Why you Should Move to WPF
If you have not taken a look at WPF yet, you really should. WPF is a great desktop development platform. Granted all of the of the tools are not yet in place, but Microsoft is pouring millions of dollars into developing WPF tools. Windows Forms is now considered a legacy technology and will no longer be updated. These two reasons alone are enough to convince you that you should start taking a little more than a serious look at WPF.
WPF and XAML = A Great Combination
WPF and XAML are the way of the future for development. Remember back when you did classic ASP applications? Remember mixing code and HTML together? Then remember when ASP.NET came out and how much easier it was to have a declarative syntax for controls? The same thing holds true to WPF. Instead of the design tools writing code for each control (aka Windows Forms), you now have XAML to define each control. You reserve the code for writing what you want to do with a control. This is a much cleaner way to develop desktop applications. In addition, XAML makes it so much easier to do animation, and to create visually appealing applications compared to Windows Forms.
XAML and Silverlight
Another great benefit of learning WPF and XAML is many of the same concepts will apply to Silverlight development. Silverlight uses XAML just like WPF. Sure, it is a subset of the XAML we have in the desktop world, but it is still the same XAML. And, with the release of Silverlight 3 you can do XAML and Silverlight development and create out-of-browser applications!
Many Reasons For Moving to WPF
There are many more reasons to take a good look at WPF as your desktop development platform. The following are some of the things I particularly like about WPF:
- Ability to style or theme your applications without recompiling code
- Can animate controls with little or no code
- Separate business logic from UI code easier than Windows Forms
- Easily create applications that take advantage of different screen resolutions
- Able to add powerful 3D graphics without 3rd party tools
- The data binding features are more powerful than Windows Forms
- A designer can do most of the UI work, the developer can focus on the backend code
- Much more...
Yes, there are lots of reasons why WPF just makes sense. I hope you will find your way to WPF in the near future. As always, if you need a helping hand, PDSA will always be here to help.
Learn WPF from PDSA
PDSA, Inc. offers a workshop for learning WPF. Please contact me at PSheriff@pdsa.com for more information on having us bring this workshop to you and your team. We can offer this workshop in a hands-on format at your location, or we can present it as a webcast over the Internet.
Past Blog Content
Blog Archive
-
2015
-
2014 (18)
-
2013 (11)
-
2012 (19)
-
2011 (29)
-
2010 (19)
-
2009 (28)
-
2008 (0)
-
2007 (14)
-
2006 (6)