If you look at the forum topics on a site like Codeproject, it does not appear there are that many using WPF yet.

I can speak to you not necessarily from first hand-experience, more first hand-watching, from when I went to a class on WPF put on by someone from Infragistics. There were numerous times the presenter mentioned how a particular phase required help from the graphic designers at Infragistics. And it was obvious to me from what he showed to be the code modification to get something lined up correctly, or to function correctly, I would have been 110% lost.

You most certainly need more then a 101 level knowledge of graphic design to proceed with WPF.

And I've heard from many about the true lack of support of WPF in VS 2008. It is a conundrum for MS. There are some features that require a design surface such as that provided by their graphic tools. And MS is not sure how to provide the tools without having VS step on their graphic tools area, or have the graphic tools provide functionality without having it step on the VS domain. So some important functionality is in neither toolset.


>Another stellar post, Mr. Strahl. Michel should be paying you to come here.
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>In this case I think you just saved me a lot of time. I recently decided to invest some time in learning WPF, simply because I have been hearing so much about it and am attracted to shiny new toys, as you put it <g>. You have made me realize I don't have any practical reason to do so. I am going to invest the same learning time in some other technology. I don't even know the basics of .NET that well, not really. Maybe try to up my SQL Server knowledge from a decent developer's understanding to a more DBA like level. Anyway, thanks!
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>>>- Takes advantage of video processors to render, so it's faster than WinForms (Hardware acceleration)
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>>It's a myth!
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>>If you've ever built a WPF application you know it sucks a** when it comes to performance. Yeah hardware acceleration is there, but it gets lost in the myriad of UI objects that need to be managed. This might change in the future but right now - perf is no reason.
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>>Hardware acceleration only helps with the rendering and shading and vector sizing. IT does nothing for page composition and layout where the CPU still is needed and there are much more objects involved at the .NET level (ie. rather high level code) than in Winforms which is basically calling low level Windows API semantics to render.
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>>>- Everything is a vector graphic, so even when scaling, you don't get jagged edges
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>>Depends on what you're using. If you're building all your artwork using vectors yes. But if you're using images you still have to deal with scaling and distortion.
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>>And building scalable UIs is actually quite difficult even when you have anchors and docking available.
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>>Frankly if you build any sort of text application with WPF (other than the full scale text viewer) I've found that it really is horrible because WPF uses some odd variation on clear type that makes font display horribly blurry. this is especially noticable if you run on a machine that has clear type off and you see a WinForms (or any other WinApi app) in comparison to a WPF app side by side. It looks awful and blurry...
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>>>- You can use UIs that are difficult or impossible with WinForms (Rich composition and customization)
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>>That's definitely true, but you have to know what you're doing.
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>>But you can also turn this around: You can't easily do things that you can do in WinForms with WPF. Possible yes, but because there's a severe lack of controls (even from 3rd party vendors) you don't get many features that you'd take for granted in a forms application. No date picker, no grid, no masked input, etc. etc.
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>>Most of the things you take for granted in WinForms are difficult to do with WPF. And creating custom controls is not easy either at least if you want to build a real WPF style control that supports styling and theming.
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>>>- True separation of behavior from UI elements because of Declarative Programming
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>>>- Data binding better than WinForms
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>>This is one of the highlights of WPF for sure. The databinding and whole Dependency Property mechanisms are great.
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>>Unfortunately there are also serious issues with Data Validation (no way to detect validation errors BEFORE the data is updated back into the data bound source).
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>>>- Microsoft is not using resources to further develop WinForms. All new work is being done on WPF
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>>That's not exactly a big deal given that most of the innovation in this space has always come from third party vendors.
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>>WPF is cool and you can built some really interesting stuff with it, but don't expect to do even simple things in anything less than half a life time <g>... It's incredibly tedious to build even the simplest things that actually look nice.
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>>I don't even want to think what kind of UI nightmares folks who are not versed with graphics design (ie. most of us) are going to create with this technology. It's like giving people Photoshop to design a user interface and saying - have at it.
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>>The way I see it WPF is a very shiny new toy that addresses a very specific market segment. It's not a tool - for now - for the Line of Business market. It's a tool for graphically rich application that require heavy visual interaction - typically bubbly consumer applications or graphically rich applications that do advanced graphing/charting or data manipulation using new UI implementations.
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>>There will be people building incredibly mind blowing apps with WPF, but at the same time you have to realize that most of those apps will be designed by designers who understand graphic design. For the average developer doing quality WPF design and layout is going to be a struggle...
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>>I've seen a few WPF apps that are trying to do 'basic' forms interfaces and it's not impressive in anyway. And it took the developers a heck of a long time to make that actually happen... the same apps in WinForms would have taken half the time.
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>>WPF is useful if you have a right application for it. But otherwise it's one of those technologies one should think about very hard before jumping into - unless you have an employer or client that's willing to foot the bill for you to experiement a lot.
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>>+++ Rick ---
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>>>>During a recent discussion of WPF and the possibility of using it in our applications the topic of what business benefits this new technology provides came up. We are a shop that has several small development teams creating and maintaining windows desktop applications. The applications we develop are not web enabled. We do not and will not have “designers” on staff.
>>>> I can see plenty of negative expense in using this new technology but was unable to point to a single benefit.
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>>>>Are there any tangible benefits to using WPF beyond have a cool toolbar or button?