Craig
>Like any technology, WPF may or may not be applicable to your environment
I made it pretty clear that I’m talking about line of business applications here. Enterprise applications.
> You need to start thinking outside the box (both figuratively and literally - think the gray rectangle that is a Winform) and ask what additional value you can give to your users by using WPF
Well I think you need to come back into the box a bit and ask yourself if you really are adding value. Lets take that example of yours.
> With WPF it is easy to include anything in a combo box. So, when you have that combo box with 10,000 inventory >items, you can not only include a name/description/part number, you could also include a picture of that item.
In an enterprise application your not going to pull 10,000 pictures of anything across the wire. Not happening period.
In a line of business or enterprise application the people using the system probably haven’t even ever seen the parts so a picture is just useless eye candy.
Enterprise clients don’t like paying for eye candy in there line of business applications, if its in the application you better have a reason.
> It's not that you can't do that in WinForms, but it's MUCH easier with WPF.
Come on Craig you have been doing this as long or longer than I have and we booth know its not that hard to display a picture in a windows form. You would use a Grid instead of a combo box. Its been done to death in articles all over the place.
Saying that it would take the same amount of time to layout a WPF form for a line of business application as it would with Winforms just isn’t true. Even with the improvements in 2010.
If you can call the 2010 IDE an improvement at all. Its was starting to run pretty quick before MS decided to throw WPF at it.
The two technologies that really peeked my interest when MS announced them where WPF and the ADO.Entity framework. Booth where disappointing and required significantly more time to code than the technologies they seek to replace.
MS claimed to want a larger share of the enterprise development space, they clearly don’t get it.
Java ?