Tore,

Front end development in .NET is a bit of a pain because Microsoft has a serious identity crisis of what they want to do. They have WPF, WinForms and Windows UI (forget the latter :-) but that's what MS pushes now).

WinForms is the closest thing to FoxPro and will probably feel very familiar, but WinForms has been in 'retired' mode since version 3.0 of .NET when WPF was introduced. That said it still works well, is fairly lean and is easily the quickest way to build Windows UIs. There's also a great third party market still for WinForms with controls that are actually quite usable (see for WPF).

WPF is more current, and very, very powerful, but IMHO has a very steep learning curve. There's a lot of stuff to remember with WPF and it seems you're constantly looking stuff up and that never stops it seems. Lots of stuff is badly named and nothing is intuitive or natural with WPF. If you're willing to spend some time learning though however, it's worth the effort - it's just that out of the box it's not very full featured. Lots of custom stuff has to be built to really make WPF useful. There are also lots of third party controls/libraries for WPF but they are actually a lot harder to integrate than WinForms ones.


Now all that said I would highly consider NOT building desktop applications. If your apps are line of business applications consider building Web based applications and running them locally or on a local network instead. The apps become immediately distributable, tend to be easier to maintain and grow and you're not directly stuck with Microsoft's Jeckyll and Hyde's identity crisis when it comes to UI.

This is the path I've taken for the last few years and I'm not regretting it. All internal stuff now runs in the browser and it's simply easier to maintain, expand and intermix Web based UIs. Plus you can access them from anywhere, and when I travel I can get by with a tablet often where I needed a PC before.

There's definitely a big learning curve for Web UI as well, but at least that's something that's a remarketable skill that you can use for many other things in the future.

My current stack for this is:
AngularJs on the client (plus minimal jQuery)
Bootstrap CSS (heavily customized for each app usually)
ASP.NET Web API on the backend
ASP.NET MVC for minimal server side UI

It's the closest I've come recently to build desktop experiences in the browser. It's still hard (especially when you talk about building good mobile UIs), but it's possible to run all this stuff on any device including mobile phones.

Hope this helps,

+++ Rick ---



>OK, I am considering throwing in the towel. I have decided to give dotnet a try. I have read several books about C# and VB#, and I believe that I will be able to write some code relatively fast. But I don't want to start in the wrong end, I want to do it right from the start, so I ask for some advice.
>
>First of all, I have Visual Studio 2012 Professional installed and running on my computer. I also have MS SQL server 2012 installed and running. And I will focus on C#.
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>One of my first questions is, should I use Windows Forms or WPF Forms?
>
>In VFP I have sub-classed all the base classes, some of them more than one level. Should I do the same in .net also? If so, how?
>
>Can anyone recommend a good book (or two) with essential but not too much reading?
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>Are there other important decisions I will have to make early in my learning phase?
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>And last, please don't mock me! I will always remain a VFP lover, and I know that I haven't always written nice things about dotnet. From now on I will avoid writing negative about dotnet until I know better what I am talking about.