I really like WPF but it's a steep learning curve to get comfortable with its compositional mode and two-way databinding.

WinForms is great if you're familiar with VFP desktop apps - same basic model of controls with events and properties that can be mostly managed via the UI. If you're building forms centric applications it's hard to beat WinForms for productivity.

WPF is more complicated in many ways. There are fewer controls built-in and you actually use XAML (XML) to write most of your UI rather than relying on a property sheets and dragging and dropping controls. However, if you can make the time WPF is incredibly flexible to build all sorts of UIs. I often joke that WPF makes the hard things easy and the easy things hard :-)

For consumer level or broad verticals I prefer WPF because it's more polished and properly deals with High DPI and scaling on Windows (which WinForms like VFP do not).

Basically there are no really good answers - everything has its advantages and draw backs.


+++ Rick ---

>Hi Rick,
>
>Of course, we find a lot biased feedback on this question. For some reason we all have vested interests on those issues. The content and it neutrality stand out!
>
>Thanks for your great input. As a later comer to GUI dev on the windows platform with a strong VFP background, would you recommend to move to WPF or do you consider that winform could make sense? In other words, is winform only legacy?
>
>Agan, thanks a lot!
>
>Daniel