Why... [modified]
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If you think WPF is bad after all those years, give a go to the lightweight Silverlight. Your browser will start hanging more than ever before, 8GB of RAM won't help you and be prepared for some odd UIs, designed for Vista-bloat candy lovers. And it is 2009.. wow. Redmond has been high on flowers since 2006.. it is darn obvious, but as with all MS-related, they managed to sell it real well via blogs, PDCs etc to the 'high-tech' Java Swing 4.0 + XML crowd. No wonder Adobe and Google people keep laughing their socks off.. [On the topic of adaptation and catching up, it is the .NET crowd that is light years behind. It takes some adaptation, decades and playing with all their bloat to realise that fact :) Please continue to invalidate an entire cache with a WPF button and simple control, it is Space Oddysey 2010 after all ]
modified on Monday, December 29, 2008 6:21 AM
User of Users Group wrote:
high on flowers
Hi, I am curious to ask you about this interesting phrase and its source. thanks, Bill
"The greater the social and cultural distances between people, the more magical the light that can spring from their contact." Milan Kundera in Testaments Trahis
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User of Users Group wrote:
high on flowers
Hi, I am curious to ask you about this interesting phrase and its source. thanks, Bill
"The greater the social and cultural distances between people, the more magical the light that can spring from their contact." Milan Kundera in Testaments Trahis
(bang, slam, bash).. edited to protect the innocent MS.
modified on Tuesday, December 30, 2008 5:13 PM
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User of Users Group wrote:
high on flowers
Hi, I am curious to ask you about this interesting phrase and its source. thanks, Bill
"The greater the social and cultural distances between people, the more magical the light that can spring from their contact." Milan Kundera in Testaments Trahis
and the bit I forgot: Any MSDN blog you read, especially from PMs, contains something along the lines of: "and it contains performance and reliability improvements..". Eespecially on SP1s, Beta 2s, etc, v4.0s and 2010s. Surely by now, everyone is aware it means the source itself is: Either 99.9999% high or over-promising yet again (about 20 times a year for 8 years ). Unattractive any way you look at it, and high time to do something about it (like specialise in 'banana-sales', it might sound odd, but I don't see a reason why it wouldn't produce better quality or more rewarding output after such a work-wasting exercise, even though it pays the bills TM).
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(bang, slam, bash).. edited to protect the innocent MS.
modified on Tuesday, December 30, 2008 5:13 PM
Hi User of Users ! My sincere thanks for your very thoughtful and educational replies to my brief query ! I have yet to "jump in the water" where the WPF water-lilies arise from the muck of XML, and I am still convinced we need a better (lean and mean) 2d retained-mode graphics engine with superior anti-aliasing, but then I am an old fogey (perhaps the used of the well-used) from the beyond who has no appetite for the eye candy of these times. I used to work at Adobe, by the way, and have been meaning to take a look-see at what's happened with all the stuff from Macromedia and SVG and AIR, etc. best, Bill
"The greater the social and cultural distances between people, the more magical the light that can spring from their contact." Milan Kundera in Testaments Trahis
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Hi User of Users ! My sincere thanks for your very thoughtful and educational replies to my brief query ! I have yet to "jump in the water" where the WPF water-lilies arise from the muck of XML, and I am still convinced we need a better (lean and mean) 2d retained-mode graphics engine with superior anti-aliasing, but then I am an old fogey (perhaps the used of the well-used) from the beyond who has no appetite for the eye candy of these times. I used to work at Adobe, by the way, and have been meaning to take a look-see at what's happened with all the stuff from Macromedia and SVG and AIR, etc. best, Bill
"The greater the social and cultural distances between people, the more magical the light that can spring from their contact." Milan Kundera in Testaments Trahis
Thanks for listening :) And you're most welcome. [ping me offline with reply button and email address.. 2D stuff is doable, and far beyond that. Few samples out there that demonstrate how .NET can really fly, without GDI+ and without WPF ]
modified on Tuesday, December 30, 2008 5:13 PM
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I totally agree with you on this. At work, my boss thinks that WPF and WWF are the best inventions ever. Personally, I can't stand either one, and I have used both in fairly involved applications. One thing that makes WPF a little more bearable is to code the UI directly in C# rather than using XAML. I know it's a throw-back to the pre-UI designer days, but the fact that nothing is hidden and you can understand all of the connections is a wonderful thing. you don't have half defined in the XAML and half in the code-behind with the (non-) Intellisense being the only thing to connect the two in the editor. Give it a go in plain C# and see if that doesn't help restore a little of your sanity.
Paul
A .NET developer who now drinks the Ruby and Cocoa Koolaid.
Paul A. Howes wrote:
One thing that makes WPF a little more bearable is to code the UI directly in C# rather than using XAML.
Hi Paul, A most intriguing remark. Do you, by any chance, happen to have a link to an on-line example of this flavour ? best, Bill
"The greater the social and cultural distances between people, the more magical the light that can spring from their contact." Milan Kundera in Testaments Trahis
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John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
...does WPF have to suck as bad as WWF?
At least WTL is robust and stable and resource editors work just fine.
"The Forgotten Framework" a.k.a. "Build an object oriented Windows application that is under 100kB". :)
Paul A .NET developer who now drinks the Ruby and Cocoa Koolaid.
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Paul A. Howes wrote:
One thing that makes WPF a little more bearable is to code the UI directly in C# rather than using XAML.
Hi Paul, A most intriguing remark. Do you, by any chance, happen to have a link to an on-line example of this flavour ? best, Bill
"The greater the social and cultural distances between people, the more magical the light that can spring from their contact." Milan Kundera in Testaments Trahis
Just read through the MSDN documentation. They usually give examples for the various classes in C# and XAML. Everything you do in XAML is converted to IL under the hood. It might be easier to think of XAML as a compiled language that just happens to be XML-compliant. In .NET 2.0, Microsoft separated the designer code and code-behind into two separate files using the "partial" keyword modifier on the "class" keyword. The result of compiling XAML is pretty much the same — a partial class that matches the one in your code-behind file. Just do a Google search for "WPF without XAML" and you will find more information. It's basically like writing WinForm code by hand, without designer support.
Paul A .NET developer who now drinks the Ruby and Cocoa Koolaid.
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Man that's such tripe - what freakin Expression are you using? A beta? The UI is fairly standard in terms of colour scheme with a LOT of design / graphics-ish type applications (see Blender for a kick off), and for the record, I'm WELL over 30, and work on a 5 year old laptop with a 15" screen. FWIW it can also be changed. I've never experienced issues with layouts, and would be rather surprised if anyone else does either. I really don't see what you mean about the menus being unintuitive - ffs, use your brain - just because something is different to what you're used to, and you're struggling to get your head around it / understand it, doesn't make it useless. Nish was very right - it's a substantial learning curve, but (as I've said before), WPF is a HELL of a lot better than anything else we have to play with - I KNOW you remember MFC...you're honestly telling me that was a better way to do UIs?
C# has already designed away most of the tedium of C++.
I agree, WPF gives much better looking applications. But there is a steep learning curve. Some have enjoyed the data binding abilities and they are quite cool. The grids available are much better than what is available than WinForms. But, the learning curve is steep. Many companies and business that produces application software do not have the financial resources nor time to have their engineers learn the technology needed to produce WPF applications. Therefore, many will still stick with WinForms. There are a few third party libraries available that can make your forms look like WPF. My company uses Infragistics, which our latest application look like WPF. They do not have animations, but the UI looks just like WPF. Pretty good. There is also DevForce which makes a forms library that looks pretty good. If your company doesn't have the time or resource to learn WPF, but has the money to buy a 3rd party library, look into it. Each of these vendors have some free libraries available, but fewer items. Good luck.
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Yes, but Expression Blend really, really, really sucks. For a UI design tool, its user interface is horrible. Non-standard and counter-intuitive menus and controls, a layout that varies from run to run without rhyme or reason, and a color scheme that is unusable unless you're under the age of 30 and have a very high-end flat panel. I've had more luck coding XAML by hand in Visual Studio than I've had using Expression Blend.
Software Zen:
delete this;
Fold With Us![^] -
That's a pretty crappy excuse, you must admit. If the VS design time support is unstable, why should anyone bother getting Yet-Another-Microsoft-Tool just to begin learning it? Why should you have to use two different tools, one to "design" the appearance, and another to program the behavior. I agree with John: if the native tool set doesn't work,then it is beta crap that Microsoft is dumping on customers. The fact that they have Expression Blend working makes the offense of not fixing the VS designers in a service pack even less forgivable. This seems to be the only industry in which a supplier can sell defective product to its customers and not get sued. It's a damn good thing Microsoft doesn't build bridges.
You have all these wonderful tools to make webpages look beautiful, all these neat controls, and lots of neat ways to display data. You have CSS and HTML, you have image editing programs. I'll even throw flash in there. That's coupled that with languages as powerful as anything on the desktop for creating user apps. In the world of native applications, we're stuck with the same old controls we've always had, just spruced up a little bit. WPF gives the designers the power to create beautiful applications, and programmers the familiarity and power of the VS environment. It's about bringing the elegance of a well designed web application to the desktop, with all the benefits a native app has that a web app can never have.