Is Winforms dead ?

[pkfox]

Hi John, thanks for that, I too am a conservative prick and don't want to see *everything webised*. In-house systems still have their place without having to *share* everything on farcebook or twitter. I personally would not like my company business on FB or Twitter.

When the going gets weird the weird turn pro - Hunter S Thompson RIP

[pkfox]

Hi Marco, any recommended reading to get up to speed on WPF ?

When the going gets weird the weird turn pro - Hunter S Thompson RIP

[Pete OHanlon]

Josh Smith's articles. Sacha Barber's articles. Oh, and Adam Nathan's WPF Unleashed.

I was brought up to respect my elders. I don't respect many people nowadays.
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[Marco Bertschi]

Linkies: -> Sacha Barber's articles[^] -> Josh Smith's articles[^] -> WPF unleashed by Adam Nathan[^] cheers, Marco

**Marco Bertschi

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[Jon Clare]

Second those choices, and WPF Control Development Unleashed is also a decent read once you've covered WPF Unleashed.

[NormDroid]

I think Microsoft are dead give it a fews years and the desktop will be a distant memory.

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[jim lahey]

It's not dead yet. But it should be if you've ever had to develop or maintain a property grid in WinForms. Never before have I created so many classes that have collectively done so little.

[BillWoodruff]

I believe WinForms will be widely used for years to come, but, not to create the latest winking-blinking-flashing thing-in-the=cloud that needs a browser to feed, and dance. Think "line-of-business," as well as applications. You could speculate about WPF being either dead, or in deep-freeze, and that XAML lives on. Which I regard kind of like a baby dying at birth, and somehow the placenta lives and grows-up believing it's a person. What I read is that SilverLight is now deprecated, at the very least. However, I note that CP's greatly respected Pete O'Hanlon has hinted on CP that there are important new developments with WPF "in the works." You could interpret the mess of uncertainty that MS created in the WPF, and WinForms, SilverLight, communities, prior to the roll-out of Windows 8, the possible failure of the Win 8 RT hardware gambit, the hard-landing of Modern/Metro (exit Sinofksy), as being a phase of mutation, as Sauron of Redmond morphs to wage global war against Google, and Apple, and their spawn in the form of iWhatever, and Android. The questions I ask in listening for heartbeats in the future's software is: is it inevitable that the software industry changes to requiring a purchaser to go through a company store (kiss 30% goodbye), necessary that end-users have to subscribe, and actually may be locked out of editing their existing files if they don't continually subscribe (hello, Adobe)? And, must every application use the Cloud, support some form of social-networking ? If only we had, years ago, WinForms equipped with a first-class retained mode 2D drawing system that enabled vector re-sizing and graphics like WPF does. If only the binding model in WinForms had evolved to be more powerful (equivalent to what can be done in XAML), and less awkward to use. I'm trying to stop assuming anything, and I am waiting to hear from Pete, the WPF Disciples, Marc, and other prophets on CP about the future of WPF, and that strange throwback, the equivalent of assembly language for UI, XAML. If only ... :) Bill

“Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection." Ed

[AlphaDeltaTheta]

It looks so... I have slated WinForms, WPF is definitely the way to go... It won't be long enough when, everything in windows will become managed... WP8 is already out there, WPF with MVVM and Data Binding and numerous other things, greatly simplifies app coding and maintainance. So a great :thumbsup: for WPF!

[Dave Kerr]

WinForms has its place, but I find generally now-adays that I use it less and less even for utility apps, I've just got faster at knocking out WPF. In terms of desktop development, learning WPF is going to be pretty useful - it's widely used and performs well, it simplifies a lot of typical tasks. But it's interesting to take a look at what big fat apps are built in: Visual Studio: C++ (Win32 SDK), COM, WPF Microsoft Office: No idea. Guessing lots of C++/Win32 SDK and some WPF? Anyone else have any ideas? Photoshop: Guessing C++/Win32 Come to think of it, what are most large-scale desktop apps written in? My assumption is C++ but this may be totally wrong...

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[Lost User]

What does "dead" even mean these days? Technologies are declared "dead" while tons of people are still using them - like WinForms.

[Septimus Hedgehog]

Pete O'Hanlon wrote:

Adam Nathan's WPF Unleashed

I stalled working through this book for some reason. Maybe my approach was wrong but I was kinda hoping the code samples would all work in isolation. I'm not saying his book is bad but I couldn't work out if it was a cookbook of WPF topics or something you could work through cover-to-cover building up as you progressed? A good while back there was some thought that WPF itself was "doomed", in the sense smarter people than me said, "Go west, young man, there's HTML5 and CS3 in them thar hills." Was that viewpoint correct or has the anti-WPF camp mellowed?

If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.

[pkfox]

Cheers Pete

When the going gets weird the weird turn pro - Hunter S Thompson RIP

[AlexCode]

You don't kill something just because some hype appears. As ASP.net won't ever die just because MVC was resurrected and applied on top of it. M$ is pushing WPF to be the "new" Windows Forms default but I'm sure they won't ever stop supporting the "ancient" form, it simply doesn't make sense. WPF might be cool but compared to Windows Forms existing software it's just a drop in the ocean. And... MFC's still exist don't they?! :)

[Septimus Hedgehog]

Preach it brother. A previous developer where I work thought it would be a really good idea to actually hand-roll a grid. I've seen some cheap, nasty, sinister code before, but to see business logic meshed into owner-drawn graphics to paint the columns and rows was simply the worst I've ever seen. I'm sure he thought he was Top Gun but what he produced was a Rabbit's Bottom Pellet. Code like that gives WinForms a bad name.

If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.

[pkfox]

Good stuff - thanks to you all - and keep em comin

When the going gets weird the weird turn pro - Hunter S Thompson RIP

[Septimus Hedgehog]

AlexCode wrote:

but I'm sure they won't ever stop supporting the "ancient"

That's exactly what they said about Cobol and Fortran. The placenta is alive and by all accounts still going strong despite the nay-sayers trying to slay them. There's room for them all at the Great Development Banqueting Table. I've worked with many engineers in the past. Some of the civil and mechanical engineers really didn't give a hoot what language, platform, or design was used. As long as it worked is all they wanted.

If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.

[Septimus Hedgehog]

BillWoodruff wrote:

and actually may be locked out of editing their existing files if they don't continually subscribe

That's a dangerous thing to speculate on Bill, but it rings true and is possible.

If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.

[Keith Barrow]

No, but it has entered the hospice. It'll almost certainly limp on for years, the pool of new work will start to dry up to a trickle (or already has - I don't know). Most winforms development will be about maintaining existing systems. Everything is pretty uncertain now, Microsoft seems to be making a lot of good business decisions but screwing up badly on the detail. Take as an example Win8 - excellent idea to have a single Tablet device/PC platform, but instead of having a readily switch-able desktop optimised vs touch optimised UI, it is profiled for tablets. Though it'd take an age for MS to fail (and I don't think it will) for the first time in my career I don't see working with MS technologies as a totally safe bet. WPF was an excellent technology, I thought it was dead but, as other posters have pointed out, Pete has hinted at good things to come with it. I do hope so, coming from a mostly web-UI background I learned Winforms and WPF at roughly the same time, I found WPF much easier to get to grips with so I was semi-shocked at Winforms developers criticising it (the main genuine concern for me was poorer performance if not properly done & a blurry text problem that didn't get fixed AFAIK). In your position I'd look for a good article on WPF, especially one that uses the M-V-VM pattern. WPF is similar to silverlight and the XAML is used in Win8 apps. The M-V-VM pattern goes hand in glove and will not only give you an "in" to newer desktop techs, but would make a theoretical jump to MVC easier.

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[wout de zeeuw]

WPF is even more dead than Win Forms. My advice would be save yourself a huge learning curve and frustration and stick to Win Forms.

Wout