Is Winforms dead ?
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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.
CodeStash - Online Snippet Management | My blog | MoXAML PowerToys | Mole 2010 - debugging made easierPete 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.
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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.
CodeStash - Online Snippet Management | My blog | MoXAML PowerToys | Mole 2010 - debugging made easier -
Apologies if this has been asked before - but I have been working in a cave for quite a few years and have just escaped. If Winforms is indeed dead what has taken over ? I hear WPF,MVC and a myriad of other acronyms but can't seem to find a definitive answer. I know I'm setting myself up for a torrent of sarcasm but this is still a good site for advice . Many thanks for reading this.
When the going gets weird the weird turn pro - Hunter S Thompson RIP
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?! :)
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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.
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.
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What does "dead" even mean these days? Technologies are declared "dead" while tons of people are still using them - like WinForms.
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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?! :)
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.
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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
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.
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Apologies if this has been asked before - but I have been working in a cave for quite a few years and have just escaped. If Winforms is indeed dead what has taken over ? I hear WPF,MVC and a myriad of other acronyms but can't seem to find a definitive answer. I know I'm setting myself up for a torrent of sarcasm but this is still a good site for advice . Many thanks for reading this.
When the going gets weird the weird turn pro - Hunter S Thompson RIP
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.
“Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts, skills, or abilities - that's training or instruction - but is rather making visible what is hidden as a seed”
“One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated”Sir Thomas More (1478 – 1535)
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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
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
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Apologies if this has been asked before - but I have been working in a cave for quite a few years and have just escaped. If Winforms is indeed dead what has taken over ? I hear WPF,MVC and a myriad of other acronyms but can't seem to find a definitive answer. I know I'm setting myself up for a torrent of sarcasm but this is still a good site for advice . Many thanks for reading this.
When the going gets weird the weird turn pro - Hunter S Thompson RIP
Here's a small selection of techs/etc that have been declared dead despite being alive: - assembly. Used plenty on embedded platforms, but even on PC: intrinsics only get you most of the way, assembly is still used by those who need to go all the way. See the code for video encoders and such. - fortan, still big in scientific computing. - cobol, used by banks and such. - MUMPS, still used despite actually being a disease. - 6502, z80, and other "surely we don't use these anymore"-CPUs - check your calculator and appliances that seem smart. - x86, how the hell can people call it dead? ARM devices are not taking over, they're here in addition to normal PCs - Windows (all), usually in favour of Linux or something from Apple, declared by the fanboys of both. Dream on. - Silverlight. It's not even really dead as a browser plugin - used by plenty of streaming sites. It's definitely not dead on Windows Phone, either. - Java, even Applets aren't completely dead yet, though they should be. - GIF, declared dead in favour of APNG. Hasn't happened. If anything it's seeing a massive resurgence. - Native languages. Haha good joke, .NET fanboys. Sure C# is cool, but not everyone is using it all the time. Go check how many programs that you actually use are native - probably at least 90% of them. - Windows XP, "end of support" does not mean "it stops working now". It will continue to work for the foreseeable future, and people will continue to use it - usage decayed roughly exponentially, the 0 is at (approximately) infinity. - Flash, declared dead in favour of HTML5+JS. See youtube (what happened to their HTML5 mode?), kongregate, armorgames, etc, and annoying ads. Used by the streaming sites that aren't using Silverlight. - Dial-up, though it doesn't really deserve to live. - 16bit PC programs, despite not working on most new PCs due to their OS. - DOS and DOS programs - still happily powering the inventory management in a couple of stores in my area, that must mean at least some others use it too. Supposedly also used by some airlines, perhaps that explains why they suck so much. Here's a small list of things that are actually dead: - Managed Direct X, the reason for being dead is MS literally killed it - it actually doesn't work anymore. - ??? As a general rule, nothing dies. Usage will decay slowly, but, as long as it keeps working, it will never go away.
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Apologies if this has been asked before - but I have been working in a cave for quite a few years and have just escaped. If Winforms is indeed dead what has taken over ? I hear WPF,MVC and a myriad of other acronyms but can't seem to find a definitive answer. I know I'm setting myself up for a torrent of sarcasm but this is still a good site for advice . Many thanks for reading this.
When the going gets weird the weird turn pro - Hunter S Thompson RIP
WinForms is definitely not dead, and arguably it is less dead than WPF. WPF's big selling point was that it was very similar to Silverlight, and Silverlight has been canned (or at least served notice of a canning), and while XAML is still in the game for Metro, you can't (I don't think anyway) just write WPF UIs and expect them to work there. WPF's also excluded from Mono, if you're worried about cross platform compatibility.
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Here's a small selection of techs/etc that have been declared dead despite being alive: - assembly. Used plenty on embedded platforms, but even on PC: intrinsics only get you most of the way, assembly is still used by those who need to go all the way. See the code for video encoders and such. - fortan, still big in scientific computing. - cobol, used by banks and such. - MUMPS, still used despite actually being a disease. - 6502, z80, and other "surely we don't use these anymore"-CPUs - check your calculator and appliances that seem smart. - x86, how the hell can people call it dead? ARM devices are not taking over, they're here in addition to normal PCs - Windows (all), usually in favour of Linux or something from Apple, declared by the fanboys of both. Dream on. - Silverlight. It's not even really dead as a browser plugin - used by plenty of streaming sites. It's definitely not dead on Windows Phone, either. - Java, even Applets aren't completely dead yet, though they should be. - GIF, declared dead in favour of APNG. Hasn't happened. If anything it's seeing a massive resurgence. - Native languages. Haha good joke, .NET fanboys. Sure C# is cool, but not everyone is using it all the time. Go check how many programs that you actually use are native - probably at least 90% of them. - Windows XP, "end of support" does not mean "it stops working now". It will continue to work for the foreseeable future, and people will continue to use it - usage decayed roughly exponentially, the 0 is at (approximately) infinity. - Flash, declared dead in favour of HTML5+JS. See youtube (what happened to their HTML5 mode?), kongregate, armorgames, etc, and annoying ads. Used by the streaming sites that aren't using Silverlight. - Dial-up, though it doesn't really deserve to live. - 16bit PC programs, despite not working on most new PCs due to their OS. - DOS and DOS programs - still happily powering the inventory management in a couple of stores in my area, that must mean at least some others use it too. Supposedly also used by some airlines, perhaps that explains why they suck so much. Here's a small list of things that are actually dead: - Managed Direct X, the reason for being dead is MS literally killed it - it actually doesn't work anymore. - ??? As a general rule, nothing dies. Usage will decay slowly, but, as long as it keeps working, it will never go away.
If I add IE6/IE7, will you call Godwin's law on me?
Pablo. "Accident: An inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable natural laws." (Ambrose Bierce, circa 1899).
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If I add IE6/IE7, will you call Godwin's law on me?
Pablo. "Accident: An inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable natural laws." (Ambrose Bierce, circa 1899).
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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
Interesting point of view. What makes you say so? :confused:
Why can't I be applicable like John? - Me, April 2011
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Beidh ceol, caint agus craic againn - Seán Bán Breathnach
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Da mihi sis crustum Etruscum cum omnibus in eo!
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Just because a thing is new don’t mean that it’s better - Will Rogers, September 4, 1932 -
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
Wout is right that going from Winforms to WPF entails a steep learning curve. But I don't quite agree with him that WPF is dead. After all, Visual Studio itself is written in WPF...
Why can't I be applicable like John? - Me, April 2011
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Beidh ceol, caint agus craic againn - Seán Bán Breathnach
-----
Da mihi sis crustum Etruscum cum omnibus in eo!
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Just because a thing is new don’t mean that it’s better - Will Rogers, September 4, 1932 -
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.
The HTML5/CSS camp are vociferous in their denial of all things desktop. WPF is still alive and well - it may not be getting the new features that people have asked for, but it's still got some life in it yet. It's not being deprecated as a technology any time soon.
I was brought up to respect my elders. I don't respect many people nowadays.
CodeStash - Online Snippet Management | My blog | MoXAML PowerToys | Mole 2010 - debugging made easier -
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.
“Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts, skills, or abilities - that's training or instruction - but is rather making visible what is hidden as a seed”
“One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated”Sir Thomas More (1478 – 1535)
Keith Barrow wrote:
a blurry text problem that didn't get fixed AFAIK)
The blurry text issue was fixed in WPF 4. I guess you were using 3.5.
I was brought up to respect my elders. I don't respect many people nowadays.
CodeStash - Online Snippet Management | My blog | MoXAML PowerToys | Mole 2010 - debugging made easier -
WinForms is definitely not dead, and arguably it is less dead than WPF. WPF's big selling point was that it was very similar to Silverlight, and Silverlight has been canned (or at least served notice of a canning), and while XAML is still in the game for Metro, you can't (I don't think anyway) just write WPF UIs and expect them to work there. WPF's also excluded from Mono, if you're worried about cross platform compatibility.
BobJanova wrote:
WPF's big selling point was that it was very similar to Silverlight,
Wrong way round. Silverlight came long after WPF.
I was brought up to respect my elders. I don't respect many people nowadays.
CodeStash - Online Snippet Management | My blog | MoXAML PowerToys | Mole 2010 - debugging made easier -
Apologies if this has been asked before - but I have been working in a cave for quite a few years and have just escaped. If Winforms is indeed dead what has taken over ? I hear WPF,MVC and a myriad of other acronyms but can't seem to find a definitive answer. I know I'm setting myself up for a torrent of sarcasm but this is still a good site for advice . Many thanks for reading this.
When the going gets weird the weird turn pro - Hunter S Thompson RIP
I still see no compelling reason to use WPF for the vast majority of WinForm'ish work, especially given the continued excellent third party WinForm controls made by vendors such as DevExpress. However, I do think web-based applications will become more prevalent, which is worrying because I still consider the Internet to have a certain fragility. I'll digress for a minute to discuss that. Let's consider the number of players involved in a web app. You have: the physical infrastructure itself, from wires strung across poles or buried in pipes underground the internet provider the hosting provider the company providing the "cloud" space for the app and probably a few things I'm forgetting. Compare that to an app running autonomously on, say, your laptop. That's it. You don't need to be plugged in to a chain of dependencies in order to work. So, back to the point - the key issue for me is the "data" interaction requirements, and I use the term "data" loosely to include even things like multiplayer games. If the data needs to be accessible in an uncontrolled access environment (for example, Code Project has no way to predict who or from where people will visit its "data") then a web-based application is a natural fit. When access to the data is very deterministic, then a client-server environment with a thick client (WinForm or WPF, for example) provides advantages, and the Internet simply becomes a mechanism for supporting remote access, which is the exception, not the rule. And finally, you have pure "device only" applications that can be autonomous, and data is typically shared via a separate application--usually email, but also FTP and uploads to a website. Code Project is probably a good example of an environment where all three modalities are in use. It, by necessity, requires the web, I imagine that there are non-web applications in use to monitor activity and perform other important tasks on the server, and finally, as an author, I can write an article autonomously and then upload the content via the web interface. So, the reason there are so many acronyms at the moment is that there are several different technologies being used depending on how to best work with the data. For example, I have never written an article in CP's editor that is available through the browser, but I do usually do final formatting fixes as that's the first time I can see what the article looks like in a web presentation. So, in my opinion, WinForm is not dead and WPF, while it can look like WinForm
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Keith Barrow wrote:
a blurry text problem that didn't get fixed AFAIK)
The blurry text issue was fixed in WPF 4. I guess you were using 3.5.
I was brought up to respect my elders. I don't respect many people nowadays.
CodeStash - Online Snippet Management | My blog | MoXAML PowerToys | Mole 2010 - debugging made easierWe started with the beta, albeit quite late on :-\ the advantages for our application were so clear we took the risk - and this was in a Building Society. By the time I'd left we'd upgraded to 3.5 and I wasn't so involved. The original problem was relatively infrequent so that, in the little bits of work I do to try and keep my hand in, I hadn't noticed it "going". Good to know they fixed it.
“Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts, skills, or abilities - that's training or instruction - but is rather making visible what is hidden as a seed”
“One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated”Sir Thomas More (1478 – 1535)
