WPF - why?!
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Agreed, on all counts. I've been using WPF for ten years for UI on our products. Once you 'get it', you can do wonderfully useful things in your UI that would be next to impossible without it. And yes, the WPF designer is worthless. Between constant crashes and its incessant need to insert absolute constants everywhere, it's far easier to hand-code XAML.
Software Zen:
delete this;Agree
__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now. © 2009, Rex Hammock
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WPF compared to winforms feels half baked and inconsistent; documentation is, poor and I spend more time searching the web on how to do something so simple in winforms (like a checked listbox) that I'm not enjoying development anymore. UWP you can at least use win2d and get a graphics object like the GDI+ in winforms and draw natively when you need. I'm not saying winforms is perfect, and not everything in WPF is bad, I can just do way more work in a single day with winforms than WPF. It feels like the ones who created xaml looked at the web and tried to copy how that worked, to bring web devs to the desktop.
Only if you are doing something relatively simple.
Any form that requires execution-time reconfiguration gets real messy in WinForms, while in WPF, all it requires in changing bound parameter values. Before I was retired, I did this all the time.
__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now. © 2009, Rex Hammock
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Only if you are doing something relatively simple.
Any form that requires execution-time reconfiguration gets real messy in WinForms, while in WPF, all it requires in changing bound parameter values. Before I was retired, I did this all the time.
__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now. © 2009, Rex Hammock
I worked in industrial control, my software had several hundred install locations, all included run-time end user customization: everything from user color themes to what data point was shown where and how it was formatted, and it was all done in winforms with help from GDI+ to a remote computer dishing out WCF, I'm not even sure how I could pull off the same thing under WPF. the only thing I liked so far about WPF is the lack Hwin handles on everything, and it does feel less OS heavy, but I still prefer the flexibility that winforms plus GDI+ give me on run-time display tweeking. But just like development languages, to each their own in preferences. C# vs VB.net or windform vs. WPF; it doesn't matter to the end user it it gets the job done.
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I worked in industrial control, my software had several hundred install locations, all included run-time end user customization: everything from user color themes to what data point was shown where and how it was formatted, and it was all done in winforms with help from GDI+ to a remote computer dishing out WCF, I'm not even sure how I could pull off the same thing under WPF. the only thing I liked so far about WPF is the lack Hwin handles on everything, and it does feel less OS heavy, but I still prefer the flexibility that winforms plus GDI+ give me on run-time display tweeking. But just like development languages, to each their own in preferences. C# vs VB.net or windform vs. WPF; it doesn't matter to the end user it it gets the job done.
Prior to my forced :( retirement, I was working in a mental health care setting with a very limited budget. Third-party controls were out of the question, unless they were free and available with source code. This meant that, if I wanted a nonstandard control, I usually had to create it. With WinForms, this was a continuing pain.
With WPF, much of the needed functionality was built in via data bindings. I could often do things with an existing control using a data binding and a few lines of code in a backend module that would have required a whole separate project to create a new control in WinForms.
My boss at the time did not favor my approach, but as the sole programmer :java: and an ever increasing list of new code to be written and older code to maintain, coding speed was important.
__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now. © 2009, Rex Hammock
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Prior to my forced :( retirement, I was working in a mental health care setting with a very limited budget. Third-party controls were out of the question, unless they were free and available with source code. This meant that, if I wanted a nonstandard control, I usually had to create it. With WinForms, this was a continuing pain.
With WPF, much of the needed functionality was built in via data bindings. I could often do things with an existing control using a data binding and a few lines of code in a backend module that would have required a whole separate project to create a new control in WinForms.
My boss at the time did not favor my approach, but as the sole programmer :java: and an ever increasing list of new code to be written and older code to maintain, coding speed was important.
__________________ Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now. © 2009, Rex Hammock
same boat here; was a single developer with no budget for 3rd party controls. but I'm going to guess you had mostly database work that made data binding your go to. so yes WPF does make that easier than winform's data binding. the stuff i dealt with in industrial control had no databases what so ever, and had no need for binding; it was mostly generic tags that the live IO was converted from; temperatures, pressures, on/off values... each tag had a unique id. Winforms was extremely efficient for what i used it for, it's a bit of a different world than most software development. I'm not saying the way you did it is wrong, quite the opposite; you worked with a technology stack that worked best for you. winforms worked best for me. now I'm at a place that uses WPF as it's main product because binding makes more sense here. when ever I go back to dealing with non-database applications, I usually default back to winforms, because I have direct ability to draw what i need directly to the surface of a control; UWP also let's me do this, but I really don't like the store-app model for distributing my software.