I hear from many people that WinForm is dead-ended and that Microsoft is pushing WPF forward.



How does Strataframe work with WPF



Thanks.



_Ajit

hi,

i think it kinda depends on the kind of software you are developing. right now i can only see wpf for multi-media driven and/or end-user applications. it doesnt bring any advantage to buisness customers other then shiny effects and animation in my oppinion.

I think StrataFrame will integrate with wpf to some degrees. Possibly everything except the winforms-components.

(I guess )

I have tried WPF, in my opinion great for addding some pizzaz, not so good for business applications and data.

I have a few apps where I used it for a flashy menu or splash screen, but for anything else I didnt see the value. They push it at my peer groups as well, but noone has showed me that it could work well with complex data operations. Simple websites yes, business applications, not so much.

Keith Chisarik

Well, this is a great conversation here.  WPF is no where even close to replacing WinForms.  WPF is great for creating high-graphics type of interfaces.  But if you have tried to create a dialog with very many data entry controls, you know that WPF would make end-users want to commit suicide!

WPF is still a generation or two away from being even a remotely decent replacement for WinForms.  There are a lot of things that I really like about WPF and am excited about (i.e. the rendering dispatch thread).  We recently had a very long debate about one of our future medical products which is very graphically intensive and whether we would use WPF or WinForms.  We landed on WinForms and GDI+.  The meshing of WinForms and WPF is like oil and water (think combining a web control in a WinForms app and then making the web portion and the WinForms portions work together....that it the level of frustation you will have).

But the straw the pushed us over on this debate came down to the PropertyGrid.  We have the need to allow our end-users to create and customize screens so we will create a designer for them to use.  Well, WinForms supports a run-time PropertyGrid...not WPF.  So all of the wonderful type editors, etc. that you create you would have to create your own PropertyGrid.  Secondly, XAML is a horrible platform.  You can do a lot in code, but there are times when you must use XAML...another major downer of WPF.

Regardless of what you hear, WinForms has another 10-15 life...easy!  There is way too much money and momentum in WInForms to go away any time soon and WPF is in its infant stage of coming into the marketplace.  So my advice would be to stay away from creating any type of data applications in WPF. 

Oh, I never really answered your question.  Yes, you can use SF with WPF, but we do not have any WPF controls at present so you will have to use 3rd party WPF controls.

Good to hear about Winforms from everybody.

I am in the process of moving from VFP to DotNet.

No doubt about the capabilities of VFP - but moving on as it

is "dead-ended".



I was concerned about the "dead-endedness" of Winform.



Guess I should not be much bothered if I follow the framework's rule of putting all code in BOs.

In which case, I just have to design a WPF frontend in future.



Thanks once again for the responses.



Sincerely,



_Ajit Abraham