WPF definitely requires "drinking the Kool-aid". For WinForms Devs, it might be tough to swallow, but it's good medicine. The state of WinForms development bef

WPF definitely requires "drinking the Kool-aid". For WinForms Devs, it might be tough to swallow, but it's good medicine. The state of WinForms development before was not sustainable and incredibly challenging with large applications. Having tried to develop a WPF app like a WinForms app, it is incredibly tedious because it's not what WPF was designed to do. Drinking the Kool-aid and working within the confines of how WPF was designed to work makes a lot of things significantly easier, but the trade off is having to explicitly set up view models, use data binding, and find alternatives to doing everything in code behind. IMHO, the biggest challenge was dealing with the databinding ecosystem, which is incredibly powerful, but also complex, opaque, verbose, and tedious. There is practically no debugging of databinding, which is incredibly frustrating. It's hard to figure out why it doesn't work or why you don't get what you expect to get in whatever is actually being called. Whether it was old winforms databinding or various js databinding approaches on the front end, its always been fairly straight forward to get what I needed. WPF always seems like it's jumping through hoops for things that should just work. I'm sure there's a lot of logic behind how WPF's databinding actually works for it to be able to support all the various situations that it does, but, for me, it's never been very clear, and I've wasted countless hours trying to find and debug the right databinding syntax only to have it still not work and have to resort to a less elegant/hacky way of achieving the result that I'm looking for.