4 ms·

WinForms is a pretty great UI toolkit. It's easy to use, fast, and requires very little system resources.

fsloth 12y ago
This. It might appear a bit clunky at first sight, and it might not provide the shiniest eye candy out of the box but in terms of development velocity to get something practical done - provided it is combined with the tooling in Visual Studio - it's really nice.
- jaked89 12y ago
  Velocity? Only for simple, boring UI. Any non-standard control requires GDI+ rendering, which is not very maintainable. WPF offers a far superior composition ability.
  - WorldWideWayne 12y ago
    I love using simple boring UIs because they are predictable. WPF encourages non-standard custom drawn stuff that only serves to distract from usability in my opinion. WPF also still has weird focus rectangles and font issues.
  - fsloth 12y ago
    I agree I would not suggest doing anything non-standard with it. And yes, it looks dated and ugly. But in some places visual appearance of widgets is not that important. Often, boring UI:s are good. The tool should fade into the background and let the user focus on getting her work done. While I love shiny things the real world accepts good enough solutions that are economic to develop. Theoretically I just adore WPF:s scenegraph oriented paradigm since it feels the right way but... I've observed that for a large projects practically it needs a lot of work to get anything usefull done compared to forms. Perhaps the overall architecture is a bit big-org oriented where every tiny widget will have its own development team. Which is understandable but means for simple UI:s WPF might be a lot more expensive. I haven't done anything massive with it myself but have just observed a few projects from my work. I hope there are counterexamples.
    - jaked89 12y ago
      "Non-standard" doesn't necessarily mean "shiny". Often you need to compose elements in a way that makes a certain UI feature possible, or convenient. Such compositions aren't inherently shiny; they can even be ugly. But functional. In WF it's very hard & tedious.
pjmlp 12y ago
Yes it is quite nice, but WPF/XAML is better.

This. It might appear a bit clunky at first sight, and it might not provide the shiniest eye candy out of the box but in terms of development velocity to get something practical done - provided it is combined with the tooling in Visual Studio - it's really nice.

jaked89 12y ago
Velocity? Only for simple, boring UI. Any non-standard control requires GDI+ rendering, which is not very maintainable. WPF offers a far superior composition ability.
- WorldWideWayne 12y ago
  I love using simple boring UIs because they are predictable. WPF encourages non-standard custom drawn stuff that only serves to distract from usability in my opinion. WPF also still has weird focus rectangles and font issues.
- fsloth 12y ago
  I agree I would not suggest doing anything non-standard with it. And yes, it looks dated and ugly. But in some places visual appearance of widgets is not that important. Often, boring UI:s are good. The tool should fade into the background and let the user focus on getting her work done. While I love shiny things the real world accepts good enough solutions that are economic to develop. Theoretically I just adore WPF:s scenegraph oriented paradigm since it feels the right way but... I've observed that for a large projects practically it needs a lot of work to get anything usefull done compared to forms. Perhaps the overall architecture is a bit big-org oriented where every tiny widget will have its own development team. Which is understandable but means for simple UI:s WPF might be a lot more expensive. I haven't done anything massive with it myself but have just observed a few projects from my work. I hope there are counterexamples.
  - jaked89 12y ago
    "Non-standard" doesn't necessarily mean "shiny". Often you need to compose elements in a way that makes a certain UI feature possible, or convenient. Such compositions aren't inherently shiny; they can even be ugly. But functional. In WF it's very hard & tedious.

pjmlp 12y ago

Yes it is quite nice, but WPF/XAML is better.