3 ms·

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 so

by 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.

by fsloth 12y ago

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.