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A Case for WinForms

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When DevExpress released their roadmap for 2011, WinForms barely got a mention. As a ten year old technology that is basically abandoned by its creator this isn’t too surprising. But what it interesting the amount of negative feedback that it generated. A lot of DevExpress’s customers just don’t see WPF or Silverlight as a viable replacement for their major applications.

Seven years ago Avalon was announced. Now known as WPF and Silverlight, it represented a major evolution in the design and development of graphical user interfaces. Combining the declarative style of HTML programming with WinForm’s ability to create custom controls has proven to be very effective. With three major versions of WPF and four of Silverlight now in production, one would expect the technology to be pretty solid.

Unfortunately there continues to be serious performance concerns, both in terms of processor and memory usage. While very real on their own, these concerns are exaggerated by the steep learning curve. Even minor design flaws have a bad tendency to multiply the amount of resources needed for a given screen.

Comments on the DevExpress Roadmap and follow-up post.

Sigurd Decroos:

It is sad to see Winforms pushed back so much. WPF is still too slow on most computers for major apps and SL is not mature enough for a complete ERP app.

[…] what's the meaning of much faster graphs if my customers use Citrix and Terminal Services... This is where WPF and SilverLight fail to deliver and why we need further improvements on WinForms too.

Heiko Mueller:

Sorry guys, but with this roadmap I will not extend my subscription. I use only WinForms and ASP.NET and I'm not interested in WPF/Silverlight - WPF at this time for me is not suitable for my kind of applications (larger business Apps). Silverlight in my eyes is a dead technology - HTML5 is the future for rich internet applications.

Jens Necker:

I have to agree to the comments on WinForms.

SL and WPF are not ready for real business applications. WinForms is a robust and well understood platform and has broad support.

Garry Lowther:

WinForms is not going to be replaced by WPF or Silverlight or HTML 5 any time soon. WinForms apps work great with internet services on Amazon, Google and Microsoft Windows Azure. CUstomers love and expect responsive business applications which work as fast as Microsoft Office apps. For now, WinForms is still the best method of developing and delivering this.

Richard Choroszewski:

Our team came to DX some 2 years ago mainly because of the obviously superb winform tools, and winforms remains and will remain the main focus of our business for the forseeable future.

Experimenting with Silverlight, WPF etc., is good for us to keep an eye on what might become mainstream one day (or maybe not if Ms dev people find some new super toy to play with) but the technology is not yet mature enough to base our business on.

While this may certainly be just a case of the unhappy minority, they do represent real development shops that still don’t see WPF/Silverlight as mature enough for large scale applications.

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