Question Windows Forms (Winforms) or WPF? (2019)

[Neal]

It's 2019 and Windows Forms continues to seem to dominate mainly I suppose for ease of use, drag and drop, no requirement for MVVM. Microsoft has easy fixes for high dpi support and I've tested this on a 4K monitor and it does seem fine. I do wish the default font size was not 8pt but that is one thing that seems to have carried over since the 90's.

We are facing a new project and we most likely will use WPF. We have to gain proficiency with WPF, XAML, MVVM (which we already use in mobile and other areas, that's not the biggest thing here). Component vendors still seem to favor Winforms but obviously WPF has a lot of potential and capability to take an application to the next level and with Apple's brainwashing on form over function WPF again seems to be the right answer.

We heavily use DevExpress components and like them, they as mentioned above do seem to favor Winforms which is probably easier to add components for coming from an ActiveX/VCL background. I'm not sure how .NET Core 3 plays into this but I do know being proficient with XAML will also help should anyone choose to use Xamarin Forms.

As many here face this dilemma, tell your story of what platform you choose (Winforms vs. WPF) and why. When is the last time you started a new project and made this choice and how did it pan out?

 

[Elad]

I do not know if you ask or suggest which package is worth working on, anyway I recommend you go for WPF which is more powerful than Winform
The convenience that WPF has is much more than WinForm is very easy and simple to understand (even though it's a whole world) you can do so many cool things for distribution. One of the things that stands out to me is the arrangement of the existing controls in WPF (Layout), not so much messing with WinForm but I know it's not easy to set up a custom view for a smartphone or iPad window. There are other significant benefits that WPF provides and Winform is limited by.

 

[jmcilhinney]

We don't do much Windows Development any more but we opt for WPF first these days. Like MVC over Web Forms, it seems like more work at first but, once you get proficient with it, it's really not much more effort and may even be less if want to architect a WinForms application properly. WinForms is generally easier for quick and dirty stuff, although you can use WPF without MVVM and then it's not much harder if at all, but that also lends itself to bigger WinForms applications that are still dirty. Writing a WinForms app using best practice is a pain and doing so in WPF is far more natural, which is exactly how I felt when moving from Web Forms to MVC.