Answered WPF Please Explain

[kwhelchel]

@Skydiver I see you posting a lot of times saying learn WPF ? So my question is what is the Biggest reason ? and will someone else be able to work with it like winforms?
Also my project has a lot of variables with daily sales data and I need to be able to create reports from that data. I am using sql tables and will need to be able to combine days (temp tables) and pull from different filters.
You have seen this before but I am now just wondering.
And yes there will be data binding etc.
And I couldn't figure out how to PM you here lol
Keith

 

[Skydiver]

The biggest reason to move to WPF is because WinForms is at end-of-life. Yes, Microsoft adopted it into .NET Core 3.1 as a minor reprieve, but notice that they've disabled a whole bunch of features, and they have no plans of doing further investments into it. They will only do security fixes as needed. I suspect that the reason why they gave it a minor reprieve is because there are still a lot of legacy LOB apps written in WinForms.

Moving into WPF gives you:

• Slighted extended support/lifetime -- at least until MS says that WinUI is absolutely the only path forward and WPF is at end of life.
• A better architecture that most modern developers would understand due to it's basis on MV* architecture -- in the case of WPF MVVM.
• With learning MVVM, whatever concepts you learn will translate over other technologies that use MV* -- so when you look at WinUI, or multi-platform Xamarin, or web based MVC things won't be so foreign.
• Faster rendering and better performance with WPF because it uses DirectDraw/DirectX for rendering.

I believe the forum admins disabled PM-ing.

 

[kwhelchel]

OK and as far as difference between the two not much?

 

[Skydiver]

There is a world of difference between WinForms and WPF. See:

Making The Transition From WinForms To WPF - Part 1 - WPF & Silverlight Tutorials | Dream.In.Code

Making the transition from WinForms to WPF - part 1:

www.dreamincode.net

 

[kwhelchel]

@Skydiver ok so yeah a lot different but the layout is nicer to me more like css type and I like how I can define a style for it to work things around what I need

 

[Skydiver]

Yup the difference between declarative UI vs. imperative UI when working with with XAML vs. WinForms. I prefer the declarative UI as well.

Under the covers, the XAML is still actually converted into imperative code to build up the UI, but it is not as obtuse as the WinForms .designer.cs files.