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What are some current opinions on WPF?

I was looking for some current opinions on WPF based on their 4.0 release.

We are trying to decide if we want a Desktop application with a WCF server, or if we want an ASP.Net web app. I would really like to do it in WPF, however some major concerns have come up that I am not sure if WPF can handle. I have looked around online and a lot of WPF reviews are based on the 3.5 version, so I was looking for some current opinions.

  1. What sort of Support is out there for it? Microsoft support and Community? Is WPF a dying technology or a growing one?
  2. It is harder to find WPF programmers. Is this always going to be the case?
  3. What is the performance like for terminal services? The majority of our users login using WYSE thin-clients to a Windows 2003 terminal server. Each server normally has between 10 and 30 people on it on any given day. Most of our TS users only need basic view/insert/update abilities and our admin staff needs the more advanced features and reporting. The admin users all have XP machines with SP2 or higher.
  4. What other concerns should I have about WPF?
Solution

  • It seems the underlying concern here is whether or not WPF is a mature enough technology for serious desktop application development. The answer there is IMHO certainly yes and the proof I offer is Visual Studio 2010. It is written in WPF, is a major desktop application and has to meet the criteria laid out in your question.

    To attempt to head off the 2010 is slow + buggy argument. Yes, 2010 is not a perfect product and has bugs. The vast majority of those problems are not purely a WPF issue but instead are related to legacy code, managed native interop or just interesting interactions between old and new technology.

    To answer some of the non-technical questions with hand wavy answers ...

    • Yes today it's probably harder to find WPF programmers than say WinForm programmers. WPF is a newer technology and hence likely won't have as many developers. Will this be true in the future will only be decided in the future :)
    • I feel like there is great support for WPF (see the WPF tag on this site for an example). When I started doing WPF work for the 2010 release the vast majority of the questions I had were already answered on this site or in blog tutorials.