I have been working with WPF, Blend 2 and VS2008 for the last month and found it to be fairly easy to learn. I really like your articles including the ones in CodeProject. They have helped immensely. Once you get comfortable with these technologies you can develop some really amazing apps easily.

I have become an evangelist of sorts trying to get my company to start changing over to WPF. We mainly use windows apps and some asp.net as well, and everything runs on Microsoft OS.

However, there are some drawbacks using WPF with Blend 2 being a separate designer and not supporting VSS like VS2008 does. There is no DataGrid control, but 2 companies that I know of create a “Free” version of this grid, one of which you work for. Another is the animation and 3D graphics are awesome, but they are a huge performance drain on the hardware.

Do you notice any other big performance issues or other show stoppers like this since you have been working with WPF?

Thanks Josh for all of your hard work!!

Matt

Josh

I have already started doing a new desktop project in WPF. And definitely Silverlight on the web. I also wanted to rewrite my existing apps in WPF. But most of them use SQL Server CE and SQL Server Reporting Services (there are times that you just need to dump a lot of data). Unfortunately the new Client Distribution in SP1 doesn’t support WindowsClientIntegration. And the only way that I know of to do the reports in WPF is through WindowsFormsHost. I think the same is probably true for Crystal Reports. So, those of us with existing apps using reporting have the choice of using WPF or having a smaller download for customers (much less pain, and excellent selling point - which is why they made the client redist) and staying in Windows Forms.

But definitely WPF and Silverlight for the future. Great stuff!

-Gary

Could you send me out an e-mail I’m working on a big project and I would like to get some feed back from you from moving from Visual inheritance to component agregation.

I was only joking about advertising. Keep in mind that I work for Infragistics now, so there would definitely be a conflict of interest if I were to host your ad on my blog.

Josh

I can’t find any contact information for you here. We are willing to talk with you about advertising.

Thanks for the feedback, but I must disagree with your point. Just because Cider has the potential for RAD doesn’t mean that it, Cider, currently makes it possible.

Josh

P.S. I typically charge people for *advertising* on my blog.

I saw you at the MVP summit but didn’t get a chance to talk to you.

I don’t really agree that WPF isn’t RAD yet. The designer isn’t as good as the 1.0 winforms designer was but it is fairly good. I run a control vendor company and our control offerings for WPF have awesome RAD designer support thanks to the APIs that Cider provides. In SP1 we’ll see some basic improvements in the designer that should answer the problems that people most frequently run into in the RAD space too.

Tim Dawson
Divelements

“Wouldn’t it be great if we could just do whatever we, the developers, wanted? If the customers don’t like it, that’s their problem!”

Get out of my dreams, lol