Windows Forms vs. WPF

To be honest; I’m getting a bit sick of this seemingly endless discussion. But i wanted to write about it anyway.

For me personally, WPF equals creativity and innovation.  Let me try and illustrate this for you. Imagine a beautiful, colorful painting that took the artist a long time to make but will draw large crowds. You might claim that, regardless of the time that was put into it, it’s still just a painting right? What are the benefits of this detailed, colorful painting? Why didn’t the painter make a more simple sketch; He would be done a lot quicker and the message would be the same right?

Wrong

Remember the Halo effect researched by Thorndike in the early 20′s? He wrote about two woman having the same intelligence but one more beautiful than the other. The Halo Effect describes the fact that other people think the ugly person is less smart than the beautiful woman. My opinion is that the same goes for software: If the functionality of the software is the same but Application A looks a lot more pretty, intuitive and clean than Application B, A sells. B doesn’t. WPF can do just that.
Just look at the gaming industry; It’s all about the graphics, less about the gameplay. Or common advertising; it’s all about beautiful woman with tiny cloth covering up certain body parts, less about the product.

By the way, all that emphasis on the UI possibilities of WPF is blown out of proportion. If you dig deeper in the technical aspects of WPF you discover that it not only gives you the power to ‘paint’ and innovate, it’s also a data powerhouse. Let’s take for example the databinding possibilities. The power to bind properties of elements to data that is constantly changing, reflecting changes not only in flat text, but with images, colors, animations, etc. etc. All thanks to the combination of Dependency Objects and their Dependency Properties, ValueConverters and DataTriggers. Isn’t that wonderful?

WPF is like creating a giant switchboard and configure it to behave in the way you want. Putting data into it and watch it work. You just feel in control. If you have worked with WPF, you will know what i mean.

So why do some Windows Forms lovers still hate WPF? I mean, WPF has a WindowsFormHost for all of your valuable assets, it even has a DataGrid to look at data in the conservative way. There is one point I agree about when people ‘defend’ Windows Forms. It’s really good at RAD (Rapid Application Development) in contrary to WPF. But hey, in comes that beautiful paining again!

So let’s get it out: WPF is here to stay and take over the world! What do you think?