I have a project that i started as a WinForms application as that was the format i was confortable with at the time. I have since started dabbling in WPF an introduced some WPF UserControls (mainly grids) into my project and absolutely love them.
The question i have is, is there any real advantage to me changing the UI Project of my solution into a purely WPF project, and get rid of any WinForms?
I am fully aware that each format suits a certain environment, and you wouldnt be able to give a definitive answer without knowing more of the details, but i would like to know peoples opinions, and if anyone has done a silimar thing of converting an existing WinForms App into a WPF frontend, and any observations they made in doing so.
Thanks
Underlying the new features in WPF is a powerful new infrastructure based on DirectX, the hardware-accelerated graphics API that’s commonly used in cutting-edge computer games. This means that you can use rich graphical effects without incurring the performance overhead that you’d suffer with Windows Forms. In fact, you even get advanced features such as support for video files and 3-D content. Using these features (and a good design tool), it’s possible to create eye-popping user interfaces and visual effects that would have been all but impossible with Windows Forms.
WPF enhances features that appeal directly to business developers, including a vastly improved data binding model, a new set of classes for printing content and managing print queues, and a document feature for displaying large amounts of formatted text.
But if you’ve done a substantial amount of work creating a Windows Forms application, you don’t need to migrate it wholesale to WPF to get access to new features such as animation. Instead, you can add WPF content to your existing Windows Forms application, or you can create a WPF application that incorporates your legacy Windows Forms content.
Reference: Pro WPF in C# 2008: Windows Presentation Foundation with .NET 3.5, Second Edition
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I am used to WPF Development. But recently, i am assigned to Windows Forms projects. Fortunately, application framework supports pluggable architecture and that's why i feel i can develop plugin in WPF.
If we safely assume that framework doesn't need more than a interface to detect a plugin, I have following questions:
First of all, is it a good idea to develop WPF plugin for the given scenario?
Are there any guidelines available which i should follow? Any Examples?
Will it be a good idea to design some abstraction layer specially for WPF plugins rather than depending on interface?
Thanks in advance.
Yeah, we have huge project called "Plugins" which is basically WPF App/Windows loaded via additional app domain.
I think in your case depends if you Windows Forms are in .NET 2 or .NET3.5. If it is .NET 3.5 then you dont need additional app domain to load .NET 3.5 with WPF.
If you are already in .NET 3.5 with your WinForms, then you can use ElementHost to host your WPF inside WinForms.
Apart from few glitches (like not repainting the form sometimes), it went quite smoothly in our case
As to your Qs:
Usually it is better to do everything in WPF, but do u have a choice ? (I dont think so)
Lookup an example on WPF ElementHost
Well, I would use MVVM with WPF so that later on you can chnage the UI bit (maybe Silverlight or Win8 metro) without chnaging much of the business layer logic
Hy.I am currently working on a application in windows forms c#.My application is almost finished but the design is awful,i mean is very simple.I've searched some things about WPF and i think is a very good way to improve my design...But my question is:For using WPF only for my interface..if i will make copy -paste of my code, and i will modify only buttons and colors....will my project continue to work?Or I should started from 0...?
Thank you
In general I would recommend to start from scratch. If you aren't doing a complicated architecture here and have simple event handlers for WinForms you can pretty much stick with the same structure in WPF.
Architecturally speaking it would have of course been better to isolate the business logic from the event handlers. In that regard you might want to take a look at MVVM (and the MVVM Light Toolkit) and Prism.
We have successfully put a WPF shim around one of our very large WinForms apps and hosted the WinForms parts inside of a windows forms host. This allows you to convert one part at a time. This might be a route to take if this project is bigger or you are not sure you will be able to convert the entire application in one shot.
If your win forms app is designed properly you should be able to reuse all but your UI code. In my opinion WPF is far superior to win forms and you should definatly consider using it but it will take some learning to get started, dont do thus if you have a deadline coming up soon.
I also recommend you to move to the MVVM and WPF anyway if your project it is not so big you can use only WPF for interface and copy and paste your code. But from architecture point of view using the MVVM pattern you can make better separation of the interface (View) and you logic (Model) if you will use MVVM in the future will be easier to maintain and change your application
After toying a little with the new Silverlight 4 camera features, and being really disappointed that these were not included in WPF, I looked at the Silverlight assemblies and found that they more or less delegate all work to agcore.dll.
Do you think it is a good idea to package agcore.dll with my WPF application, and copy/paste or rewrite all classes concerning cameras to WPF, to get these nice features there?
That particular approach isn't likely to work, unfortunately. There's a lot more to getting C# code to work with Silverlight than just referencing the appropriate DLL. Silverlight is actually a completely different implementation of the CLR, so you can't just call into agcore.dll from a WPF app and have it run.
If you need Silverlight features in your app, I can think of two ways to get them: (1) you could conceivably host a completely separate instance of Silverlight inside a browser control in your WPF app, though communication with that Silverlight instance becomes complicated (though not impossible); or (2) you could write your entire app in Silverlight OOB (Out-of-browser)/trusted mode.
You can try VideoCaptureElement in my WPF MediaKit. It will show a webcam in WPF. It does have a different API than the Silverlight webcam API, but it should have just as many features.
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I'm a C++/Java developer and have no idea about .Net or GUIs. I need to develop a windows app for 2000/XP/Vista/7.
I think I've come to conclusion that C# is the best and the fastest way to go (please correct me if I'm wrong). What do you recommend? Which GUI approach should I learn? (Forms? Any other stuff?)
Is it the best way to compile in .Net 2.0 mode? It's going to be an application for the public to download.
For desktop applications there are basically two options; WinForms and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).
WinForms is more traditionally built and hence easier to learn. WinForms might therefore be a simpler start, but if you plan on actually using your gained knowledge in GUI development for .NET I'd say you're better of diving into WPF from the start. It's a much richer framework, and where Microsoft is putting their effort for desktop applications. It is also similar to Silverlight, meaning you can easily get into Silverlight too when you know WPF.
This other question gives some useful resources when getting started with WPF.
Also check out this tutorial at MSDN.
WpfTutorial obviously has a few nice hints for you too!
Good luck!
In my personal development experience Windows Forms is just about as easy as it gets when it comes to rapidly deploying a GUI application on Windows. WPF is of course another option, but using it would likely require you spend some time familiarizing yourself with XAML. Windows Forms look and feel like a lot of the available GUI options for Java, it's just much better than the majority of them, in my opinion.
If you want the fastest possible GUI development time in .NET, Windows Forms is it.
Yes. C# is the language of choice when it comes to .NET development. Since you've programmed in Java, you'll find that the language looks very familiar (it looks a bit cleaner though and has some very nice features like delegates and you can even use pointers if you really want to, although you won't need to in most circumstances).
It's SWF (System Windows Forms) or MWF (Managed Windows Forms - a lightweight version of SWF written in managed Code using System.Drawing - it frees you from the WinAPI that's underlying classical SWF) all the way.
There's also GTK-Sharp, a GTK+ binding for C-Sharp, but since you're developing for Windows, users will find it strange to install a third-party GUI framework for your application.
I wouldn't recommend using WPF though. It makes direct calls to the underlying graphics hardware, which means it's quite fast, but not portable at all. It will only run on x86 systems (not SPARC, etc.) with DirectX compliant hardware rendering units (graphics cards) and it will not run on a system with strong hardware abstraction (like most Unices like BSD or Linux or Solaris).
Novell also stated that they will never implement WPF in the near future due to it's strong hardware dependencies (Novell wants Mono to be portable across many processor platforms). Don't use WPF. Software is no longer just a throw-away-product and when it comes to operating systems we're in the age of spin. The platform you're running today isn't necessarily the platform you're gonna run tomorrow. WPF is a proprietary and patent-encumbered technology developed by Microsoft and Intel. If you use it, you'll find yourself in a very nice Win32-on-x86 vendor lock in. And this means that you'll most definitely find yourself completely re-writing your application sooner or later. Just write portable software from the beginning, even if you don't need that portability today. I'm telling you from experience, you will need portability tomorrow. Definitely!
You could use Windows Forms or Windows Presentation Foundation to develop your GUI; although, Windows Forms might feel more familiar to you. If you search on Google for Windows Forms tutorial, you will get many options for getting started.
If you need to use .NET 2.0, you will be limited to Win Forms. WPF requires .NET 3.5.
I would suggest downloading Microsoft's free Visual Studio Express Edition to use for developemnt. it includes an excellent drag-and-drop GUI design tool.
I would recommend learning Winforms first, then move the WPF. Winforms is easier to learn and get something working quickly. The future however is WPF, so I wouldnt leave that in the dark. I posted some good books and links for GUI development work.
Books
Design of Everyday Things A really good book about design of interfaces. It's not software specific but a must read for GUI designers.
Coding Horror. He recommends a lot of development books on his book list, but these ones are specifically interface-related:
Don't Make Me Think
About Face 3.0
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
GUI Bloopers
Web Links
Are Confirmation Dialogs Harmful? A blog entry by Guido van Rossum (creator of Python)
GUI Articles A few articles about GUIs by Joel Spolsky (joelonsoftware.com)
Interfaced Systems International Has a lot of resources, especially on their UI References page
User Experience Guidelines for Windows Vista
I disagree with all the WinForms advocates. It's not easier. It may be easier for someone who has traditional experience with GUI programming, but this poster doesn't have that.
WPF has a better design story and the databinding is much, much better than WinForms. You can get up and running on WPF at least as fast as WinForms, and then go much further without running into the limitations that WinForms has. Couple this with the design-time databinding in VS 2010, and I'd say that anyone starting out on GUI development should completely bypass Winforms.
C# WinForms will be the fastest in terms of getting a practical GUI working rapidly. Though if you think on making a complex GUI, with animations, 3D etc, WPF would be better.
You can use CodePlex to find some good working projects to learn from in terms of best practice, both for WinForms and WPF.
You can also look here for some good books on both WPF and WinForms.
C# for sure. Use Winforms for line of business app / classic GUI.
read petzold 'programming windows with c#'
Or just dive in with visual studio. Creating GUI with VS is really easy - you will like it
You will find the langauge transition from java to c# pretty simple (not the gui bit tho)
I think I've come to conclusion that C# is the best and the fastest way to go (please correct me if I'm wrong). What do you recommend?
Personally, I would stick with Java. We (meaning OffByZero, the company I co-founded) have released an encrypted text editor called OBZVault, which is written in Java.
We originally wrote it in Linux, and then ported to Mac OS X and Windows. We found that the Windows port provided a perfectly acceptable look & feel - almost (but not exactly) like a native Windows app.
We used InnoSetup to build a native Windows installer, and found that quite good as well.
Bottom line: unless you want to learn a new language & platform, or you have a specific need for functionality provided by a different platform like .NET, stick with Java for your Windows development too. You'll need to learn a Java GUI framework, but then you'd have to learn WPF or WinForms if you switched to .NET anyway.
It may be faster for an experienced .NET developer to build a Windows app in WinForms or WPF, but if you're already well versed in Java I say stick with the tools (language, libraries, IDE) that you know.
I work on a large C# application (approximately 450,000 lines of code), we constantly have problems with desktop heap and GDI handle leaks. WPF solves these issues, but I don't know what is the best way to upgrade (I expect this is going to take a long time). The application has only a few forms but these can contain many different sets of user-controls which are determined programatically.
This is an internal company app so our release cycles are very short (typically 3 week release cycle).
Is there some gradual upgrade path or do we have to take the hit in one massive effort?
You can start by creating a WPF host.
Then you can use the <WindowsFormHost/> control to host your current application. Then, I suggest creating a library of your new controls in WPF. One at a time, you can create the controls (I suggest making them custom controls, not usercontrols). Within the style for each control, you can start with using the <ElementHost/> control to include the "old" windows forms control. Then you can take your time to refactor and recreate each control as complete WPF.
I think it will still take an initial effort to create your control wrappers and design a WPF host for the application. I am not sure the size of the application and or the complexity of the user controls, so I'm not sure how much effort that would be for you. Relatively speaking, it is significantly less effort and much faster to get you application up and running in WPF this way.
I wouldn't just do that and forget about it though, as you may run into issues with controls overlaying each other (Windows forms does not play well with WPF, especially with transparencies and other visuals)
Please update us on the status of this project, or provide more technical information if you would like more specific guidance. Thanks :)
Do you use a lot of User controls for the pieces? WPF can host winform controls, so you could piecewise bring in parts into the main form.
WPF allows you to embed windows forms user controls into a WPF application, which may help you make the transition in smaller steps.
Take a look at the WindowsFormsHost class in the WPF documentation.
I assume that you are not just looing for an ElementHost to put your vast Winforms app. That is anyway not a real porting to WPF.
Consider the answers on this Thread What are the bigger hurdles to overcome migrating from Winforms to WPF?, It will be very helpfull.
There is a very interesting white paper on migrating a .NET 2.0 winform application toward WPF, see Evolving toward a .NET 3.5 application
Paper abstract:
In this paper, I’m going to outline some of the thought processes, decisions and issues we had to face when evolving a Microsoft .NET application from 1.x/2.x to 3.x. I’ll look at how we helped our client to adopt the new technology, and yet still maintained a release schedule acceptable to the business.