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We are trying to make a decision about if we should create a program in WPF w/ a WCF server, and I was wondering what the current opinions are of WPF. I was looking around online but most of the arguments I saw for/against WPF were dated a year or two ago, and about WPF3.5. I was wondering if those opinions have changed in the past year or two with the release of WPF4.0.

Some notes....

The program we are making is for use by a single-company in a controlled enviornment. With the exception of one or two Vista laptops, most users are on Terminal Servers or WindowsXP. It is not media-heavy and doesn't need a pretty UI (although it won't hurt). It needs to be extensible and allow for easy additions later on. Security and Performance are our key concerns.

EDIT

Primary concern about WPF is Support (MS and community), memory/cpu usage on terminal servers, and finding people to work on the project now and maintain it in the future. Some smaller things of concern are lack of library controls, development time, and learning curve.

The primary alternative we were considering is ASP.Net/jQuery.

Rachel
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    Maybe you can get a better answer if you include some examples of the bad things you've heard that concern you. – Brian R. Bondy Nov 16 '10 at 14:15
  • Sorry its not clear but what are you considering for alternatives? Are you trying to decide between a desktop client and a web client or considering Winforms over WPF ? – Jeremy Nov 16 '10 at 14:38
  • @Brian, @Jeremy: I updated my question with some of the concerns I had and the alternative we were thinking of. – Rachel Nov 16 '10 at 19:38

2 Answers2

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I like it.

IMO it is good.

WPF is just presentation, so it won't affect security, unless there are some security issues I've not heard about.

I've not seen any metrics comparing WPF to WinForms performance-wise. I'm guessing they're comparable. This SO question is about the performance of WPF v WinForms: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/368371/performance-comparison-of-winforms-and-wpf

I like WPF because XAML is declarative and makes saying how I want the UI to look and act easier than with WinForms. This is only true after I have learned the basics of MVVM.

Community
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Matt Ellen
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I too like WPF but I know I had some issues with Windows XP when I first started using it (albiet it may have been my fault). WPF was originally developed for use with Vista (and then Windows 7) so it originally didn't work on XP. There is a blog post about this on MSDN (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tims/archive/2007/01/05/comparing-wpf-on-windows-vista-v-windows-xp.aspx) and while it is old it outlines some of the issues that may exist when using XP.

For what you are doing, it may be fine but if you end up needing something media intensive I wouldn't use it as performance may take a hit per the blog above.

Glorfindel
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Jetti
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