Our product is an "add-in" for a native 3rd party CAD application that hosts the .NET runtime and loads add-ins like ours into it's process.
Ultimately this does not work well with WPF's threading model. The CAD application's API becomes very flaky when add-ins use multiple threads. The solution at the time was to pull most of our code and GUI out into another process which involved developing a small service layer to ferry data from one process to the other. This also meant that we could use .NET 4 instead of being stuck with .NET 3.5 (and it's WPF text clarity issues) since the CAD application did not support .NET 4 at the time. I'm now concerned about the effort involved in maintaining this service layer and expanding it as we develop new products that cover more of the host application's API, and the additional logic for handling some of the more advanced interaction scenarios across the service boundary. If we were to use WinForms instead then we could dramatically simplify the code base and future development. On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 3:18 PM, Jake Ginnivan <[email protected]>wrote: > +1 would be very interested to know what constraints would cause you to > choose winforms over wpf..**** > > ** ** > > *From:* [email protected] [mailto: > [email protected]] *On Behalf Of *Grant Molloy > *Sent:* Thursday, 18 August 2011 1:05 PM > *To:* ozDotNet > *Subject:* Re: Good looking WinForms apps**** > > ** ** > > I think that you should also explain in more detail the "constraints" of > the situation which are causing you extra work and why this has made you > believe that WPF is not the correct choice.**** > > ** ** > > Grant**** > > On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 2:33 PM, Matt Siebert <[email protected]> wrote: > **** > > Hi folks,**** > > ** ** > > Can anyone point out some particularly good looking WinForms apps? > Screenshots will do, a working app I could show someone would be better.* > *** > > ** ** > > This is a bit of a strange request so I should probably explain a little... > **** > > ** ** > > We've built a product using WPF but we have lots of constraints imposed by > the environment we're coding for. This has caused a lot of extra work with > more to come. As such, I don't think WPF is the right choice and I'm trying > to convince my manager that it's worth considering switching to WinForms > which is much better suited to this environment. He's not a developer and > is fairly visually oriented, and he's worried that if we were to use > WinForms then we may not be able to produce a good GUI / UX. I've assured > him that this isn't the case but some good examples would help.**** > > ** ** > > Cheers.**** > > ** ** >
