Steering clear of the "whether or not choosing WinForms over WPF is a good idea" debate, it's definitely possible to create some nice looking UI's in WinForms.
The System.Drawing namespace gives you a fairly open licence to do whatever the heck you want with the window. Bob Powell has some excellent (a bit dated, but still applicable) articles on some of the cool things you can do with GDI+ in .NET (see http://www.bobpowell.net/faqmain.htm). There are some things you "can't" do (or can't do *easily*), such as doing matrix transformations or using pretty WPF fonts - but I guess these are the kinds of things that usually aren't a problem for "line of business" apps. It's also pretty easy to shoot yourself in the foot with memory leaks, and it's easy to create performance problems by doing intensive painting or calculation in the wrong places. Joe. 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. >
