I'm surprised Scott; I thought WPF was dead to you *grin* .
I agree with everything you say apart from the last: "WinForms
productivity will always trump WPF". While in general (and up to a
certain point) that may be true, but after you become relatively fluent
with WPF (and/or Silverlight?) I think the reverse is true (again in
general, and up to a certain point).
WPF "requires" the developer to be a bit more structured and
disciplined, which eventually translates into better architected
applications and developers falling into the "right way" of coding
solutions. Personally, I feel I can now write small or large scale
solutions in WPF a lot faster than WinForms because I've developed my
coding style, honed my techniques, accumulated (and built) my tools, and
I can leverage my experience. It has been a struggle to get here, but
the pay-off is well and truly worth it.
This topic that has broad reaching implications; one that the written
word (email/blogs/etc) isn't up to summarising into a brief read that's
correct in every way. Having been a living breathing developer for 14+
years (most of them on Microsoft), I would recommend the move from
WinForms to WPF or Silverlight. There is enough information out there
to help you work it out (eventually), but at this early stage you're
going to have to want it.
I certainly couldn't imagine the current project I'm on (an enterprise
WPF app) being built in WinForms. *shudder*
Carl.
Carl Scarlett
Senior .NET/WPF Developer, UX Designer - Genesis Team
IT Applications Delivery | Bankwest
A: Level 5, 199 Hay Street | Perth | Western Australia | 6004
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E: [email protected]
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2010 Bank of the Year
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]
On Behalf Of Scott Barnes <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, 15 October 2010 9:10 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: Should I give up?
Alastair,
It was interesting to read your thoughts as these kinds of letters
were ones i use to crave back when I was in my ivory tower in Redmond
:) that being said, I've read this kind of thing before and I guess
you can take some sense of positivity that you weren't the first and
definately not the last to write this kind of thing. Sad part is the
fact you guys have to write it in the first place.
There are and is a number of challenges facing the WPF on-ramping:
Migration.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Just like with any technology getting 6million+ .NET dev's to embrace
anything new faces its initial challenges - mostly around the
acceptance of the "new" but that aside, when a company like Microsoft
expects people to move forward then there is a tax to pay, the first
being is your developer satisfcation levels (scores) will drop (as
confidence gets lowered given people have to learn) and lastly you
need to invest heavily into providing these folks bread crumbs to
follow into the new world.
I mention this as inside Microsoft you're goaled on these types of
metrics namely around Product and Developer satisifcation levels and
once these scores drop, people freak out which in turn creates this
chaotic effect where in many ways each subsidary around the world says
"I have the solution" and then floods the interweb with the said
solution. This in turn creates churn for developers like you as not
only do you have these initial on-ramping issues around change and new
but now you have to seperate signal from noise. Furthermore given the
beta life cycles of Silverlight/WPF over the years you also have to
seperate old/depreciated vs new and so on... to be blunt, its a
freaking mindfield of stupidity at the moment.
However, thanks to places like Stackoverflow and in parts
social.microsoft.com forums you can find some salvation given the life
span of the products (ie it's fairly well seeded in to developer
market but by no means is there one definitive site that answers the
most basic problem).
The stark reality is, I know WPF/Silverlight better than most given
i've had initimate knowledge of it since its birth but there isn't a
day i go without cursing the technology in a cubicle somewhere - most
recently is my experience in trying to make LINQ to Entities work the
way I expected it to in a WPF solution.
Maturity.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The overall maturity of WPF developers is low whilst the ubiquity of
WPF is high. Silverlight has high amount of developer base but low
about of ubiquity. I raise this point simply because Microsoft asked
everyone to really focus on Silverlight so well everyone kind of did,
but in doing so it shifted the developer base away from WPF into
Silverlight which in turn creates this supply/demand issue world-wide
around WPF.
Having this deficit of WPF mindshare creates an issue for future on
boarding, as in turn you want a healthy amount of developer base to
talk about their problems / success online in order to help pave the
way for new blood. The reality is though you're more likely to yield
answers in Silverlight than WPF if you're not looking in the right
places that is (right places meaning you've figured out a pattern
around seperating noise/signal in WPF google searches hehe).
I'd say there needs to be more mature/senior WPF experts unloading
into more centralized locations than the disparate ones at place, as
in order to retain the Allaistair's of this world, it just needs to
occur for future seeding.
Shing Object Syndrome.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Assuming you have mastered the Maturity/Migration issues above, then
comes what I call the wave approach to shiny object syndrome. As
again, inside Microsoft you are given commitments and scorings against
weird metrics that roll up to a health report index of how investment
in products are going etc (reviews of the business etc aren't fun
meetings to have). The downside with this is well most staff are told
to double down on the new wave, so in our case you're going to see a
lot of momentum around Windows Phone 7 and Silverlight in the next
fiscal than before.
Now, there isn't an issue with this per say - hey embrace change - it
does however create more distance between technologies like WPF and
the new world order, as in reality there needs to be a backfill of
staff who's job is to sustain the adoption of the old wave's
(Silverlight 4 / WPF 4) aswell as seeding the new. This doesn't
happen given old wins aren't as good as new wins, so less of a vicotry
email bang occurs if you walk into a meeting and said "I grew last
year's or year before's metrics by 20% this year!" vs "I grew this
years metrics by 20%".
In order to defeat this, it requires street evangelism to occur which
is people on this list talking about the value propositions of WPF and
helping people like the Alastair's out when they hit a wall (and hard
at that). This requires a better sense of community and it also really
needs in parts the help of Microsoft on an subsidary based level to
help nurture and foster these relationships more (ie code camps, msdn
user groups, online QA's etc). This is because you want to raise
confidence levels of a new adoptee to a stage where sure it's hard to
learn, but if the said person(s) feel like there are more others
around them they are more likely to gravitate and polynate there
learnings more in a deeper fashion.
This isn't occuring :(
Should you stay?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So should you give up? It depends :D - but there is the reasons why
the state of play is what is, its not perfect it's not entirely
Microsoft's fault and you aren't alone. Winforms productivity will
always trump WPF as well it did all of the above well - too well! :0
so you have habitual + confidence levels at an all time high. There's
just no easy "How to migrate from WinForms to WPF" story being told
and thus why you're confidence levels are dropping despite your
maturity around .NET being probably high.
Regards,
Scott Barnes
http://www.riagenic.com
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