> > > im not holding my breath for > > large-scale acceptance anytime soon. > > It might take off more with Silverlight 3 / VS 2010. But there's so > much > investment in WinForms that most developers will only gradually move > away from that. I think it's a far neater approach than WinForms, > ultimately.
(Added NF tag) I agree on all points. I am quite good at WinForms now, and am for the first time in my life (I must be getting old) finding myself resistant to the "new hotness" of WPF. Silverlight 3 does show some serious leg though. In my case, I have this thing about "writing code" in XML. But beyond that subjective objection, the whole architecture of WPF is simply different -- better being, as it were, in the eye of the beholder--and will take some getting used to. I get the vision for it, and it's a classic case of a software development shop-centric technology, i.e., not really driven by the consumers of software so much as its producers. It's motivated by a desire to get UI out of the hands of developers who generally suck at it and into the hands of designers who usually can't code their way out of a paper bag... but in my case, the interior decorator in me actually enjoys building nice UIs, and I view XAML as a step toward HTML/CSS-induced spaghetti code hell. I never really liked web development because of these "languages". No doubt it's sexier, graphically speaking, being based on DirectX instead of GDI and all, but it's hard for me to overcome the fact that most of the "code" is XML. True, you can write pure-code WPF, but it's pretty tedious (as is WinForms without designer help). XML is one of those over-hyped, ubiquitous buzzwords that prove how pampered and grossly inefficient we have become as developers, what with all this hard drive space and bandwidth to waste... it's the LDL of protocols. Moreover, I was deftly avoiding carpal tunnel until XML actually made me type those blasted angle brackets all the time...;) The only thing it has going for it is industry standardization, which for me is another word for design-by-committee. Another thing... the WPF designer is a relative pain. The first few times I tried to rename my main form from Window1.xaml to MainForm.xaml (as is my custom) and it took me a half an hour to figure out all the places I needed to change that reference in XML, I decided I'd wait awhile to jump on the bandwagon. I actually find myself more interested in emerging native code technologies, like the D programming language (which my C++ hero Andrei Alexandrescu has adopted), the latest Delphi (did you know, it finally has generics!), and very high level languages that compile to native code on multiple platforms, like Haskell (now THAT is a new way to think about programming that, unlike XML, is actually good for and liberating to your mind!). I think MS made the right moves in terms of development tools and languages by pursuing .NET; it's an amazing technology that is ultimately getting better over time. It is to Java what the Aeneid was to the Odyssey, only it's actually better than the thing of which it was a copycat. Unfortunately I think they went bonkers with their new culture of innovation... now there is a lot of uncertainty when you adopt a new .NET technology whether and how long it will be around before Yet Another Paradigm Shift. The latest .NET technology to get my attention in a serious way is F#, which I am finding very enjoyable and productive as a language, particularly as I learn Haskell to understand the concepts behind it. The "light" syntax MS encourages over legacy Occaml-style syntax has a sort of Python-ish feel to it (indentation becomes significant when #light syntax is on), but the real power is in language features like asynchronous workflows (based on an even more powerful general-purpose capability called computation expressions), quotations, pattern matching, and symbolic manipulation. Because of these features, F# has few peers on any platform (Scala is nearly analogous on the Java platform) and none on .NET (though new and impressive languages are coming out almost daily). I'm writing a real-time stock analysis system in F#, and using Delphi Prism for the UI (mainly because 1.) F#'s CodeDOM is incomplete so it doesn't work with the designers; 2.) in 2008 C# intellisense crashes when it bumps into unusual F# types, a "known issue that is fixed in VS 2010" according the MSDN support, and 3.) because I love the new primitives for parallel programming in Delphi Prism in their own right, and wanted to renew my old Object Pascal flame). So I have plenty to learn without having to drink any more XML poison. ;) WPF will wait a little longer before I inevitably dig in. For now, I'm writing this system using WinForms, the admittedly inferior but oh-so familiar "devil I know." I'd rather exercise my brain cells on truly interesting new technologies. :) - Bob > -- > Alan Bourke > alanpbourke (at) fastmail (dot) fm _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[email protected] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
