Full-Time WPF Development

Question

I am fortunate to be working for a company in which all of our new development efforts are all in WPF. Are there a lot of other developers out there in this situation? Are companies quickly adopting this as their primary UI platform? As developers we all see the value in it, but are companies buying into it?

Answer 1

I am doing WPF development at a major semi-conductor company. So far it has been a hit and miss experience. I was given pretty free reign to decide what development platform I used as long as we could support Windows Vista and later. Given that I had a pretty short development timeline for a rather large application and just two GUI developers to work on it, WPF seemed the right choice. HOwever as I got further along, some more warts of WPF manifested themselves... JUst look into "airspace" issues when integrating DirectX with .NET 3.0 implementation of WPF. Or look at the sorry state of the designer tools in Visual studio 2008. Still with these problems, they are relatively minor when compared to the development cost of creating a fully skinnable UI that supports RTL languages and animation. At one point someone (who worked at Microsoft no less) suggested that I look at SDL as an alternative to WPF. Yeah right.

Another problem that I have is that designers are still not doing uptake on the whole WPF/Blend tools. Most designers I know scoff at running anything other than Adobe tools on a Mac. It is up to us developers to translate their designs into workable code. I hate those turtlenecked d***ks.

Anyway, my company leaves the technology decisions to the people that are using it. So WPF was a natural choice given my requirements. I don't regret it but I wish it had been a bit more mature before they released it with Vista. There are some critical fixes that were put in .NET 3.5 that I need. HOwever, I don't want to force my users to download .NET 3.5 when .NET 3.0 is on their Vista system.