How stable is WPF?

Question

How stable is WPF not in terms of stability of a WPF program, but in terms of the 'stability' of the API itself.

Let me explain:

Microsoft is notorious for changing its whole methodology around with new technology. Like with the move from silverlight 1 to silverlight 2. With WPF, I know that MS changed a bunch of stuff with the release of the .NET service pack. I don't know how much they changed things around. So the bottom line is, in your opinion are they going to revamp the system again with the next release or do you think that it is stable enough now that they won't change the bulk of the system. I hate to have to unlearn stuff with every release.

I hope that the question wasn't too long winded.

Answer 1

MS do have a history of "fire and movement" with regards to introducing new technology into their development stack, but they also have a strong history of maintaining support for the older stuff, and backwards-compatibility. WPF seems to be getting stuff added to it with each new release of the framework but the things you learn aren't being superceded or invalidated.

The only breaking change I've seen in my own WPF applications with a new release of the framework was one recently in 3.5 SP1, and that was because we were unknowingly relying on a bug to get a certain behaviour from our code. We adjusted the XAML to be more correct and it started working fine.

So yeah, I think WPF is pretty "stable" as a client-side development technology.

Answer 2

We've been using WPF since it was first released and yes it had it's problems at the beginning that caused us headaches and had us scratching our heads to find a work around, but each new update the stack has actually become pretty stable.

It definitely became easier and easier to develop with it with the addition of Expression Blend. Creating the XAML in VS 2005 was not fun. The templating engine alone is enough to switch from WinForms, let alone the animation support.

Either way, I agree with Matt that it is pretty stable as a framework for developing client applications.