How to put forward a good business case for WPF?

Question

There are many questions about WPF vs Winfoms and the benefits of migrating to wpf, however I have a more specific question, which is probably subjective but would definitely help me justify using WPF.

Being in an internal IT department, the business users are not bothered how we get to the end product, but are also not fussed about things like animations, styling etc.

I can put forward some technical reasons, but how can i convince them and the management that WPF will be beneficial to them now and in the long run.

Any examples of improvements to UI controls etc would help.

Thanks.

Answer 1

The biggest business benefit of WPF over WinForms as I see it is the massive increase in testability. Because of the ubiquitous Data Binding support in WPF, patterns like Model-View-ViewModel become trivial to implement, and enable the vast majority of the interaction logic of an application to be separated out into ViewModel classes which, being Plain-Old-Clr-Objects, are much easier to test than WinForms controls.

The second benefit comes from the composability of the "widgets" in WPF. Customizing the look and feel of items in a ListBox or ComboBox using Data Templates, for example, is a cinch compared with the custom drawing that has to take place in WinFroms. So WPF makes it much easier to create apps with high usability compared with WinForms.

Thirdly, the Control Model and Graphics APIs are a vast improvement on WinForms. When I wanted to create a Custom Chart control, with support for rendering several hundred series performantly, it only took me a couple of days to do it - I remember something similar taking weeks in WinForms. As another example, I've blogged about how easy it is to get started with creating a custom Gantt control in WPF.

Answer 2

Well, if you simply have to convince the management about the merits of WPF just throw them a couple of funky YouTube videos. I like especially this and this. :)

The most important technical reason I can think of is separating the logic of the program fron the UI. This can be achieved using alternative programming paradigms though.