Moving from Winforms to WPF

Question

I know this could be a subjective question, but I want to know your experience and an estimation of how long it would take for a Winforms programmer to switch to WPF and write a simple application.

I'm starting to build a windows application using .Net Winforms. Since the customer cares about the UI, I thought that it's a good idea to switch to WPF at last.
I'm very new to WPF and almost don't know anything about it except some general knowledge.

The application is a single user desktop application with SQL Server Express as the back-end database and will use either Strongly Typed Datasets or subsonic as its DAL. Some basic UI elements (Datagridviews, Textboxes, Buttons, ...) will be used. As you can see it's not a complicated project at all. That's why I was considering using WPF for the first time for this project.

I don't know how long would it take for a Winforms developer to get used to WPF.
Do you think I should start this project using WPF considering its learning curve?
P.S. The project should be ready in about 2 months and I'm a fast learner.

Answer 1

You can easily and quickly write "WinForms-like" (event handlers, code-behind, etc.) code using WPF and it will work just fine. But it's not really the "WPF way" and will limit your flexibility in the future.