Backgrounder needed. Why WPF

[Just_a_fan]

I have been through two books where they talk about the (almost)
parallel control set for WPF and VB. They go through the small
difference and talk about everything going on a form but what they don't
say is...

WHY WPF?

What did we get by having a (almost) parallel design palette. If the
features were so good, why not just fold them into the parallel controls
in VB?

This makes for another set of hundreds of things to remember and I can't
see the overriding benefit.

Possibly there is a White Paper on this somewhere or someone in the know
can say why. Wrox book talk about the what but not why this duality
came about.

Thanks for any help with this. I can't help but think that two
competing groups of designers got to load their almost identical but
incompatible stuff into the same IDE. Just seems odd to me. Anyone
else?

Mike

-----------------------------------------------------------

There are a variety of enhancements to the WPF Designer that are not
available in the Windows Forms Designer. These enhancements include:

Margin lines and stubs: Margin lines around each control indicate that a
margin has been set for that control. A margin stub indicates that no
margin has been set for that control edge.

Zoom control: The Zoom control appears in the upper-left corner of
Design view and allows the developer to zoom in or out on the design
surface to perform exact adjustments.

Snaplines: While snaplines appear in both the WPF Designer and the
Windows Forms Designer, in the WPF Designer they also display exact
values. In addition to displaying control alignment, snaplines also show
text alignment for text-based controls. For more information, see How
to: Align to Both Text Baselines and Margins.

[Patrice]

WPF is redesigned while Windows Forms still builds on the good old concepts
introduced years ago...

Examples of things allowed by this redesign in WPF are :

- rendering is "standardiz ed" so that an item rendered in a list box can be
whatever you want from text to images or even videos. It was previously more
complicated to create listboxes with custom elements

- the rendering tree doesn't stop at the control level, i.e. by customizing
the template for a control you can customize its appearance much more easily
than previously. For example if you have first a listbox of video names you
could customize the listbox to render it as a "video carrousel" but
technically speaking this is still a listbox

- improvements in layout capabilities, styling, sizing and countless others
(vector graphics, animations, transformations allowing to render non axis
aligned UIs etc...)

---
Patrice

<Ju********@hom e.neta écrit dans le message de groupe de discussion :
3t************* *************** ****@4ax.com...

I have been through two books where they talk about the (almost)
parallel control set for WPF and VB. They go through the small
difference and talk about everything going on a form but what they don't
say is...

WHY WPF?

What did we get by having a (almost) parallel design palette. If the
features were so good, why not just fold them into the parallel controls
in VB?

This makes for another set of hundreds of things to remember and I can't
see the overriding benefit.

Possibly there is a White Paper on this somewhere or someone in the know
can say why. Wrox book talk about the what but not why this duality
came about.

Thanks for any help with this. I can't help but think that two
competing groups of designers got to load their almost identical but
incompatible stuff into the same IDE. Just seems odd to me. Anyone
else?

Mike

-----------------------------------------------------------

There are a variety of enhancements to the WPF Designer that are not
available in the Windows Forms Designer. These enhancements include:

Margin lines and stubs: Margin lines around each control indicate that a
margin has been set for that control. A margin stub indicates that no
margin has been set for that control edge.

Zoom control: The Zoom control appears in the upper-left corner of
Design view and allows the developer to zoom in or out on the design
surface to perform exact adjustments.

Snaplines: While snaplines appear in both the WPF Designer and the
Windows Forms Designer, in the WPF Designer they also display exact
values. In addition to displaying control alignment, snaplines also show
text alignment for text-based controls. For more information, see How
to: Align to Both Text Baselines and Margins.

[Alex Clark]

Why WPF?

It may be parallel for now, but prepare for it to surpass WinForms in the
near future. MS have clearly opted to invest into WPF, XAML, Silverlight,
XPS, and all the other new 3.5 technologies as heavily as they can (someone
at Adobe pissed them off maybe?) so in many respects it makes sense to start
investing into it yourself and get ahead of the game.

In terms of coding advantages, it makes the separation of the GUI from the
business logic a lot more clear cut, it actually makes more sense to define
a UI in markup rather than code, the presentation capabilities are
impressive, front end performance is generally better, customisation &
skinning of UI is a lot easier and more powerful, you can do more with
standard controls by editing templates without having to resort to creating
custom controls, and it makes conversion of an app from the desktop to the
web a lot simpler.

But, why *not* WPF...?

First off, despite the 1.0 moniker, it simply is not finished. Some
controls are missing, others don't support the full set of functionality
you've probably come to expect from doing WinForms development, and there's
a bit of a learning curve associated with it. I was all ready to start
coding a simple explorer style app until I realised that the TreeView
doesn't have a rootlines property, and to implement such a simple thing
manually required over a hundred lines of template modifying XAML that I
didn't really understand, and even then it didn't work perfectly. Ditto for
another app of mine that I wanted to rewrite in WPF - right up until I found
that the WebBrowser control and DateTime picker don't exist, and would
require WinForms interop.

If I were you, I'd invest the time in learning it now so that you're ready
and tooled up for later in the year when MS will *hopefully* fix these
shortcomings with an update.

-Alex

<Ju********@hom e.netwrote in message
news:3t******** *************** *********@4ax.c om...

>I have been through two books where they talk about the (almost)
parallel control set for WPF and VB. They go through the small
difference and talk about everything going on a form but what they don't
say is...

WHY WPF?

What did we get by having a (almost) parallel design palette. If the
features were so good, why not just fold them into the parallel controls
in VB?

This makes for another set of hundreds of things to remember and I can't
see the overriding benefit.

Possibly there is a White Paper on this somewhere or someone in the know
can say why. Wrox book talk about the what but not why this duality
came about.

Thanks for any help with this. I can't help but think that two
competing groups of designers got to load their almost identical but
incompatible stuff into the same IDE. Just seems odd to me. Anyone
else?

Mike

-----------------------------------------------------------

There are a variety of enhancements to the WPF Designer that are not
available in the Windows Forms Designer. These enhancements include:

Margin lines and stubs: Margin lines around each control indicate that a
margin has been set for that control. A margin stub indicates that no
margin has been set for that control edge.

Zoom control: The Zoom control appears in the upper-left corner of
Design view and allows the developer to zoom in or out on the design
surface to perform exact adjustments.

Snaplines: While snaplines appear in both the WPF Designer and the
Windows Forms Designer, in the WPF Designer they also display exact
values. In addition to displaying control alignment, snaplines also show
text alignment for text-based controls. For more information, see How
to: Align to Both Text Baselines and Margins.

[Just_a_fan]

Thanks. Nicely said.

The sticking point is, as you mentioned, that 1.0 is a fooler. Not
ready for prime time. Maybe next time around, it will be.

I finally found some stuff on it in a book. It is like learning yet
another new, full programming language. Everything changes. No longer
VB at all from the demo code I saw.

I am about to turn 61 and think I have learned my last full-blown new
language. I have learned a dozen of them (all listed on another thread)
and I think #13 may be my stopping point.

(tired)Mike

On Fri, 11 Jul 2008 23:00:19 -0500, in
microsoft.publi c.dotnet.langua ges.vb "Alex Clark"
<qu****@noemail .noemailwrote:

>Why WPF?

It may be parallel for now, but prepare for it to surpass WinForms in the
near future. MS have clearly opted to invest into WPF, XAML, Silverlight,
XPS, and all the other new 3.5 technologies as heavily as they can (someone
at Adobe pissed them off maybe?) so in many respects it makes sense to start
investing into it yourself and get ahead of the game.

In terms of coding advantages, it makes the separation of the GUI from the
business logic a lot more clear cut, it actually makes more sense to define
a UI in markup rather than code, the presentation capabilities are
impressive, front end performance is generally better, customisation &
skinning of UI is a lot easier and more powerful, you can do more with
standard controls by editing templates without having to resort to creating
custom controls, and it makes conversion of an app from the desktop to the
web a lot simpler.

But, why *not* WPF...?

First off, despite the 1.0 moniker, it simply is not finished. Some
controls are missing, others don't support the full set of functionality
you've probably come to expect from doing WinForms development, and there's
a bit of a learning curve associated with it. I was all ready to start
coding a simple explorer style app until I realised that the TreeView
doesn't have a rootlines property, and to implement such a simple thing
manually required over a hundred lines of template modifying XAML that I
didn't really understand, and even then it didn't work perfectly. Ditto for
another app of mine that I wanted to rewrite in WPF - right up until I found
that the WebBrowser control and DateTime picker don't exist, and would
require WinForms interop.

If I were you, I'd invest the time in learning it now so that you're ready
and tooled up for later in the year when MS will *hopefully* fix these
shortcomings with an update.

-Alex

<Ju********@ho me.netwrote in message
news:3t******* *************** **********@4ax. com...

>>I have been through two books where they talk about the (almost)
parallel control set for WPF and VB. They go through the small
difference and talk about everything going on a form but what they don't
say is...

WHY WPF?

What did we get by having a (almost) parallel design palette. If the
features were so good, why not just fold them into the parallel controls
in VB?

This makes for another set of hundreds of things to remember and I can't
see the overriding benefit.

Possibly there is a White Paper on this somewhere or someone in the know
can say why. Wrox book talk about the what but not why this duality
came about.

Thanks for any help with this. I can't help but think that two
competing groups of designers got to load their almost identical but
incompatible stuff into the same IDE. Just seems odd to me. Anyone
else?

Mike

-----------------------------------------------------------

There are a variety of enhancements to the WPF Designer that are not
available in the Windows Forms Designer. These enhancements include:

Margin lines and stubs: Margin lines around each control indicate that a
margin has been set for that control. A margin stub indicates that no
margin has been set for that control edge.

Zoom control: The Zoom control appears in the upper-left corner of
Design view and allows the developer to zoom in or out on the design
surface to perform exact adjustments.

Snaplines: While snaplines appear in both the WPF Designer and the
Windows Forms Designer, in the WPF Designer they also display exact
values. In addition to displaying control alignment, snaplines also show
text alignment for text-based controls. For more information, see How
to: Align to Both Text Baselines and Margins.