Fast WPF app?

Can anyone point me to the fastest WPF application they know of?

By fast I mean quickly responds to user input, etc -- and something that's not a simple run of the mill "hello world" app.

Found a couple (actually, a ton, which is surprising) WPF demos in XBAP form running around the net, but they were all dog slow.

Just in case you haven't found, there is a listing on the wiki available here: http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/WPF.ApplicationPortfolio

Might be something in there that interests you.

geekling wrote:

Can anyone point me to the fastest WPF application they know of?

By fast I mean quickly responds to user input, etc -- and something that's not a simple run of the mill "hello world" app.

Found a couple (actually, a ton, which is surprising) WPF demos in XBAP form running around the net, but they were all dog slow.

My app, which we've nearly finished with is WPF and desktop-based.  It doesn't respond to user input because it is a digital sign, but it has MP4 video with semi-transparent lateral tickers overlayed on top, 3 hosted flash movies and some fancy transitions between the movies.  It uses less than 50% CPU and on the whole it is pretty performant but of course this is a pretty irrelevant stat without knowing the hardware it is running on and it could no doubt be faster and smaller if written in Direct-X, but I value my time more at the moment. It was all written in code, with no xaml (designer is broken).

My only issues at the moment are the weakness of some of the components that are shipped - MediaElement being a good example. There is so much functionality missing from it (taking data from a stream so the disk doesn't get hammered, loading content from a .grf file, allowing us to specify the filter graph).

Whilst WPF is pretty cool, it does sometimes feel like it was rushed out to be available at the Vista launch.

The other difficult thing seems to be getting help or even finding out who to ask - as in I am *still* trying to find someone who I can talk to about MediaElement.

geekling wrote:

Can anyone point me to the fastest WPF application they know of?

By fast I mean quickly responds to user input, etc -- and something that's not a simple run of the mill "hello world" app.

Found a couple (actually, a ton, which is surprising) WPF demos in XBAP form running around the net, but they were all dog slow.

Maybe your PC isn't fast enough. Or particularly your graphics card doesn't support enough DirectX features so that WPF ends up doing a lot more stuff in software than it would otherwise. I know this happens with the integrated graphics on my PC at work. My PC at home runs Expression Blend as fast and responsive as any other Windows app and it has a slower CPU than my work PC, but it has a Radeon X1600pro graphics card with 512Mb of video ram.

So yes, as an example, Expression Blend runs fast.

AdamKinney wrote:

Just in case you haven't found, there is a listing on the wiki available here: http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/WPF.ApplicationPortfolio

Might be something in there that interests you.

Thanks, Adam. I found some very visually pleasing + fast WPF applications there, so I feel that its safe to start using WPF for some up-coming jobs.