Where are the WPF apps? | The Coffeehouse

kitron

Where are the next gen UIs? What happened to the Max project? Why is Microsoft not leading by example and start building their UIs with wpf? The only thing I am seeing are demos but no a final product. Young users are not atracted to the platform as it is. It started with the desktop and it will end there if MS doesn't do something to atract them. (If you don't belive me go to any apple store and check out the vibe.)

Michael Griffiths
Fatalism.

Good question.

Personally, I'd like to see Windows Live Messenger abandon their atrocious UI - and lack of rich text support - for a WPF interface along the lines of Yahoo! Messenger for Windows Vista (which looks like abandonware anyway).

That way I could use their good features like Remote Assistance invitations, calling, integration with Spaces/Hotmail/various Microsoft things as opposed to using Trillian.

PerfectPhase
"This is not war, this is pest control!" - Dalek to Cyberman

kitron wrote:
Where are the next gen UIs? What happened to the Max project? Why is Microsoft not leading by example and start building their UIs with wpf?

Well Expression Blend is a start....

kitron

I think they should've converted some of the smaller apps that ship with windows to WPF, like : calc, notepad, paint.

Besides changes in the look and feel of windows, the apps that ship with it look the same. It is not exciting to use at this point.

Michael Griffiths
Fatalism.

kitron wrote:

I think they should've converted some of the smaller apps that ship with windows to WPF, like : calc, notepad, paint.

Besides changes in the look and feel of windows, the apps that ship with it look the same. It is not exciting to use at this point.

I agree for Calc (WPF-ize, perhaps add basic graphing & visualization) and Paint (that'd be fun; particularly also adding excellent Pen support) but not Notepad.

Notepad can't be changed Smiley

JohnAskew
9 girl in pink sweater

There's no calc -gadget in Vista Ultimate, either, out of the box.

Here it is for download, and some other Vista gadgets.

EDIT:
Here's Rob Relyea's list of WPF Resources.

Frank Hileman
VG.net

Memory consumption per element
Poor performance with thousands of elements
General complexity and poor ease of use (for developers)

Can't speak for others, but these issues affected us.

WPF Performance Problems

Rossj

As you may know my job involves putting a lot of content (video, flash, images, text, DVB-T streams etc) on big displays (hundreds/thousands) intended to run for weeks without any intervention, and we chose WPF to do this.

Unfortunately that turned out to be, possibly, the single worst mistake of my career to date. Really.

The comment on MSDN linked to by Frank, "WPF making the easy things easy and the hard things impossible" is just far too close to the mark for me.

Realistically, and without my rose-tinted spectacles on I would have looked out further into the wider world and noticed that nobody else, at least not in great numbers, was shipping WPF apps. And then Microsoft has to pay people to write Silverlight apps before Mix. All signs that I should have paid attention to and didn't.

Fortunately, having been through the other options, this faux pas has shown me something - that the Microsoft platform really is not the right platform for doing what we do. Sure we'll keep the design tool on Windows (WinForms) but that's about all at this moment in time. We'd look at Vista but several of our larger customers have already told us not to bother as they don't use it yet.

So, long story short, why is nobody using WPF? Just follow Frank's links.

Frank Hileman
VG.net

I forgot the most important problem for us: lack of a cleanly integrated, immediate-mode rendering API. There is a low level retained mode API provided, but being retained mode, we cannot use any of the usual performance tricks on it. For example, the performance enhancements we use in VG.net.

With an immediate-mode API provided, most of the other problems wouldn't have mattered so much for us, as we would have ported our super-lightweight framework on top of the rendering API. As is we have to look for another rendering API to make progress.

Michael Griffiths
Fatalism.

huh.

Well, I haven't looked farther than a few tech demos into WPF, and I'm certainly not going to do so now.

Rather pathetic, all told, to have such glaring performance problems.

"Easy things easy and hard things impossible" indeed.

Rossj

Michael Griffiths wrote:

"Easy things easy and hard things impossible" indeed.

In their defense I did speak to a couple of devs about things like getting access to, or providing dev's own Filtergraph for MediaElements - and it looks like the devs *wanted* to put it in, but were either out of time or told not to.

Ray6

Rossj wrote:
As you may know my job involves putting a lot of content (video, flash, images, text, DVB-T streams etc) on big displays (hundreds/thousands) intended to run for weeks without any intervention, and we chose WPF to do this.

Unfortunately that turned out to be, possibly, the single worst mistake of my career to date. Really.

Ouch! ...

Well that certainly explains why there are so few WPF applications out there.

Would like to hear from the WPF team about some of these issues. From what I understand, MS would like all apps to use the framework in the future; certainly doesn't sound like a viable idea right now though.