Lawson Smart Office brings WPF goodness to the enterprise | The Continuum Show

spiked3

Don't get me wrong, I fully understand the hoops the developers had to jump through to design this, but the end results are so disappointing.

It looks to me as though it is just an application that emulates a UI that we already have with the windows desktop - what new does this bring to the table?

I have worked on 2 decent sized applications in WPF myself and I am finding the technology to be so immature at this point it has not been worth the effort. While I am sure the technology is capable, I have to compare it to writing assembly language code - true that there is nothing that cannot be done, but the effort to get there is ridiculous. Like HTML, visual design tools exists (Blend) but they often come up way short on actually accomplishing the goals and you must resort to hand coding most of the time. For my last project we got so frustrated trying to use Blend to hatch ideas we went back to Photoshop. I thought the idea was to avoid that?

When will WPF move beyond being a 'does small fancy visual demos' release and become something useful? The health care CUI is the only thing I have seen that looks headed in the right direction, but that too stops way short of actual functionality and is geared at just being a cute demo. The source for it has not been released and I would venture that it is because it is embarrassing to show how much work it took to make a non-functional application.

Anyhow, someone at Microsoft needs to wake up. Great idea, poor execution.

mtan

In reply to spiked3

#Sep 5th, 2008 @ 5:00 AM

"Anyhow, someone at Microsoft needs to wake up. Great idea, poor execution."

That's a little harsh. From my experience with WPF, including Windows Forms interop, WPF is great at two things: 1) completely redesigning an application to be form-less, and 2) using visual cues (animation, transparency, etc.) to enhance the UI in a traditional application. I agree that it's not as mature as Windows Forms (or Win32), but that's to be expected given it's age.

My guess for the reason why you're not seeing a lot of WPF source for LOB apps floating around is that UI controls are moving from being a commodity (i.e. a ComboBox = ComboBox = ComboBox) to being a differentiator.

aL_
Rx ftw

In reply to vesuvius

#Aug 28th, 2008 @ 9:06 PM

i dont see anything there that disproves anything hansleman says.. the fact remains that you rarly (and never on vista) will need to download the full .net framework. you argue that .net is a part of windows, uh.. so? how is that a bad thing ? why not use windows update to distribute updates to .net? you argue that you still need to be online to install the compact framework (not sure about the validity of that but in whatever) .. uh, so? compact framework is about minimizing the time to get an app upp and running.. what happens after that is irellevant.. if youre going to do a offline distrubution, what does an extra 200 mb on a dvd? nothing thats what..

-edit-

also, you seem to think that wcf is just for servers.. thats just plain wrong Smiley

wcf is exelent for inter procrss comunication though named pipes and also to talk to servers, something that most clients needs to do at some point Smiley

Noureddine

verry nice thanks see online :
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