Actually, I have started learning WPF. I have few months of experience in developing Windows Forms applications. Though, I am getting the meaning of a WPF application, but still I am not able to differentiate the difference between two, on the basis of their output.
With reference to this Link: Device Independent Pixel (DPI), I have learnt that whenever the operating system render a WPF application it manages its size itself according to its resolution.
So to check this difference, I created two demo applications in both frameworks and changed the resolutions as well.. but I didn't find any satisfactory difference. Which could explain it is a WPF application and this one is a Windows Forms application.
It does not create any scroll bar on maximizing and doesn't make the button big or small on changing the resolution.
I have read somewhere that Visual Studio 2010 has been rewritten in WPF. But in my experimentation I saw that, (on changing the resolution of desktop) it makes text and graphics unreadable/blurry. On re-sizing its window, everything was getting hidden except the menu-bar. And the menu-bar content was shifting its positioning, e.g. far right one menu items were shifting down. Why?
Kindly make me correct & explain a little more bit (this display issue) too.
To answer this question properly I should write a whole chapter, but I keep it short:
There are three major differences between a WPF application and a Windows Forms application: Layout, Render, Presentation
Layout:
WPF layout system provides a greater flexibility in arranging the elements on the fly. It is based on the Element Bounding Box (as opposed to precise pixels in WinForms) and Measure and Arrange mechanics (as opposed to UpdateLayout in WinForms) that automatically and dynamically finds the place for each element without any need for a manual update.
Basically, all elements bounding box are measured first and then are arranged using multiple methods such as Measure, MeasureCore, ArrangeCore, MeasureOverride, etc.
Unlike WinForms, where you have a pixel-perfect size for everything, in WPF you have much more options and complexity such as Width, ActualWidth and DesiredSize (and even Transforms as LayoutTransform) for the same element.
This is why
As you type in a WPF TextBox, its width might increase and push other elements away or even push some elements into a new row (like the menu bar you've observed)
As the size of a control changes, it affects the available space for other elements. So their size and location might change accordingly.
When the window is being re-sized or resolution is changed, it immediately updates the layout and changes the size of elements in order to fill or fit the space. Here you'll find out more about Layouts.
using Margin alone (without using layout capabilities) to arrange elements is not the best idea in WPF. As it's the WinForms mindset which isn't much helpful while developing WPF.
Render:
WPF uses double data type for Layout (as opposed to pixel-perfect WinForms) and therefore you might see the edges blurry sometimes, but it can be avoided with SnapToDevicePixels=true.
WPF is much more efficient in utilizing the GPU to render a GUI. Try a grid of 30x30 TextBoxes in a Windows Forms application and a WPF application. No matter how messy you write the WPF, it never blinks and it still runs much faster than Windows Forms. Even adding a handful of animations, visual effects and styles on them does not hurt your performance like in Windows Forms.
Remark: To avoid a speed decrease and blinking in a Windows Forms application, you should set DoubleBuffer of the form to "true".
You can use any Transform as RenderTransform to easily implement smooth zoom/rotate, or develop custom GPU-based shader effects, and much more in WPF. (I think everyone agrees that doing such things in WinForms is feasible but real pain and you most likely will give up and move to GDI+ or DX if not out of frustration then because of the bad performance.)
And the last and the most important:
Focus on presentation:
When develping WPF Applications you have to stop thinking in Windows Forms: No more UI events, accessing controls by their names and writing logic in code-behind and start to think in WPF: Binding, Commands, Resources, Styles, Templates, Converters, DependencyProperties and their callbacks.
The real power of WPF lies in separation of 'View' and 'Logic', Which can be achieved using the MVVM pattern.
It makes the most visually-complicated problems quite simple and easy to develop and easy to write Unit Tests for.
Once you got the hang of it, you will realize there's no limit in how you can present the data or show off an awesome GUI looks.
If you've planned to switch to WPF, you've made the right decision. Always stick to MVVM and AVOID CODE-BEHIND AT ALL COSTS! (i.e. unless you are doing a pure UI operation: do not write code in .xaml.cs files, do not access x:Name in cs files and avoid UI events.)
Windows Forms (WinForms) and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) are two different ways of building the user interface for your application. Windows Forms is the older technology and its controls are found in the System.Windows.Forms namespace. WPF is a newer technology and its controls are found in the System.Windows.Controls namespace.
WPF
Pros:
Powerful styling and skinning structure
Easy to create your own look and feel
Does support Windows Forms
The future technology for developing Windows Vista applications
The ability to reuse existing code
Highly advanced data binding possible
Cons:
Declarative vs. procedural code
Requires .NET Framework 3.0
Compared to Windows Forms, still in development phase
Requires Dx9 compatible video card for advanced graphics
Windows Forms
Pros:
Extensive documentation to be found on the Internet
Plenty of examples
Does support WPF
Cons:
How long will this be supported? (I've read somewhere that Microsoft is just developing WPF now, only maintenance for Windows Forms).
Design your own look and feel in an application is a lot of work.
Related
We were able to use automation tool and it was able to identify html objects on Winforms while on WPF it does not since it is rendered as an image.
My main question is what does Winform CEFSharp uses to render and why WPF not able to use a similar rendering mechanism?
Warning: it is a very generic answer. I briefly looked at CEF source (briefly - 3-5 minutes) and the rest are my guesses based on my own WPF/WinForms interop experiences. I've had quite a few. I also played a bit with early Chromium builds. However, all of that was a few years ago, so it may simply be out dated. Maybe Chromium has now first-class WPF support. I have not found any information about that, but if this really happened, I encourage you even stronger to follow the last paragraph.
--
I doubt that there is any reason behind this other than time-cost to implement -
either on CEF or Chromium project.
WinForms and WPF are totally different GUI frameworks, written in different eras, using different architectures, different rendering techniques, different platform features, etc. This is as different as it can be, down to the idea of a "Window" itself.
In WinForms, almost every control is a separate small window-like thing, has a system-wide handle, has a system-tracked region, etc. All controls render themselves almost directly by unmanaged win32 GDI+ functions.
In WPF they don't. In WPF there's only one handle per whole window, controls don't render themselves. Instead they have a definition of their "look" and the WPF renders them to the 'surface', which is then blitted/streamed (sorry, dont remember) to target device.
That's true that CEF uses different approaches. For WinForms they make heavy use of a 'browser component' taken directly from Chromium, for WPF they render to bitmap and show/update the bitmap periodically.
Why? My guess is that it's because Chromium already provided a COM/OCX/ActiveX/whatever component, and WinForms can use it almost directly, thanks to the everything-has-a-handle "feature" - if you can call it a feature - one of the goals and successes of WPF was to eliminate that.
However, I don't think that Chromium at that point of time provides any such component for WPF.
If it does not exist, then for WPF there are only two options - one could embed the WinForms component in WPF window through a special 'host' intermediate control, but that actually hits the performance and also has many problems when some advanced rendering features (like movie streaming) are used. Diagnosing and fixing them is complex, hard, and even unstable (crosshosted components behave very differently on different windows and .net versions, even on .net patches sometimes change them, it can work one one, and freeze on other, hang and render as black on next and cause a blue-screen on another)
Other option for WPF is to use the "offscreen" mode. Chromium can render to a bitmap, so why not. Render to bitmap, and display that. Simple. Quick. No problems.
So, I'd say, it all boils down to a famous quote from Eric Lippert:
The question is "why does [snip] not have this feature?" The answer to that question is always the same. Features are unimplemented by default; [snip] does not have that feature because no one designed, implemented and shipped the feature to customers.
It's great we can at least display Chromium in WPF apps. If you think it can be done better and that it's worth doing, it's open source, feel free to implement it - if not in CEF, then in Chromium itself.
I've spent some time working on WinForm user and custom controls. However, in the back of my mind are the increasingly loud voices saying that WinForm technology is obsolete, and that WPF is the future on the desktop.
I've only looked superficially at WPF. Can anyone comment about if WinForm user controls can be used at all on WPF, and how different WinForm user controls are from WPF user controls?
Most of the controls I'm working on do some type of owner-draw as opposed to child controls being dropped onto the control. I'm just wondering how much of this code will be reusable under WPF.
It is certainly possible to use WinForms controls in a WPF application using the WindowsFormHost control. As usual, there are a few caveats. In particular, the two control types don't overlap well.
However, doing so seems that it would prevent you from taking advantage of many (if not nearly all) of the benefits of switching to WPF in the first place. If you have a large code base that's working for you, I'm not sure why you feel you need to migrate. There will always be something newer that comes along. The real battle is figuring out whether it's really better, at least for your particular situation.
Mandatory disclaimer: I'm far from an expert on WPF and apparently quite a bit less jaded on WinForms than many developers are. So perhaps my advice should be taken with a grain of salt, but I think it's worth considering nevertheless.
Your controls will be reusable (through WindowsFormHost, as Cody suggested). However, I'd not bank on being able to port your code across to WPF. The fundamental programming model is quite different (WPF relies heavily on data binding and thus benefits from very different code-behind), as is the rendering model (WPF doesn't use GDI+). The best way to approach most controls in WPF is to use the built-in templating; other than custom layout panels (which isn't really "drawing"), I've found nothing so far that requires custom draw methods in controls.
It'd certainly be a waste to create a WPF application just to host your WinForms controls. WPF may (or may not!) be "the future" but that doesn't mean you should throw away what you've got on a whim.
You say you've only looked superficially. If you think it might be worth investment, why not do an R&D project to prove how the integration might work on a small part of the system?
i've been learning wpf for about a week now..
and i have a basic question:
From a business view and development view (out of your experience).. what can and what cant be done with wpf(capabilities) ..
please try to be illustrative..
examples of undesired answers:
"Fully functioning stand alone applications with alot of animation and Glittering images"
A second question:
if i build a XBAP UI for my application, can i make the UI "not show" in a browser!
if u r going to answer from tutorials/websites/books.. please dont copy paste them directly, try to write it in your own words...
You can host anything built to the Win32 GDI/USER API (WinForms, ActiveX controls) inside a WPF application, so even if you hit some limitation with an app that is mostly WPF, you can always host some old controls inside it.
And since 3.5 SP1 you can even host animated DirectX graphics pretty seamlessly as well (although WPF's 3D support provides its own much simpler ways of achieving the most commonly done things).
As for comparison, the major advantage of WPF over WinForms is the way it keeps closely to its own component-based model, so a very large proportion of controls are able to act as containers for other controls. Want to put a combo box in a menu item? Not sure why you would, but you can. More usefully, you can put a button in a list box (or tree view). These kinds of thing are not possible unless you implement every standard control from the ground up (which is what WPF does).
The disadvantages are probably temporary: it can be a little unstable on some machines (the rendering code seems vunerable to display driver incompatibility) but this gets better with each service pack. Also the text rendering has been heavily criticised - it goes a bit further with ClearType anti-aliasing than Windows normally does, so some people complain that it looks blurry.
(The reason these are likely to be temporary issues is that Microsoft's Visual Studio 2010 is adopting WPF. So they are now "eating their own dogfood".)
You can pretty much do anything in WPF that you'd need from a GUI app. But that's not the real benefit, IMHO.
One of the real benefits of WPF is development speed and simplicity, once you get past the learning curve (and there is a learning curve!)
The other major benefit, and probably the biggest one, is that it allows designers to work on the presentation, do lots of interactive things, all using a designer-friendly (friendlier, anyway) tool and not having to submit requests to the coders. Just by changing the .xaml, a designer can make an application look almost completely different, and add all kinds of behaviors (panels disappearing, expanding, all kinds of neat stuff). Without changing a line of code.
You can in theory do anything in WPF what you want. Compare it with a WinForms application. Is there anything that you can't build with that? Not really. The same goes for WPF. It's just that WPF is better suited for some things, like animations, video, graphics, etcetera. As it is xaml based, it is also better suited for databinding against XML for example.
See also this related question.
As for your second question, I'm not sure what you mean by that. Do you mean if you can show websites using WPF? Yes of course, just like WinForms.
Oh, in WPF some things are still not implemented. DataGridViews as popular example are only in the codeplex preview. YOu have alot of things like theExpander which work in a differnet way, and you can have a lot of problems with autosized content.
I am programming simple Windows apps. I don't need DB support. Why would I use WPF instead of WinForms?
One obvious answer is that WPF offers a richer user experience than WinForms, allowing for animations (even 3D) in the user interface, for example.
From a development perspective, it goes a long way to enforce the separation of the User Interface (in the XAML) from the business logic (in VB.NET or C#), which is always a good thing.
A Google search for "WPF vs WinForms" brings up lots of pages that discuss this issue. I won't repeat all their findings here, but this page raises some interesting points:
Databinding in WPF is superior to what Windows Forms offers.
UI and C# business logic can be cleanly separated in WPF
Storyboard
Data/control templates – a much cleaner way than anything Windows
Forms can offer.
Styles – cool and simple. Its so easy to style all your buttons in an
application to have the same look and
feel.
Even if the VS designer breaks, its easy to code XAML.
UI virtualization – I’ve got grids with 100K rows, ticking off a moving
market. Performance would be dreadful
if it wasn’t for UI visualization
which come for free.
3D support.
Nothing scientific but, UI development feels quicker in WPF –
maybe its just because a WPF
application looks cooler at the end of
an iteration, or maybe its because
development really is quicker.
I can add a User Experience engineer to my team, and with no C#
knowledge he can work magic in
Expression Blend and give the
front-office trading application a
makeover that is guaranteed to win
over the business users.
WPF is the current platform for developing Windows desktop applications. It is a modern, advanced, hardware accelerated framework for developing applications that maintain separation of concerns. It supports advanced rendering of 2D vector and 3D graphics, providing an immense range of capabilities for building rich, interactive, and quality user interfaces.
WinForms, on the other hand, provides a basic platform for developing "classic" Windows apps with your standard look and feel using standard controls. It does not offer the rich, hardware accelerated, vector 2D and 3D capabilities that WPF offers. WinForms applications tend to have much greater coupling between application behavior and UI (view), which presents a less flexible platform upon which to develop applications.
As for which one you choose, it entirely depends on your needs. If you need vector graphics, 3D rendering, the ability to create rich, interactive, animated, modern user interfaces, and/or wish to maintain separation of concerns, WPF is definitely the right choice. If you need none of that, and just need to create a simple UI that solves a simple problem, WinForms will meet your needs just fine.
To learn.
To have greater (i.e. any) control over the appearance of your program
To benefit from easier data binding, triggers, styles
(I don't see what DB support has got to do with it)
WPF can utilize hardware acceleration to some degree, but that is expected to improve over time.
Also, because of XAML, you have more options for "doing stuff", declarative vs. programmatic, or a mixture of both.
Microsoft no longer does active development on WinForms, they are strongly pushing WPF, and for good reason.
WPF allows for much easier "resolution agnostic" designing. To achieve that in WinForms, it is a lot more work.
The MVVM pattern was already mentioned in one of the comments, this allows one to do real unit testing vs. GUI-based testing on your code, that is a big win, in my experience.
Nobody mentioned about better testing capabilities of the WPF applications (if they are written in the correct way, for example based on the MVVM pattern).
A
Anywhere Execution due to XAML.
Can be used as WinApp, WebApp, Mobile.
Whereas WindowsForm Internal UI representation is in C#.
B
Binding -->Simple object to object data transfer.
C
Common look and feel(Styles) -->can define look and feel styles commonly and use it for bunch of controls.
D
Directive Programming -->Binding objects in XAML.
E
Expression blend and Animation-->WPF uses DirectX, and DirectX can be used for animation.
F
Faster Execution(Hardware Rendering)
WPF internally uses DirectX (Hardware rendering) while Winform internally uses GDI (mostly uses Software rendering).
There are two ways by which a computer renders display on monitor.
1) (CPU) Software rendering -->In case of CPU rendering ,the CPU drives the whole logic of rendering display on monitor.CPU also does other operations like running applications,performing memory management,running OS. So on top of it its extra load to display things on monitor.
2)(GPU) Hardware rendering -->Its Specialized kinda processor, specifically meant for rendering and display faster on monitor.
Now in WPF, this rendering is further optimised in
>Tier 0 mode (Software rendering) uses DirectX7 internally,
>Tier 1 mode (Partial Hardware rendering) uses DirectX7 to DirectX9 internally,
>Tier 2 mode (Hardware rendering) uses DirectX9 internally.
G
Graphic Independence (DIP) -->Means resolution independence
Resolution --> Total number of pixels that fits into screen/monitor
Pixel --> Simple dot on screen.
Windows form uses pixels as a measurement unit, so when pixel changes then win forms has to adjust itself that means we have to write logic for it.
But WPF does not use pixels as a measurement unit but uses DIP(Device independent pixels)
1 DIP = 1/96th of the inch.
At last Testing --> Better unit testing with use of MVVM pattern.
If you want to have a rich user interface like the image posted in your previous question, I'd recommend going with WPF. Aside from making it easier to create a nice-looking application, it's also the technology Microsoft will push in the future. There's almost no new development for Winforms.
The single most important difference between WinForms and WPF is the fact that while WinForms is simply a layer on top of the standard Windows controls (e.g. a TextBox), WPF is built from scratch and doesn't rely on standard Windows controls in almost all situations.
A great example of this is a button with an image and text on it. This is not a standard Windows control, so WinForms doesn't offer you this possibility out of the box. Instead, you will have to draw the image yourself, implement your own button that supports images or use a 3rd party control. With WPF, a button can contain anything because it's essentially a border with content and various states (e.g. untouched, hovered, pressed).
check this article it will help you:
https://www.wpf-tutorial.com/about-wpf/wpf-vs-winforms/#:~:text=The%20single%20most%20important%20difference,controls%20in%20almost%20all%20situations.
I also have a desktop application written in Windows Forms that is a middling size (a couple dozen major forms backed by 46 tables in the database). I'm thinking about rewriting the UI in WPF, but before I go there I was curious if there were any war stories about doing such a conversion.
I use LLBLGen to generate my low level data access objects, and I have a business logic layer above that. The forms are databound to the business logic objects, although the main form uses caching objects to minimize round trips on the more common navigation routes. The UI never speaks directly to the database: always through the UI -> business logic -> low level -> datastore path.
One control that I use heavily is the TreeView, which acts as a visual guide and short range navigation tool. The tree has been heavily customized with icons, highlight colors and it is the control I worry most about porting.
Is there a story that might convince me to go ahead and convert (or conversely, wait until Microsoft is closer to pulling the rug out from under Windows Forms)?
EDIT: I was asked in a comment what motivation for conversion I have. I have some concern about future proofing: I have 500,000 lines of code that were originally ASP and VBScript. We have been porting the functionality over time to ASP.NET and C#, but only as we make changes to the code. The upside is we have kept costs minimized, the downside is half the code remains ASP and VBScript. I'm concerned about a similar situation arising with Windows Forms applications.
Am I worried today about Windows Forms going away? Not even close to it... but the application is moving from ASP and VBScript to ASP.NET and C#, has nine years of history behind it, and probably won't be replaced this decade (instead, simply it will evolve). The desktop application is likewise a long term project with years of history.
For me, the WinForms vs. WPF decision is a simple one - if normal people are going to use it, the user interface can make the difference between a winner and a loser.
It is definitely a steep learning curve. But I have NEVER gotten done with a nice looking WPF application and said "Man, I should have used WinForms".
I'd say invest in the effort to make your UI better whenever possible for your customers, so yes to WPF if that's the case.
WPF has a ridiculously large learning curve. It will most likely require you to rewrite a lot more than you think for just changing the UI. Also, a lot of features that would make WPF nicer to use just aren't implemented or included in WPF yet. Unlike routeNpingme, I have written nice looking WPF applications and have said, "What a waste of time, I should have used Windows Forms and completed in 70% less time".
EDIT:
Also, unless Microsoft figures out a way to make WPF easier to learn, I don't see it catching on to the masses at all. WPF can do some very cool things, but a little effort to make it easy to understand instead of throwing stuff over the wall would have gone a long way. It would not surprise me in the slightest to see Microsoft drop WPF for something easier to work with in the not too distant future. So don't go changing your Windows Forms application just for the sake of changing it.
Pros:
Ridiculously easy data-binding (most of the time)
Ridiculously easy customization of look and feel
Cons:
Very steep learning curve
Some obvious bugs or issues. Similar to .NET 1.0 Windows Forms
Little or no tool support
In my opinion, WPF will definitely replace Windows Forms at some point. However, right now the tools are the main thing keeping it back. I disagree with Dunk that Microsoft will drop it for something else. Change it yes, but I think it's here to stay.
Should you change your application to use WPF now? No. Feel free to learn WPF but if your application works fine currently, then WPF won't give you anything extra. It just makes doing what is possible in Windows Forms much easier.
WPF is great. It is particularly good for extending controls like TreeView with customisations. You can add a string as an item in a TreeControl. You can also add a small panel containing an image and some text in various fonts and colours. Or you can add buttons, or anything you like. It has a completely general composability system. Same goes for ListBox, ComboBox, Button, etc. All their content or child items can be as simple as a string or as complex as a multipage document viewer with zoom buttons (if you want).
But the only way to find out is to try porting one of your forms. It shouldn't be too hard to make a WPF Window open from within your existing app. I started using WPF by making new GUI panels that were hosted inside a C++ Win32 application. Eventually it was so obvious that WPF was the way to go that we switched it around and made the outer shell WPF, with some ancient dialog boxes still implemented by the old C++ code where we couldn't be bothered to rewrite them (probably exactly what will happen with Visual Studio 2010).
Porting is a tough decision. So just some thoughts to help you decide.
WinForms is OK while you work by the rules and keep everything drawn as is. But even redrawing a border on some controls may require complex and precise work and skill, as you already know from tree customization. The same tasks can be done in a very elegant way in WPF.
Also, the data-binding in WPF saves me a lot of time. In the long term, you end up thinking about data-binding scenarios that could not be remotely possible in WinForms without special-case coding.
I do not even consider WinForms for new development -- there is no excuse for customization costs.
I have started introducing WPF elements within my WinForms application and so far have had a lot of success.
The application's main component is a grid control and I haven't yet found the text rendering of WPF sharp enough to present a table of important textual data.
But the application has several additional panels, and the majority of these are implemented using WPF. So, I'm going for a hybrid of WinForms and WPF via the ElementHost control.
I have found the flexibility of WPF to allow for a much more attractive and usable UI, and my users seem very happy with it. In my case, it's also been politically easier to introduce WPF one panel at a time.
WPF's main value to me is in the binding, not in the cooler UI. The worst WPF I've ever seen is when people use WPF just because it's newer, and put all the work in the code-behind, including not using binding. What you get is WinForms data management. So be sure you're going to use the wonderful binding when you do WPF.
I would port the OP's business logic to a business layer for ease of maintenance and conversion. I wouldn't port the WinForms to Xaml at all unless new Xaml functionality was needed, and preferably not until after the functionality was ported.