Fear and Loathing - All Comments

re: ALT.NET Canada - Day 2 - DDD and more D

Nikola Malovic — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 09:00:16 GMT

Thank you so much for recording and publishing this

re: ALT.NET Canada - Day 3 - The Sharing Circle

dba123 — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 19:02:40 GMT

Nerd Power!

re: WPF for Business Applications, ready for the average user?

dba123 — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 03:55:40 GMT

>>>With all these advantages over WPF, why would anyone pick WPF? IMHO only because it's 'new'. And that's exactly why people should be careful.

People do not typically pick things just because they are "new". That's a blanket statement and a naive one unless your intern or "fresh out of college" newbie on your team is ranting and excited about something. If you have been a programmer for 5+ years that statement is not true.

For instance, when pushes for using the .NET framework 3.5 with SP1 (which by the way really isn't that NEW anymore by today's iterations), immediately management figures oh, "it's just a naive excited that the developer wants something new and he isn't thinking about the business impact". Do you think that most developers WANT to move to a new version of something simply because they see it is "new" and see it as a benefit to themselves only? Of course not, not usually. Not at all. They most often have done pretty extensive research I find, and usually and have pretty good reasons typically to do so.

Now moving to something like MVC Preview for your production environment that is not even finalized by microsoft to me is naive. That's something bleeding edge. Using something like WPF which has been official and out for some time now is NOT.

If management asks you why, and you give them 10 solid reasons and how it's gonna help the business and that manager concludes by smiling and saying you're a bit too excited about it...then that also is naive. Maybe that manager should put down the "new" guard and try some new things for a change in his/her environment if the developer or team is that motivated.

re: WPF for Business Applications, ready for the average user?

dba123 — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 03:42:34 GMT

>>>The pretty UI is just an afterthought and not the focus since we're building what would be considered a "traditional" business application (forms and maybe grids and reports).

I ----completely---- disagree about "pretty ui" and how we should not care about that.

So many developers underestimate the importance of a "pretty UI". One argues the business doesn't care but I can guarantee you it helps the business. Why? because people tend to be visual right. Not just functional, especially on the internet. A dull boring and depressing UI with no bling to me makes life boring. A good UI with great CSS can make even functional requirements stand out and seeing something that has better curves, borders, even nicer buttons makes the page flow and easier on the eyes.

That's something developers and managers SHOULD think about. I do not believe it's JUST the functionality because visual appearance is a part of this for the user experience. Why do you think sites like twitter are so addictive? It's NOT just the functionality. It's the entire user experience and even for internal business apps, I can't argue that this should be any difference...as I believe all internal web apps must have a BL regardless of the Size for reuse of code to save the business money and developer time.

point is, developers SHOULD care about look & feel. It's not just for the graphic artists. you should look at it as part of the flow.

re: WPF for Business Applications, ready for the average user?

Jeremy Jarrell — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 11:54:19 GMT

Hi Bill,

In the event that you do go with WinForms, you mentioned dismay at not being able to use an app framework with WinForms, like Prism. You may want to check out XEVA which is a super lightweight framework stewarded by David Laribee's company Xclaim. It provides nice abstraction layers for both your OR/M and IoC and is designed to work with Smart Clients. You can find the code here:http://code.google.com/p/xeva/.

Good luck!

jeremy

re: WPF for Business Applications, ready for the average user?

Colin Jack — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 10:58:42 GMT

"This specific project we looked at building one client web front-end (for the majority of the users) and a SmartClient for a smaller contigent that requires a little more real-time feel along with more rich features the web client might not be able to do (without a lot of heavy lifting)."

Out of interest, did you consider using Silverlight and just having a single app?

re: WPF for Business Applications, ready for the average user?

FransBouma — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 08:15:13 GMT

"For WinForms you generally have to either harvest what you have from existing applications or RYO when it comes to the application framework. Re-writing presenter base classes, validation strategies, various implementations of patterns like repository and specification, and building a service layer over things like NHibernate can be fairly straight forward but still might take a few weeks, weeks of cost that the customer doesn't want to pay for to see nothing out the other end."

Isn't that a simple case of lack of Entity views, build in framework based authorization, validation and auditing, build-in events for all changes to the entity graph in memory you want to know about in what you have to write for nhibernate? Once you have that (either through a tool, or RYO) building a gui with winforms isn't difficult, in fact it's quickly becoming a matter of tying events together and hit the right button.

We also dropped WPF for our next UI (except for some special parts which are better done in WPF instead of GDI+ rendering) due to textcrap, blurry texts are a no-go. Added to that the immaturity of the current 3rd party controls for WPF and you're in for a lot of work.

Mind you: winforms is well known among many developers, the caveats are known, the controls are very mature, there's a lot of documentation and tutorials available how to get this and that done, and it 'just works'.

With all these advantages over WPF, why would anyone pick WPF? IMHO only because it's 'new'. And that's exactly why people should be careful.

re: WPF for Business Applications, ready for the average user?

nmattheij — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 07:10:43 GMT

WPF's questionable text rendering prevents us from doing anything with it.

Customers have already asked us to fix 'ClearType' for them, because it makes the text fuzzy. WPF doesn't even use subpixel rendering if ClearType is turned of so text there will in fact be less sharp no matter how much you like 'ClearType'. Font's are smeared across more pixels, using greyscale, making everything look significantly worse than just plain old razorsharp but jaggy text.

For a business applicating showing a lot of data we are forced to present our clients with the most readable applications, which is anything but WPF.

So far there's no sign of Microsoft of fixing this issue, event though it's clearly a problem not only to us. Apparently the core rendering engine for WPF is built in a way that doesn't allow pixels to stick to the grid of a monitor.

re: WPF for Business Applications, ready for the average user?

Richard Wright — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 06:54:35 GMT

I am building an app in WPF at the moment. I could have done it in Winforms, and that would have been easier given my current knowledge of WPF. But the app is all about presentation, hardly any business logic, so it made sense to try and learn more about WPF with this app.

I think that WPF, or whatever it evolves into, is how Microsoft sees the future of thick client applications. And the line between a desktop app and a browser app has definitely become blurred. Probably a good thing.

I am using the June2008 preview of Blend and it certainly helps. I also think you need two monitors, one displaying Blend and the other displaying Visual Studio. At least that's how I have it set up and it really helps.

re: WPF for Business Applications, ready for the average user?

Glenn Block — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 06:23:37 GMT

Hi Bil

Nice article. Two points I would add.

1. On the Winforms being the breath solution, this is changing. Tools are maturing, and with the next version of VS the investment in WPF is signficant. Also with Prism we've aimed to reduce the curve of building business apps NOW. In the development of the RI the Prism team itself became true believers in WPF as an LOB platofrm. This story is going to get better and better.

2. On Prism + Winforms. There are alot of capabilities in Prism that are not winform specific, as we built them as such. Particularly the module loader is agnostic, and actually the event aggregator IS agnostic. The CompositeWPFEvent that we ship for EventAgg is WPF specific as it relies on the WPF Dispatcher for threading. However, the EventAgg only depends on a base event class that is NOT bound to WPF. You can implement your own WindowsEvent and use it with EventAgg out of the box. We also split the projects into two, so you can grab just the non-WPF project (Composite) and leave the rest. Brian Noyes I believe is going to be adding a WinForm version of the event base to the contrib project.