Hello fine people.

I thought Kazi was going to start blogging on here by posting a link to one of our cool 3d WPF samples. To cut a long story short; he hasn't done it yet. So I will!
If you are lucky enough to be running the July CTP of .NET 3.0 runtime components then you simply have to check this out.

http://legislation.dotnetsolutions.ltd.uk/WPF3DExplorerXBAP/WPF3DExplorerXBAP.xbap

We carefully hand-sculpted this young lady back in the November 2005 CTP days i.e. pre-Sparkle and it featured on the Channel9 video.
Let's not get over excited here i.e. it's almost entirely useless but very cool to look at for a little while!

Entirely Useless?

 

Well not entirely. WPF represents the next generation graphics subsystem in Windows and with great power comes responsibility. Its aim is to improve the user experience of applications i.e. make them more intuitive for end users. One school of thought is that usability is the measure of how an application performs the end user expects it to i.e. common Windows Form concepts like toolstrips and contextmenus.

However. In my opinion this consistency doesn't really make applications more accessible; only more so to people already familiar with Windows applications and their nuances. Almost anybody could play an Xbox game i.e. my mother with no computer skills. User experiences which represent an interactive and visual thin layer above the actual process at hand seem to be accessible to anyone, even non-techies.

Instead of all the functionality being hidden behind WinForm concepts i.e. Menus, Dialogues the user instead thinks of a visual process to changing the state of the application through a logical process which is represented intuitively.

I believe that WPF will make powerful applications accessible to the masses but things are never clear cut.

The Power User

We have line of business (LOB) applications we develop now for our clients which deal with very complicated concepts i.e. Legislative Compliance Management and Mortgage Originations. WPF may well not suit these applications now because the simplicity of the UX may have a detrimental effect to power users that need to be productive quickly.

This is the same reason much of the Exchange 12 administration will be done with a command line (Monad). Techie power users can achieve more with less UX to get in the way. For this reason I think WinForms still has a long life in LOB applications although for consumers WPF is going to get massive in no time. It may well enter the business market in the form of interactive visualizations and navigation hosted under WinForms.