Will WPF, WCF, WF ever take off?

[Administrator]

We have these new technologies: WPF, WCF, WF but are they too complicated for people to take the leap and adopt? My prediction is "I'm not so sure!" This is almost along the lines of other Visual Studio "options" we've see in the past such as the ole Visual Basic 6 Data Forms (web forms) or whatever they were called that never went anywhere and were dropped.

I'm not sure WCF is going to really take over traditional web services due to their complexity and different lingo. Is WPF and Silverlight really going to go anywhere? Only time will tell, but I'm betting we are not going to see a wide adoption. I think these three "things" are going to be niche elements and nothing more, a select few will take a gander at them, but for the most part we'll all stay with core Winforms and Webforms for a long time to come. We'll improve our coding via ADO.NET improvements, and other cool things Orcas will bring, but for the three stooges (WPF, WCF, WF) and Silverlight as the scaled down WPF, we'll seeeee!

 

[RobRelyea]

Would love feedback about WPF and VS 2008...

Neal-
I am a Program Manager on the WPF team. I'm very interested in your (as well as others') feedback about the pros/cons of WPF based user interfaces.

There are clearly a bunch of great things you can do with WPF applications. We hope with VS 2008 (formerly "Orcas") to make a very good developer experience for VB or C# developers.
Even with VS 2008, support in VS won't be as advanced as Windows Forms support (shipped 3rd generation support in VS2005).
We'd love to hear feedback about WPF and VS to ensure that WPF and VB support for it grows in the direction you all need.

We have a bunch of developers excited about the real value about what WPF enables. Sometimes that gets lost in spinning button demos.

Thanks, Rob

Rob Relyea | Program Manager, WPF & Xaml Language Team
robrelyea.com | /blog | /wpf | /xaml