In these days I'm receiving a lot of feedbacks from the (lucky) guys that are
on the PDC and what I'm observing with lots of attention and interest is the
Windows Forms future.
With the forthcoming Windows Vista is clear to all that the Winform's
application appearance have to change, but what will be the right
technology?
The future is going on a direction where user interfaces will be more
complex, with a big impact, and UI designers will assume lots of importance also
on the Windows Form's side (not only for the web). From the feedbacks I'm
receiving from the PDC I think it's clear that the future is resumable as
follow:
- for the web side, we'll have Atlas (or should I call it Ajax??) that will permit us to have
more dinamic and performant applications.
- If you have to work on a WinForm application that have to run on operative
system before Vista, the right choice will be Windows Forms 2.0.
- If you have to write a modern WinForm application (for Vista), the right
choice is Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the new
vector based engine to write user interfaces with special effects and
complexity.
- Nice to learn from the PDC that will have also the so called
WPF/E (where E stay for "Everywhere"), borned to bring the WPF power
also on other non-Windows platforms.
Windows Vista will be ready to use on 2006 I think, but we'll be really ready
to write WPF-compliant applications for Vista? At the moment there's not a tool
(correct me if I'm wrong) that permits us to write WPF user interfaces visually
and obviously this is the first essential requirement.
Visual Studio 2005 (or the future version that will have with Vista) must
have an integrated tool to graphically design user interfaces based on WPF,
exactly like actually we have for standard Windows Forms application. When we'll
see this, we''ll be really ready for a revolution on writing Winform
applications...