Presentation Technologies

Phil Winstanley posts about presentation technologies.

"I think HTML is the easiest for developers to use (think back to the 90's every man and his dog was writing HTML) and that the web is the most comfortable for 99% of users out there, they know and understand the web and how to use it, Windows Applications are much less comfortable to most."

I very much disagree with this. I think it's roughly the other way around i.e. WinForms is by far the easiest and quickest/least extraneous presentation technology. I think DHTML/AJAX is by far the hardest (for LOB apps, we are not counting DX, MDX or XNA) and most extraneous with WPF sitting exactly half way in the middle. We even have a rule of thumb at Dot Net Solutions i.e. "relative to WinForms; DHTML takes 4 times as long and WPF takes 2 times as long to develop".

Phil linked to a post by Mike Taulty about Rich vs. Reach

I also think this is incorrect. The key point with WPF is that it is both rich and reach i.e. the pitch is this: "In the old days you had to select a presentation technology based on rich vs. reach; now you have WPF - which works in any scenario only drawbacks being it takes two times longer than WinForms to develop and client prerequisites"

Mike also omits DirectX, MDX and XNA which are by far the richest (and the hardest to develop in).

From Mike Taulty:

"It comes up in debates about the various client technologies that we've got kicking around at the moment. I think you can argue as to whether Windows Forms and "WPF/E" should trade places and, also, whether there should really be 3 separate HTML-based entries and, also, Office would be another possible inclusion here as it's a client platform that sits on the screens of millions of users every day so it's very much a real platform."

There does seem to be some confusion on the reach aspect of WPF i.e. we have WPF/e and Xbap. The only differences being feature set and object/embed tag deployment.

WPF should not be on any rich vs. reach diagram because it's both.

Here is a slide from my DDD3 WPF presentation at Microsoft:

Tags: wpf xna aspnet ajax winforms mtaulty directx