Where are we today?

Since its inception as Avalon I have dedicated countless hours to the technology we now know as WPF. I can probably say that I am one of the few people who have worked on WPF at a commercial level at least in Australia. This is because the number of projects using WPF have been scarce. And I was fortunate to get involved because of my community work around WPF.

I have also tried to convince clients to go with WPF as the preferred choice over Windows Forms. I will admit that I have not been very successful in doing this. The main reason I believe is that WPF has suffered with lack of confidence. While the push has been there from Microsoft, somehow it has not come across very well. We all know about demos about spinning text boxes and playing videos in buttons. These I must say have not conveyed the benefits of WPF to business gracefully. Even though Microsoft has used WPF for their Expression products, it just has not been enough.

Do I see things changing?

You bet! With Microsoft writing Visual Studio 2010 shell using WPF, it will change the opinions about this technology in minds of many. Visual Studio is an integral part of any dev shop running Microsoft Platform. And when the flagship product which is bread and butter of millions of developers uses WPF it delivers a confident statement. Microsoft by using WPF for development of Visual Studio will communicate the benefits of data visualization better than any number of presentations. When you will work with Visual Studio 2010 I am sure the conversation will be something like this. Hey! Look at that Architecture Explorer. I really like the way it lays out all those diagrams. Did you know that the entire shell is written in WPF?

What else can Microsoft do?

Visual Studio 2010 launch will be a defining point for WPF’s future. Microsoft should produce white papers, guidance documents and start conversation around how they used WPF for development of Visual Studio. I have always felt that a successful path to WPF is through interop with Windows Forms. Somehow that balance has been missing or the message has not been sent out properly. I cannot imagine Visual Studio 2010 to be without significant interop between WPF and Windows Forms. This is also a golden opportunity for Microsoft to talk about their journey on the interop path. How decisions were made, when and how did they engage designers, did the collaboration between designers and developers work well? Microsoft should start talking about these topics.

Finally

Seize the moment by which I mean the beta cycle for Visual Studio 2010. This is the time for WPF to shine. For a glimpse of Visual Studio 2010 here is screenshot from Tim’s blog.