Why use WPF instead of WinForms?

In today’s technology-driven world, organizations need to strategically decide on how to develop new desktop based applications. When you are opting for Microsoft technologies, you have two choices available: Windows Forms (WinForms) and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Before you decide the technology, you should take the plunge to understand the various benefits and features of these technologies. This whitepaper unfolds the reasons why WPF has an upper hand over WinForms and focuses on the features available with WPF. 

Although, for a long time WinForms served as the backbone for building desktop applications, modern software required to support rapid iteration and major user interface changes throughout the process. Modern software development requires technology and tools to separate the user interface from the rest of the implementation as much as possible and to decouple visual behavior from the underlying program logic.

In 2006, Microsoft released a technology to help people create 21st-century software that meets these high demands: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). With the release of WPF 4 in 2010, the technology has grown better than ever at delivering amazing results for just about any kind of software. The primary technologies behind many Windows-based user interfaces are the Graphics Device Interface (GDI) and User subsystems. GDI+ was introduced during the Windows XP timeframe ended up being slower than GDI due to its complexity and lack of hardware acceleration. With the introduction of .NET and managed code in 2002, developers were treated to a highly productive model for creating Windows (and web) applications. In this world, Windows Forms (built on top of GDI+) became the primary way for a C# programmer to create new user interfaces on Windows. Windows Forms has been a successful and productive technology, but it still has all the fundamental limitations of GDI+ and User.

Microsoft recognized that something brand new was needed that escaped the limitations of GDI+ and User yet provided the kind of productivity that people enjoy with frameworks like Windows Forms. Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is the answer for software developers and graphic designers who want to create modern user experiences without having to master several difficult technologies.

Features of WPF includes: Broad Integration, Resolution Interface, Hardware Acceleration, Declarative Programming, etc.

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