It's a piece of cake with Windows Presentation Foundation

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As a run-of-the-mill business application developer, one usually pays for presentation layer software from DevExpress/Infragistics and so forth.

Money usually goes to attaining the latest and greatest Office mimicking UI, and your developers 'thrash out' the necessary*business logic. Rudi Grobler has just posted a simply excellent example of creating an Office 2007 Navigation Pane in WPF, using just the standard WPF tab control. Usually one* would have to spend $200-$400 (without the source code) from - to choose two random presentation vendors - *http://www.actiprosoftware.com/Products/DotNet/WPF/Navigation/Default.aspx

or http://www.devcomponents.com/.

The real beauty here is that one can skin the complete*application using the same resource dictionary, which is super-duper-powerful! This allows for*a uniform 'look and feel' across the application, normally an absolute pain to implement*with windows forms.

When you also take into account that Scott Gu recently announced that*a major update to*WPF is imminent (summer 2008), and that WPF will have a new Ribbon Control and DataGridView*out-of-the-box, a personal proclivity is developing toward WPF. I think that these controls are already available in Silverlight 2 beta, but lack sufficient time to check this out to confirm.

 

This summers*update will address key problems I have highlighted in the past with WPF, primarily poor performance with list type data,*and an unavailability of third party controls. If you also 'factor in' .NET cold and warm start up times being significantly*improved, the WPF 'stack' is certainly gathering momentum.

 

 

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