Getting used to the impressive speed and ease at which we can create a brilliant interface with the telerik winforms controls , I find myself wondering about WPF.
WPF is awesome in terms of flexibility and customisation capabilities. It's awesome in terms of performance too. Because of that , all I saw in my mind of the WPF versions of the telerik controls was just winforms x 10.
But we get to the new release of the second beta of the eagerly awaited Q3 release and while the new ribbonbar is as great as expected , it's a far contrast from the winforms one. Suddenly the gap in designer capability differences in what microsoft provides for wpf and winforms becomes exceptionally painful.
Doing a simple ribbonbar is suddenly a ream of code and by no means rad. :/ So all of a sudden when the complexitiy of controls goes up (and let's face it one of the strengths of wpf is in the ability to easily build complex/layered controls) then suddenly it becomes MORE time consuming to create these controls.
So I suppose my point is the concept of xaml is lovely when the complexity of the controls is below a certain level , in fact at that level or below you can create more complex controls than winforms with much less code and time investment. But past a certain point , the code and time investment needed is far greater.
I love the new WPF ribbon bar but creating a ribbon feels really tedious not to mention that once complexity builds on the ribbon , parts of it just don't feel or look intuitive at all. Right now I would dread developing a serious ribbonbar for a serious application and then needing to do even simple changes to it.
Anyone else feel like microsoft are really slacking with wpf designer capability ? Or am I just missing something ?
WPF is awesome in terms of flexibility and customisation capabilities. It's awesome in terms of performance too. Because of that , all I saw in my mind of the WPF versions of the telerik controls was just winforms x 10.
But we get to the new release of the second beta of the eagerly awaited Q3 release and while the new ribbonbar is as great as expected , it's a far contrast from the winforms one. Suddenly the gap in designer capability differences in what microsoft provides for wpf and winforms becomes exceptionally painful.
Doing a simple ribbonbar is suddenly a ream of code and by no means rad. :/ So all of a sudden when the complexitiy of controls goes up (and let's face it one of the strengths of wpf is in the ability to easily build complex/layered controls) then suddenly it becomes MORE time consuming to create these controls.
So I suppose my point is the concept of xaml is lovely when the complexity of the controls is below a certain level , in fact at that level or below you can create more complex controls than winforms with much less code and time investment. But past a certain point , the code and time investment needed is far greater.
I love the new WPF ribbon bar but creating a ribbon feels really tedious not to mention that once complexity builds on the ribbon , parts of it just don't feel or look intuitive at all. Right now I would dread developing a serious ribbonbar for a serious application and then needing to do even simple changes to it.
Anyone else feel like microsoft are really slacking with wpf designer capability ? Or am I just missing something ?
2 Answers, 1 is accepted
0
Hello Antonio,
You stand correct. There is a serious gap between the design time experience between Winforms and WPF. But things are changing dramatically with VS2010. It has much greater design time support than VS2008. It is a matter of time till Telerik build the design time behavior for WPF and Silverlight controls to look at least as good as the Winforms controls. We will make the first steps in this direction with Q1.2010, and ofcourse will continue to improve it with the next releases.
Do you have any other feedback on the beta of the RibbonBar control. Are you experiencing any problems with it which we can address for the official release?
Regards,
Valentin.Stoychev
the Telerik team
Instantly find answers to your questions on the new Telerik Support Portal.
Watch a video on how to optimize your support resource searches and check out more tips on the blogs.
You stand correct. There is a serious gap between the design time experience between Winforms and WPF. But things are changing dramatically with VS2010. It has much greater design time support than VS2008. It is a matter of time till Telerik build the design time behavior for WPF and Silverlight controls to look at least as good as the Winforms controls. We will make the first steps in this direction with Q1.2010, and ofcourse will continue to improve it with the next releases.
Do you have any other feedback on the beta of the RibbonBar control. Are you experiencing any problems with it which we can address for the official release?
Regards,
Valentin.Stoychev
the Telerik team
Instantly find answers to your questions on the new Telerik Support Portal.
Watch a video on how to optimize your support resource searches and check out more tips on the blogs.
0
Antonio
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answered on 22 Oct 2009, 09:34 AM
Nope all good , really enjoying the WPF suite now , you guys came a good distance in just the 1 year or so - Very keen to get started building WPF only applications with the Telerik controls and the Ribbonbar was pretty much the last piece I needed for that. Keep the good stuff coming :)