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Comment by marvin | Hacker News Reader

Windows Forms is still a completely decent option that gives you the same advantages.

I fully agree. I sometimes wonder, why so many people jump to fancy frameworks like WPF where you need to create the markup yourself. I can spit out interfaces for desktop apps in no time with good old winforms but struggle to write data-bindings, triggers and what not in other frameworks. And it even looks consistent and the tools are generally easy to adjust and extend.

You don't need to write the markup yourself with WPF. You can drag components into the designer just the same as with winforms assuming you are using Visual Studio, and everything will look pretty standard unless you go out of your way to change it.

As to the databinding, I find that WPF has more upfront work in databinding, in that you actually have to write some code, but that it's a lot more flexible in the long run. When I used to write winforms, I usually ended up with a lot of business logic embedded in hooks. It was a mess and was hard to reason about.

I think there is an interesting learning curve point where once a developer gets used to WPF layouting/templating, databinding, and MVVM patterns that developer will forever after be way more productive on WPF than WinForms.

Windows Forms is ok, but pretty slow and clunky if you come from using Delphi.

Yes! Winforms is extremely underrated these days. I find it much more productive (and efficient) than WPF.

i fully agree! though technically, there is a pretty big dependency there - the .NET Framework...

however, Mono supports WinForms on all platforms, and is able to compile everything into one standalone EXE. to be honest, i have not tried either, so i cannot say much about how that works in practice. from my experience with Mono, it can be dangerous. every now and then a new version breaks threading, causing mysterious pauses or crashes, and i've read (i think a text by Ayende) that the GC can also be buggy. but for the stuff that Delphi was good at, for smaller RAD apps, it might be worth a try.

Windows Forms was (and is) primitive compared to how easy qt/gtk and just about every windows toolkit ever made. It was built for machines to generate, not for humans to code, so when the code generation breaks (and it will) so does winforms.

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