10.2A and WPF

I believe that 10.2A does not support WPF.

That would be strange. First of all 10.2A comes with .NET 3.0 which already has WPF. And as I understood new version almost fully supports .NET assemblies, not only from Microsoft. There is some limitations, but at least for now I don't see why it should not work. I managed to launch it on Ruby, Python quite easily.

I will if I am able to use any other assembly too. Maybe I am not able to use any other assembly at all.

And as I understood new version almost fully supports .NET assemblies, not only from Microsoft.

A good goal, but a bit beyond what 10.2A actually tries to accomplish. It certainly does support a wide variety of Winforms controls, but there are some notable exceptions, in particular those that use generics. It seems likely that there are some other exceptions based on details which need to get discovered and ironed out.

During beta it was said by PSC:

You can use .NET (V2.0 - 3.5) Winforms controls, but not WPF controls.

It was also observed by a couple of participants that WPF is not really ready for prime time in business applications, but don't look to me for the details about why. But, this might explain why full support has been deferred to a later release. There is a lot of stuff out there in various UI realms that is new and exciting, but not fully formed, so it is easy for me to see why PSC would wait for the dust to settle a bit before investing heavily, especially since there are so many competing technologies and it isn't clear which are going to "win". We got .NET exactly because there was a substantial customer base demanding it. We didn't get some other things because that base has yet to develop.

Thanks for the informative reply, it looks that I can leave it. But it is still sad, because it looks like OpenEdge is still lagging behind in several fields. We got Windows Forms 2.0 now and it is already discontinued at Microsoft. Microsoft went fully with WPF which is really very impressive improvement.

Hi David, Yes WPF looks stuning on demos. Let me give you feedback on it for production env.

I've been working on pure .Net WPF projet for 3 years now (we have been early adopters). Although transitions, effects and programming scheme look very interesting, it is STILL not (on december 2008) suitable for prodtuction.

Among other things :

- Data grids are not equivalent to winform ones (their functionnalities a far behind Winform ones : not built-in sorting, no excel, no formulas, etc.). We've been struggling with the most advanced one (Xceed WPF DataGrid) but in its version 3.0 there is still big lacks such as no proper filtering tool, no excel export, strange edit mode, ...

- Focus has been made on flashy things (carousel views, transitions and effects) but those are very scarcely used in DB oriented software.

- There is NO pivot grids in WPF yet whereas in Winforms you'll find what you want.

- Most of usefull controls do not exist yet in WPF env (autosearch/autocompletion combos, multi-column combos, etc.), which require dev teams to design all those tools. Such a waste of time.

Finally, WPF is very nice dev scheme but it is very time consumming for developpers.

All those things to tell you that WPF may be the env for the next x years, but it is not ready yet. And I would discourage anybody to get into this technology for the next 18 to 24 months at least.

OpenEdge GUI for .NET 10.2A supports .NET Winforms, not WPF.

In his reply, Sylvestre rightfully points out that WPF is not yet ready for production and lacks very important functionality needed for business applications. We continue to look closely at the WPF and its evolution. It is in our roadmap, subject (among multiple aspects) to its enhancements to address the issues that have been pointed out.

Regards

Salvador