WPF vs WinForms

I don't like WPF. I've ever found it complex and overarchitectured, with a rather steep learning curve (and most times the VS designer does not seem able to draw effectively a XAML form) . For thin client applications a HTML5 SPA using your favorite JavaScript Framework/toolkit is usually more than enough. For thick clients sometimes is also enough. For those that it's not and for purely client applications you can try some of the HTML5 and node combinations discussed here. Anyway, for business line applications, Windows client applications are still needed and demanded. For those cases, I still would prefer to avoid WPF and stick to Windows Forms, and seems like I'm not the only one.

Sure there are many horribly architectured Windows Forms applications out there, just a continuation of the classical vb5 and vb6 nightmares. Obviously that's not Windows Forms fault, and many people have been developing pretty well desinged WinForms applications. The use of MVC (well, indeed I think it is MVP) demonstrated here is quite similar to what I've used in the few WinForms projects I've worked on.

With this in mind, the other day I was wondering if there is really any advantage in using WPF over WinForms. The resulting "research" did not give me conclusive answers, but made me refresh my poor knowledge of how Windows GUI applications work.

Apart from XAML, the recommended patterns and the new controls, under the covers the main evolution from WinForms to WPF is that WPF uses Direct X for rendering while WinForms uses GDI. DirectX can discharge this drawing to the Graphic Card, while GDI will do it in your CPU. This means that WPF drawing should be much faster that WinForms drawing. However, in principle WPF objects are more heavy than WinForms objects (in .Net terms). You can read more about it in these interesting StackOverflow posts [1] and [2]

One interesting point raised there is:

That being said, if you have a LOT of controls, WPF can actually outperform Windows Forms by a fair amount. In Windows Forms, each control requires a separate window handle, and receives its own message sets. With a lot of controls, this can actually slow things down pretty dramatically.

So in "Windows terms" WPF controls are lighter. But, what does this window handle and messages thing mean?

The most essential feature of any Windows GUI application (either .Net or native) is the existence of a Message Loop. The main thread in your windows application runs in a loop waiting for messages (a click, a timer, a refresh...) and when a message is received it will pass it to the code (Windows Procedure) associated to the affected Window. The notion of what a Window is at that level is quite important. At this level a Window (a Win32 Window) is not just your "normal Window" (with is blue title bar, close button...) but also controls like buttons, combo boxes, edits... you can see it here. They are created with the CreateWindow Win32 function, that is how under the covers WinForms, classic vb, MFC,... create their controls.

Both WinForms and WPF are based on the Windows message loop (it's created and kept hidden from you by Application.Run), but WinForms works much closer to the Win32 reality. Underneath it uses the CreateWindow function in user32.dll for creating most of its controls. In turn, user32 uses GDI for drawing these controls. From here:

User32.dll is a core windows dll used for windowing and other interactive user program tasks. WPF does not use it much.
Windows.Forms is mostly a .net wrapper around User32, and so is still based entirely on GDI,GDI+, and window handles.

WPF uses CreateWindow just for creating "real windows" and then it will create its controls by drawing on these Windows via DirectX (as if it were drawing shapes). As an analogy, think of how html controls work. An html button or textbox looks like its WinForms counterpart, but it's not a Windows Control, but a shape that the browser draws (for example via Cairo in Firefox)

You can verify this by running Winspector and trying to select a control in a WinForms application and a WPF application.

In the WinForms application you can select controls, for example a button:

While in the WPF application the only thing you can select is the "normal Window":