Choosing a smart client technology..
Help us out .. Kevin Moore (wpf) , Scott Morrison (crossbow ) and I were guessing some of the criteria that you use to select a platform .. we are making two assumptions: 1) you want a windows smart client .. 2) and you are considering managed code ( so windows forms or wpf mostly)
Here is where we are landing ( and criteria range or explanation ) ...
- Platform ( supported OSes )
- Richness ( battle ship gray to bling )
- Tools ( from notepad to drag-drop-databinding-codegen-magic-wand )
- Controls ( from button to datagrids, is datagrid the richest control that is fair )
- Ecosystem ( measure of existance for: books, community, control vendors?)
- Frameworks existence of app blocks to accelerate app dev ( like MDI, CAB, Spring)
- Future investments for the platform ... (e.g. how much will it change and why?? )
- Existing investments ( your skills, your code )
some that are not making the cut are: deployment (seems the same), platform lifespan ( seems the same too.. both will ship in Orcas so both have 10+ years to go..)
Some of what I am wondering:
- What are we missing??
- Localization ... is it that relevant... At MS it is... but outside?
- Help system ..
- Extensibility? Customization?
- What else??
- Are the scales above fair or too broad? I am mosty concerned on richness... was thinking of splitting it to
- Basic UI services (layout, controls, customization, )
- app services ( databinding , performance, back-end integration ) ....
- Technolgies integrated ( e.g. support for text, 3d, etc.)
- But when I partition like this seems too granular .. and wpf focused..
Thoughts?? I will let you know where we land ... this is for a deck next wednesday ... and we are all too swamped (so none has a lot of think time), drop me an email with what we are missing ... else we might miss it for next week )..
Cheers..