Now is an excellent time to overhaul your user interfaces
With NET 3.5, Microsoft introduced WPF – Windows Presentation Foundation. In Kuadriga, we have worked with this technology with multiple products. Among its main advantages is the fact that it separates the user interface logically and thus allows the same software to be implemented in both web and windows environments.
Making user interfaces as effective has possible can have measurable benefits to the people and organizations that rely on them. The primary goal of WPF is to help developers provide these benefits, and so for anybody who creates or uses Windows applications, WPF is big news.
WPF provides a unified platform for modern user interfaces, helps make designers more active participants in creating those interfaces, and can interoperate with earlier interface technologies. Some of the technologies it supplants had a twenty-year run as the foundation for Windows user interfaces. The intent of WPF is to lay the foundation for the next twenty years.
Now is a good time to start considering overhauling your software products to take advantage of these new posibilities.
Overview
The options for building user interfaces to applications are in short:
Interfaces for Windows Application: WPF and Windows Forms
Standards-based Web interfaces
Rich Internet applications (RIAs) for an application-like experience over Internet
Interfaces for Windows Applications: WPF and Windows Forms Applications that will run only in a Windows environment can be based on WPF for a modern, smooth interface with lots of functionality. Simpler, line of business applications should be based on Windows Forms. Sometimes, Microsoft uses the term “Connected Desktop Experiences” to describe the style of applications with the capability to work in both off-line/on-line modes.
Standards-Based Web Interfaces: ASP.NET and ASP.NET AJAX That basic standard technology for web user interfaces is HTML with JavaScript. More powerful approaches are Asynchronous JavaScript and XML with AJAX for greater responsiveness. Microsoft provides ASP.NET for creating Web interfaces and Internet Explorer for displaying them. Microsoft also provides ASP.NET AJAX, pre-packaged functionality that helps developers create ASP.NET applications displaying AJAX-style interfaces in Internet Explorer and other Web browsers.
http://maps.live.com/ is an exciting example of a standards-based Web interface using AJAX. It employs AJAX to give users a fast interface to a very large amount of data. All from a standard browser.
Rich Internet Applications: Silverlight Rich Internet Applications provide a mix of experiences of the standard browser and the stand-alone application. RIAs can offer animation, video, sound, etc. Microsofts main RIA platform is Silverlight.
Through a browser, Silverlight provides a subset of WPF functionality on different platforms: 2D graphics, images, animation, video, sound, and text. It is available for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Netscape running in Windows, Mac and Linux environments. Code is written in JavaScript.
Because Silverlight is based on WPF, it also uses the .NET Framework and XAML. It may also be combined with AJAX.Therefore, developers and designers use the same tools and knowledge to write stand alone applications with WPF and web applications using Silverlight. It may also be combined with AJAX.
Some exciting examples
WPF applications
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTfM5pmUrnU&feature=related
Power of WPF
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tKj_zscwNE&feature=related
Silverlight 2008 Win Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NPwjHJze9E&feature=related
Want to know more?
Please contact Jesper Lindholt, jlin@kuadriga.com, if you would like to talk about how your product may be improved with modern user interfaces.