Even after reaching many mainstream projects, Windows Presentation Foundation (or WPF), is still a long way from completely succeeding Windows Forms as the main form of user interface.
Switching to a completely different method of creating applications is difficult for almost everyone. Even after these years of being available to the public, proper documentation on WPF is still hard to find. Another factor in the adoption delay (or in some cases, refusal) is that the word "UX" (User Experience) is often distorted. The real power of WPF is often buried under the false image of UX.
The following are some of the common myths and the corresponding reality about WPF and UX.
UX is just a fancy word for skinning
WinAMP was one of the earliest applications to champion skinning. Soon after many people created software that skinned your application to look more "cooler", and some that even skinned your entire OS! In many circles, skinning was not considered to be a serious thing. Of course, part of it was the whole Designer vs. Developer thing.
User Experience is much more than how your application looks! UX is just as much about how your application behaves, and how your users interact with it. UX is about lessening the amount of work the end-user has to do (including thinking) to finish a task.
Kai Krause, a pioneer of UX, described UI/UX as: "An interface is about hiding complexity from the user, It's about guiding a process, without cognitive understanding of what goes on beneath. Interface design is the art of enveloping the observer in an enticing, "try this" exploration with ever-new elements and designs as the tools to triumph in new territories."
WPF is only about making your apps look better, or WPF is only about creating UI with tags like ASP.NET
This is only partially correct. While WPF does allow you to customize application interface to the deepest levels, and allows you to create UI using markup, the entire scope of WPF is much larger. For a long time, Windows Forms (and its predecessors) were built on top of the foundation laid out in the era of Windows 1.0 and 3.1. Over the last decade, many of the most basic concepts of UI (mostly the controls) became obsolete or non-productive. Some were updated and some were transitioned out, but most of the common things remain. A good chunk of that (Button, Checkbox, Textbox, List, and so on) is still here because it remains useful.
There have always been ideas for new UI and UX. But more often than not, it has been maddeningly impossible to actually create those as the UI technology had been too strict to allow deep customization and creating them from scratch required superb knowledge of C++ (which is too expensive for most common projects). To customize something as simple as a button you had very few choices. You could build a UserControl. But those weren't always an efficient solution, and often too resource hungry. You could create from scratch or customize with inheritance (or in the case of VB6 and other such old technologies, go subclassing till your nose starts bleeding). But that was too time consuming, limiting, and expensive in every way.
This is where WPF comes in. WPF provides a markup based method of creating UI. It is time saving, flexible, and easy. It takes the best of the web and the best of the desktop and rolls it into a single package. WPF allows you to easily customize just about any control using ControlTemplates (structural customization) and Styles (cosmetic customization) that let you do almost anything to the control without messing with the inherent functionality. A hWnd-less (among other things) model lessens many of the resource requirements that previous frameworks had.
If you've ever had an experience with pre-.NET 3.0 frameworks where you thought that you wanted a very small, simple customization in an existing control but there was no simple way to do it, you should know that you will not have that experience with WPF. Practically anything is doable.
(End of Part 1. Part 2 to be posted shortly.)