WPF Controls that Deliver Unique User Experience

By John Swiss

WPF is a great technology that is delivered by Microsoft Corporation in order to help numerous needs of developers and software shops to deliver better software. Time is ticking and software, big part of which is user interface, needs to be rewritten or reinvented.
Many Researches showed that simply rewriting user interface and application from older technology, for example Windows Forms, to newer: WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) platform brings no gain. You need to break old UI design rules to present better user experience. Many companies have R&D departments that are working on how to move from classic: menu/chart/datagrid format to something more user friendly and the same time user interface that brings better way to show data. Microsoft released WPF for this purpose
Using old technologies like Windows Forms won’t give you any good starting point to develop custom controls, as it was designed to be in windows like style. So, button, menu, grid are the same as the whole Windows interface and extending that behavior is complex and hard to maintain.
WPF controls were introduced to the world as ‘controls without look’. You can develop any kind of visual presentation using designer tools, for example Expression Blend. So, in a few clicks you can receive fluid animated button that reacts in your way on mouse press, mouse over, focus or other events. Moreover, that is applicable to other advanced and complex components such as datagrid, listview, combobox and so on.
Once you get familiar with WPF controls that are supplied within standard pack in .NET framework, you might get a need to have custom control to be done. That is also a lot easier than it was before, you still can give your designer to make UI and then you will plug it into your code and receive working custom control that can be reused as many times as you need.
The web is full of vendors that propose standard and a few kinds of unique controls and packs for WPF that can make developer’s life easier. Usually you can receive 40 controls for a thousand of dollars which cost a few times less than you would spend on development, even if you need only 2-3 of them.
There are a number of WPF Controls vendors. Among them I would like to admit some WPF vendors that stand on customer development model. So, you can receive more than only product, but also excellent support and ability to get your “features” implemented upon the request.

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