Is WPF a safe choice for my application?

Question

I support a Windows Forms application that draws map data using overlays. I am considering switching to WPF for the paint layer to take advantage of graphics card rendering. However, over the past couple of weeks I have had some doubts:

• The new version of Evernote uses WPF, and does not work on Nvidia Quadro cards .

• A WPF translates the demo from WindowsClient.net stopped rendering partially through animation on one of our test portals with Intel graphics (and yes, we had the latest Intel drivers).

• Questions like this .

With the current Windows Forms database, I can expect the application to work the same with every installation. WPF is much more dependent on the quality of the video card drivers, and I do not have testing resources for comprehensive coverage.

I am particularly interested in hearing from people who installed the WPF application outside their own company or for a mixed population of machines - did the hardware and driver errors cause an error?

Answer 1

We are facing some problems with the drivers of a particular graphics card provider. Blue screens, diagonal pixel offsets, and application crashes were observed. However, you can disable hardware acceleration for each application. Sad, but true, this is the current solution.

As already mentioned, I hope that the release of VS2010 will help improve stability. Maybe one day we will see lists of fixes related to WPF in the graphics card driver release notes. Along with the latest fixes for the XYZ game engine.

Answer 2

Our WPF application runs on Windows XP Service Pack 2 (minimum) and works fine on some computers if the application is running and the computer goes into screen view mode, it has a blue screen and the machine crashes. It seems that this is the driver version for the video card - some of our users work with two monitors.

We have not solved this problem yet.

Answer 3

WPF uses Direct3D to render it, moving to software if necessary. My best guess: some drivers say that they support something in the hardware, but they don’t actually handle it properly, and that's when we see these incompatibility issues.

The answer to your question depends on how much you are willing to have less compatibility with machines than your current code base. If you have ever visited the support forums for games for PC, you see all kinds of topics about graphics problems. Since most PCs will be increasingly compatible with Vista / Win7 and therefore support D3D9 / 10, problems should be reduced. The real question: if the compromise is worth it to you.

My own experience in deploying a WPF application, I had problems with mediaelement not working on two very similar PCs. But in any case, the video subsystem is a different possibility for worms. Otherwise, it was good, but I did not do anything special graphically, just standard xaml.