Professional Visual Basic® 2008

Chapter 18. Integrating WPF and Windows Forms

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) was introduced in the preceding chapter as Microsoft's next-generation solution to graphical user-interface development. In terms of user interfaces, the transition to this new model will be similar in significance and paradigm shift to the shift from COM-based Visual Basic to Visual Basic .NET. In other words, the paradigms and syntax familiar to developers of Windows applications are changing, and most of the changes are not backwardly compatible. Currently, there are no plans for an automated migration from any existing user-interface paradigm, forms, or Web, to the new WPF format.

You will need to transition existing application source code to a new technology paradigm. Perhaps not this year or next, but at some point the WPF paradigm will be used to update the look and feel of existing applications. How will this transition compare to the last major .NET-related transition — the one from COM? The original version of Visual Studio .NET included a tool to aid in migrating code from the COM-based world to .NET. No migration tool will be provided to transition existing user interfaces to WPF, which should be considered a good thing, considering the history of the current migration tools.

Instead, Microsoft learned the lesson that migration is both difficult and time consuming and is best done at the developer's pace. This is seen in the new Power Pack tools for Visual Basic, which Microsoft first ...