You still have to sell me on WPF

There is an interesting tendency visible on ITJobsWatch regarding Windows Presentation Foundation. It's that the demand for WPF workforce has grown significantly in the past 6 months (as of 2008Q2). I don't really got around peeking into the actual job descriptions there but three quarters of a year has grown the demand for WPF-developer up to 1,2%. Compare this do WinForms' (plumetting) 3,9% you may wonder if WPF is really ready to replace WinForms or maybe it has so many pioneering features that it generates a whole lot of new expectations about user interfaces. I must say that I Don't Thnik So. Of course I'm biased towards Line Of Business applications, I'm really hesitant about WPF when it comes to LOB because I can't really believe that people won't miss WinForm's DataGridView, the tabbed interfaces, the Masked Textbox or the MDI. No sir. It's true that there has been a lot of debate on WPF LOB usage and WPF vs. Winforms and WPF credibility and a lot of promoting of WPF (albeit some spectators say not enough of it) from Microsoft, and I believe that WPF is still sorrounded by a lot of FUD, and I don't really want to name the guilty parties. Let me just highlight one of the highlight featues of WPF-based development: the fact that designers can work more closely with programmers on a WPF project. I can't see why and how this could be a very big achievement in a time where people have learned that designers don't give a heck about functionality and programmer's don't give a heck about user interface design. Not because they are evil, simply because there is a whole impendance mismatch between being the designer-world and the developer-world (and the software usability world before we forget what the game is about) so unless you can spend a lot of money on designing and usability testing your user interface, you're effectively busted. And if you're really busted, it doesn't make too much of a difference which technology you actually use.

Of course there's a lot of value in WPF which has soon to be explored, but I think that we're not there yet. It's really cool tho to have a framework which encourages separation of concerns in an area really really prone to produce ugly and smelly code.

UI design for programmers

I've long been wanting to read User Interface Desing For Programmers by Joel Spolsky. Which is absolutely positively a must-read for every developer who is concerned about developing great user interfaces. Start by learning that "great" == "highly usable" not "bells and whistles all over the place".

The only issue I had with the book was that somehow I thought it indicates that copying an already estabilished design could do you more good than trying to invent something really cool. The notable example here is the Microsoft Office user interface which is the product of hundreds thousand dollars of careful design and usability screening at Microsoft, which magically justifies of Office UI as great. While this might be true, I really don't want people to believe that The One Microsoft Way is always the great way, because Microsoft employees are people too and they can produce shitty user interaction design too.

Anyways, UIDfP is a great book, and if you're interested even more in UI design, then you should definitely also read About Face too.