Our business is considering writing a line of business application for tablets to enable road warriors and executives access our data.
This will be primarily used for dashboards, reports and some form filling input: quite typical scenario.
Our other apps being built in .Net (WinForms) with lots of related class libraries DLLs (for data access layer, business logic, etc), it seems natural to want to use Windows 8 for this.
I am a rather put off by Windows RT as it doesn’t implement the whole .Net Framework and seems quite limitating, so we are rather considering the Windows 8 Pro tablets than WinRT ones.
However, we want a smooth and pleasant tablet experience and I don’t think WinForms would be great for this as not built for touch support.
My question is would WPF be good for this? I see there are UI vendors selling touch controls kits but I wonder whether the “touch” experience in WPF is equivalent to the one found WinRT/Metro apps?
Probably this could be answered by playing around with the tablet but I unfortunately do not have one at the moment and can’t get the budget to buy one until I have settled this.
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I think the answer to your question relies on the purpose, size and specifications of your app.
One “hidden” specification that you have (if I didn’t get it wrong) is that you want to reuse as much as possible from your WinForm project or have more or less the same structure as the other WinForm apps. In the comments you said that you are currently accessing the DB from the application using Entity Framework.
Reuse some DLL’s in WinRT is not possible, since some .NET classes are not allowed in WinRT, and Entity Framework (which is based on ADO.NET) is not compatible. So the data layer would need to change slightly.
If you chose this way and you need to refactor the data layer acess, my recommendation, if possible, is to use an API (WebAPI or WCF for example) to handle with the Data, so the WinRT app can focus on the presentation layer to be fast and responsive.
If that amount of work “is not affordable”, I think the WPF application would be the best option since this kind of apps can handle more heavy work just as WinForms and you could reuse many assemblies. The structure of the app could be very similar, only changing the presentation layer, and YES you could have a very similar touch experience as in WinRT apps.
Depending on the time you can spend and the marketing point of view you should make your decision.
In my opinion a WinRT app can be very saleable and fancy, but in your scenario could take too much time if the infrastucture behind is not ready to support it. The presentation layer will need to be redone anyway since you cannot reuse much from WinForms, maybe the final decision should be taken after evaluating the cost of having a new data infrastucture.
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