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On this site alone there are numerous examples of problems with WPF associated with XP. Eg:

If my client base still uses XP, is rewriting my VB6 product in WPF a good idea at this stage or should I just go for Winforms for now and leave WPF until the clients have upgraded from XP?

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CJ7
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    WPF is fine in XP. If you are rewriting an application I would hesitate to go the WinForms route. – Aaron McIver Nov 29 '11 at 14:38
  • @AaronMcIver: Did you not see the list of questions I gave indicating problems with XP? – CJ7 Nov 29 '11 at 14:40
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    I've written numerous WPF applications as have many others in XP without any issues. Just because a _problem_ is raised does not indicate the problem is with the framework, it could be with the user. – Aaron McIver Nov 29 '11 at 14:46
  • @AaronMcIver: still seems to me like a risk not worth taking. – CJ7 Nov 29 '11 at 14:48
  • From problems above no one (except maybe video tearing) is related to XP possible incompatibility. I've not coded much in WPF, but everything I've done so far is working well on XPSP3. I'd go on WPF route. – Arvo Nov 29 '11 at 14:53
  • It's Windows 2000 where WPF is a no-go, XP is fine. – Matěj Zábský Nov 29 '11 at 15:43
  • Voted to close as "not constructive", especially since I see you quibbling over people's responses. If you "feel" like it's too much of a risk, don't do it. But it works fine for most folks. – Andrew Barber Nov 30 '11 at 09:37
  • @AndrewBarber: Andrew, I think what my linked questions show at least is that the deployment of WPF apps on XP is not 100% smooth, which is a concern to me when deploying to large enterprises. – CJ7 Nov 30 '11 at 11:55
  • @CraigJ That is not at all what your linked questions show. They simply show that *some programmers* have problems that they *think* are related to XP. You can find lots of problem links on any combination of terms you want. Search Windows 2008 and ASP.NET... does the resulting *huge* list of questions mean asp.net doesn't work on Win2k8? – Andrew Barber Dec 01 '11 at 03:13

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I have worked on a very large, complex application in WPF which would run on XP perfectly. Yes there are probably a few issues which MAY arrise but this does not mean that you should avoid WPF entirely.

If you are going to rewrite your application WPF would be a great way to go, you can do a lot more with the UI and although there is a learning curve it is not too steep and the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

I would say migrate the product into WPF, keep the old one around for legacy purposes if users dont want to upgrade, you can probably reuse some of the code from your existing application anyway in the WPF one so maintaining both may not be as bad as you think.

Purplegoldfish
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I suspect there are as many issues associated with winforms development too.

I think it depends on what you want to achieve. WPF works fine on XP and it gives you the ability to define quite sophisticated user interfaces that are not really possible in winforms (without some really tricky coding at least). It has a learning curve so it will, likely, take you longer to rewrite your application in it.

If you know your user base will upgrade from XP anyway why not support the existing application and use the time to re-write in WPF and then not have to worry about XP specific issues. I would not re-write in winforms thinking you will throw it away and re-write a second time in WPF if you have a perfectly working version now, albeit written in VB6.

kmp
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