Advantages
- Ability to create rich user interfaces relatively easy
- Capabilities to create animations and special effects
- Resolution-independent graphical core, which uses hardware acceleration for drawing the graphical user interface, thus enhancing performance
- Powerful styling and skinning structure
- Multimedia integration support
- Culturally-aware controls
- Ability to run in a browser (the same code base can be used as desktop application and as web-based application)
Disadvantages
- Learning to work with WPF takes time, as this is a more complex technology
- WPF’s in-box control suite is far more limited than that of WinForms
- WPF applications cannot not run on Windows 2000 or lower
- Reduced community support
Development tools
- Microsoft Visual Studio
- Microsoft Blend for Visual Studio (formerly Microsoft Expression Blend)
- WPF Performance Suite