At work, we currently use C#, WinForms + DevExpress with skinning (Visual Studio

Question

At work, we currently use C#, WinForms + DevExpress with skinning (Visual Studio 2013, .NET 4.5 in near future). Our colleges from abroad don't like this too much for some reason and brought up the idea: "Hey, let's use WPF instead!".

It's up to me to investigate into WPF a bit and give a 10'000 foot overview.

One question came up: Is WPF the way to go for future-proof and shiny applications on Windows? What is the way to go on Windows platform? We will stay by Microsoft products but other suggestions are also welcome.

Explanation / Answer

I personally would strongly recommend taking a look at the wxWidgets library. It has the following features:

Cross platform - develop your software on windows and just recompile and test for others such as Mac OS/X, Linux or Unix,
Compilers under multiple compilers, including gcc,
Native Look & Feel,
Has multiple language bindings, so you can use C++, .NET, Perl and Python,
Lots of examples.
Free, both FLOSS and Libre,
Permissive Licence, L-GPG, allows commercial and private use at no charge,
Active community - so free support including directly from the developers,
Responsive to bug reports,
Mature - first release was in 1992 latest, at the time of writing, was yesterday so 22 years on.
Abstracts a lot of other, (non-GUI), things to make cross platform code a lot easier.

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