Black is the new grey. And I’m nervous.
If you don’t know what WPF is, (it stands for Window Presentation Foundation), its MS’s new technology for UI. Here are the basics:

• It’s a XML type language that describes how the UI will look – think CSS, it kinda works a bit like these
• It’s uber cool– (it has things call animations, and motion blurs!)
• Silverlight, Silverlight, , Silverlight*

It can look like this, sort of webby, right?

Why am I nervous? Not because of WPF itself, I think it’s cool. My worry is that like any tool it can be misused. It’s real easy to design bad UI.

Back when the “green screen” was king it was really hard to design a bad UI, because it was almost impossible to design a good one! There was no such thing as a good UI, there was no such thing as a bad UI, there was just UI!

Then “modern” win forms, came along, and people could do much more. That meant the opportunity for good and evil got bigger. Some UI these days is tremendous, some totally sucks (the ri…stop it!) but compared to what might be around the corner?

A bad UI designer moving from Winforms to WPF, is like taking a knife from a homicidal maniac and handing him a machine gun.

Maybe I’m worrying about nothing. The best case is all new WPF UI is great, worst case is it’s all really bad. Mostly likely, it will start off mixed, maybe a bit more bad than good, then over time, as people start to see more and more good examples, it evolves to be used broadly well.

Still there’s that first bit to get through ;-(

*Silverlight is a bit like flash for WPF on the web. The thing that’s good about it is that you can (also most) take a desktop WPF app and host it in the cloud, or the reverse.