Trading up to Plex WPF?

If you are reading this, sitting at your desk ready to start another day of Plex development, then you are already familiar with the benefits of model based development and code generation.  It’s possible too that you’re excited about the prospect of a new client generator becoming available for your beloved tool.  At the recent CA Plex Worldwide Developers Conference I saw for myself that the CA team from San Francisco are on top of the technical challenges of generating XAML and writing a supporting runtime environment that allows Plex to generate .Net WPF applications.  There was a buzz during the hands-on education session where we got to build and run a Plex generated WPF application on our own laptops; “oh wow!”, “that’s cool!”, “it works!”, “nice!”.

But, a room of delighted software developers does not directly translate into a world where their business can rush to adopt it as the solution to update current Plex C++ applications.  Why not?  Well, because it’s going to cost money to do it, and as we are all reminded daily, in this economy every investment must offer a return.  For those fortunate enough to be planning the development of an entirely new application, there is no baggage of migrating fragments of C++ source or replacing ActiveX controls, you can make a start and make a value proposition using the proven productivity of a model based development tool, CA Plex.

In order to reap the technical benefits of moving to C#/WPF we are going to have to identify what handicaps our company endures in using C++/MFC, and why it’s worth working to leave it behind.  If we can agree that every technical obstacle has a solution, then here is my question to everyone out there:

 What are your motivations for wanting to adopt WPF in Plex 7.0?

Matthew Morris is a Plex developer and a business owner (he pays for stuff!).  If you want to help him reconcile his desire to get a technical buzz out of moving Plex applications to from C++ to WPF, while creating value for the business users, then email him at matthew.morris@desynit.com

If you're on the LinkedIn Plex group, I have started a thread : Trading up to Plex WPF Client, what are the business issues?

Also on the CA Plex General Discussion forum : Trading up to Plex WPF?  What are the business issues?