WPF Components Market: Consistency Needed!

by Don Burnett

Ryan Stewart has a nice article over at ZDNET about the component market for WPF heating up. It's true this is happening, and it's kind of exciting. I love components, they make programming a lot easier. I think my favorite components set for WPF so far is Identity Mine's Blendables which I have blogged about previously. Why do I like this so much? They get components for WPF. Their components are completely compatible with both Expression Blend and Visual Studio. Why? well, most of these components are designed to have some sort of UI elements included. Since most WPF components are supposed to be "look-less" so they can be styled by a designer. Visual Studio components are most UI type components anyway with some sort of data binding.

There are several Visual Studio component makers who have started creating WPF components for Visual Studio, but they aren't compatible with Expression Blend. It's not much extra work to make a component compatible with Blend. This also important because it expands the market for component products. I am working on compiling a list of components that don't like Expression Blend and plan to shine a huge light on those developers who haven't got there yet with supporting Expression Blend. It's sad to say however that some components in certain SDKs even from Microsoft don't support Expression Blend across the board, however I hear all that stuff might go away when those products see release. I'll be putting a list of compatible components up on MichiganInteractiveDesigners.org which is going through a complete site revamp this month.