[mu_killnine]

As a developer for my company's internal LoB tools, I really enjoy WPF more than Winforms. I feel very empowered and, as a Microsoft shop, it seems to be really great for meeting a specific aesthetic and function for my users.

Could I do it in a web app? Probably. But it would take a lot more work for me and I'd be battling compatibility with IE7 (yes, we're still on IE7) as the corporate web minimum spec.

WinRT felt half-baked when I used it about a year and a half ago. Furthermore, I doubt Win8 is on the docket for quite some time.

WPF hasn't been the 'cool thing' for quite some time (ever?), but both I and my users seem to really enjoy what it's doing for us. And that's good enough.

[TheMakeA]

If you have the choice to deploy a WPF app, couldn't you ship something using chromiumembedded to get the benefits of a web app without worrying about browser compatibility? In the past, I've even dropped a CEF WebView into WPF and had the UI in HTML/CSS/JS.

[mu_killnine]

Perhaps. I am not familiar with the project.

But if you've already got a captive audience able to run anything .NET 4.0 and above (incl. async/await via Bcl.Async libraries) with the rich experience of WPF, why bother shoehorning a web application as a solution?

Our users are in a manufacturing environment, on a well-known environment. It's practically like developing for a gaming console. And in that light, WPF seems to be a good fit.

[emodendroket]

I have pretty limited experience with desktop stuff (mostly Winforms) but with the SPA frameworks now it's about as expressive and deployment issues go away (which is nice in a small shop where you can't just foist them on someone else).

[jenscow]

This is what I'm doing.

We're able to produce a standalone desktop application and a web app using the same code and have it looking/working exactly the same, on different platforms.