Examples of fast .NET WPF/WinForms apps? [closed]

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I am currently investigating whether to build a windows application using unmanaged C/C++ or in .NET and would like to know of the kind of performance and responsiveness that is capable with a managed C#/.NET GUI app?

Not surprisingly it looks like the fastest most responsive applications (e.g. chrome, spotify, etc) are written in unmanaged C/C++. I've had a hard time finding examples of really good .NET applications and so 开发者_JAVA技巧I would like some help.

What's the best example of a fast and responsive .NET windows application?

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Paint.Net is an Open Source example of an application written in .Net.

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WorldWide Telescope is a .NET graphics-intensive application that lets you browse a virtual night-sky as well as many other items releated to astronomy. It handles pretty massive amounts of data. Even though it seems to be in perpetual beta, it provides a very compelling user experience.

Windows Live Writer is another .NET application. It may not be a very big application, but it excels at what it does, and I've never had any issues with its responsiveness.

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The latest version of Bing Maps is written in silverlight which counts as managed code.

Live Mesh is written in some form of .net (although I think it ships it's own version of silverlight with it so it has no other dependencies).

A few years ago, most RSS readers were written in .net. I think that the responsiveness is going to be down to what you're programming rather than what you use. At the end of the day with multithreading you can make the app responsive while it's processing no matter what framework you use.

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Here is one of my favorites.

http://www.vertigo.com/familyshow.aspx

Once you install it, open the Windsor family and click around. Be sure to try:

• The "Time" and "Zoom" sliders in the lower left and right corners of the window.
• Typing in the "Filter" box in the lower right

Family.Show has several intentional delays inserted for a more compelling user experience, for example animations are used when navigating around the family tree. If you edit the source code and change the durations of all animations to "0" you will find that everything happens pretty much instantly.

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Greenshot is an OSS .NET app, which A LOT of people have set to start with windows (replaces SnagIt comercial app). It is Windows Forms. A quick check from process explorer confirms they use NGEN to reduce JIT time/overhead (Greenshot.ni.exe).

GitHub for Windows is WPF (IIUC mostly hand-coded XAML). Of course all the git operations are pass-thru to native libgit2 library.

Most of Visual Studio UI is managed. I'd say it is fast (fast enough for me) and gets faster with every release, despite moving more and more of the UI from C++/Win32/COM to C#/WPF/.NET . VS does play a lot of tricks to get this speed. IL layout is optimized for usage patters after many profiling runs, post-build, and then after local install the IL is pre-jitted (NGEN), so most code that runs at startup is already native code from NGEN.

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TOAD for MySQL is a .NET application. It is pretty snappy. See http://www.toadsoft.com/toadmysql/faq.htm

Also, the upcoming version of Visual Studion 2010 has a lot of UI written in WPF. The performance of the Release Candidate looks good IMO.

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DigiTweet is written in WPF http://www.digitweet.com/