Developers can choose among a variety of platforms for forms-based user interfaces. Each platform favors a particular style of interface and offers its own advantages for developers. For example, InfoPath requires the least coding to support complex forms that change dynamically in response to user input (e.g., forms that reveal new sections or hide irrelevant sections). The Information Bridge Framework, in contrast, supports a broad range of data entry and formatting methods, including automatic recognition of input data (using Smart Tags).

Nevertheless, all of the platforms listed here support forms-based data entry and thus will be competing for developer attention and Microsoft development resources. For tactical applications, developers should consider which platform is available now and can do the job with the least code on readily available clients. For long-lived applications, however, developers should also consider which platform is going to get the most resources from Microsoft, because applications on "orphaned" platforms can be expensive to maintain.

In the opinion of Directions, platforms with the best long-term prospects are those that use managed APIs and languages, which Microsoft is actively maintaining, rather than minimally maintained technologies such as the Office COM APIs, Visual Basic for Applications, or VBScript. Platforms have particularly strong long-term prospects if they are owned by Microsoft's developer tools and Windows divisions, which have large developer constituencies and resources to match.

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