Evaluating UI Alternatives

Developers must choose from an array of technologies for building the user interface (UI) portions of their applications, with each technology bringing with it a set of capabilities and restrictions. In addition, many developers want to consider non-Microsoft alternatives, such as Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) or Flash technologies.

The following table summarizes some key attributes of the various options, including the technology used to define the application’s UI, the languages and tools used to build on top of them, whether they provide a sandboxed environment (in which the code is limited to performing certain safe functions), whether they provide support for OSs other than Windows, and the key scenarios for which they are appropriate.

	GUI Description	Programmability	Tools	Sandbox	Cross Platform	Key Scenario
Windows Forms	Application code	Any .NET language	Visual Studio	No	No	Desktop application