WinForms or WPF?

[Dale.Bartlett]

I am developing a new set of addins and don't know whether to launch into the brave new world of WPF or stick with trusty WinForms. Does anyone have some experiences and comments to share? I have a preference to hone new skills (WPF), but don't want to find myself in a dead-end. I am looking at ContentGeneratorWPF from the SDK for some guidance. Thanks again, Dale

[dante.van.wettum]

@kraftwerk15 

There is one (major) issue though when i try to use WPF: as soon as you have something like a ShowDialog in your WPF form, it will lose focus on the WPF window and returns to revit instead of your form. The form will still be open, though the focus is back on revit and is no longer "blocked" as it should be. I doesnt seem to work either with the windowhandle that is been disused in an previous blog post from the buildingcoder (Jeremy).
I think this was the post: https://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com/blog/2010/06/revit-parent-window.html

[jeremytammik]

Dear Dante,

Note that the old way to access the Revit parent window was superseded in Revit 2019 by the introduction of the MainWindowHandle API:

https://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com/blog/2018/11/revit-window-handle-and-parenting-an-add-in-form.h...

Cheers,

Jeremy

[dante.van.wettum]

I must have missed that update. thanx.

So, just looking at that, i could call for Winforms:

IntPtr revit_window;
revit_window = commandData.Application.MainWindowHandle;
MyForm frm = new MyForm(commandData);
frm.ShowDialog(NativeWindow.FromHandle(revit_window));

But the thing is: WPF forms do not have an overload for ShowDialog. So it seems you can not point revit to be the native.

Consequence im facing now (also when using the sample code provided by @kraftwerk15  ) is that when you have some TaskDialog.Show() in your code, you will be pushed back to revit when you close the message instead of going back to your WPF-form, and it will even bring revit back in a full edit state.
This behavior is significantly different when your on WinForms, where it will go back to your form and keep revit in the frozen state until your showdialog is closed.

[MiguelGT17]

Sorry for bring this topic back again but I personally have managed to create this UI for revit add-ins using WPF xaml

Which is kind of fancy but If I want to go beyond that, to build something like this:

or this: 

I'm struggling generating dash lines, or any other curve lines with diferent font colors, moreover inserting images and playing around with its oppacity, and other visual effects, etc.

Does anyone has in mind any other tool that can reach those results? I've heard of .Net maui, although I've not figured out how to add dll reference to Maui projects.

All the best,

Miguel G.

[namunagetahun]

I was trying to figure out which one to go with for creating my first plugin. what you described makes sense. I think I am going to try WPF since I have some experience with XAML UI's.  Thanks for the detailed explanation.