[dba-VB] C# winforms vs WPF

Guys,

I do a fair amount of C# programming, much of which is automating SQL Server from C#.  I do almost 
no "DB Front End" kind of stuff, though I want to learn that.

I have never taken the time to learn the Windows form / control stuff and today I went researching 
and discovered that apparently System.Windows.forms is dead technology.  Something I read said that 
the programming team at MS was dismantled and WPF is not the latest thing.

Obviously I don't know either one.  For my purposes learning how to use the individual controls has 
worked pretty well, I have programmed wrapper classes, passed controls into the classes, sunk 
control events, raised events etc. I do not claim that is a superior paradigm, just 'what I know' 
from doing it that way in the Access / VBA environment.

My question, addressed to any folks who do heavy duty windows form interface programming, is should 
I just keep on doing what I do or try to figure out how to use WPF.

Just as an example, so that you can understand what I am looking to do, I have an existing class 
which takes a listview control, a progress bar, a 'clear status' button and a 'print' button and I 
pass all of these objects in to a class which forms a status system for my projects.  I wrap all of 
the delegate functionality for writing back up to the controls, sinking the events of the buttons, 
setting up and using the progress bar and so forth.  I then just instantiate one of the clsStatus 
objects in a form, place the controls on the form, pass the controls in to the form in the init and 
then call methods of this class to write status information to the list, tick the progress bar, 
clear the status list and so forth.

Notice that none of this is 'data bound', and is used by my application to tell me (the operator) 
what the application is doing in real time.

I hired a programmer to work with me (now moved on to another job), and I was the architect so to 
speak but didn't do very much of the bit twiddling of making this stuff happen.  I do understand the 
C# code but I am having difficulty (for example) getting a handle on how to use the split container 
vs the splitter, the panel, dropping controls onto these objects, docking them and getting them to 
be where I want them to be at run time, mostly just because he figured this stuff out.  He showed me 
(last year) how to do this stuff but...

So here I am trying to learn the form / control stuff and I am reading that it is dead technology. 
But can WPF give me this level of object control?  Do I need this level of object control?  Has MS 
bypassed me and provided a framework that does the kind of stuff that I am doing programmatically? 
I obviously need some books to learn what I need, but I am not clear on what I need to learn.

Any thoughts from interface programmers more experienced than I am?

-- 
John W. Colby
Colby Consulting

Reality is what refuses to go away
when you do not believe in it