Over on the Advice Line blog, a reader who signs himself "Need help from Bill Gates" asked Bob Lewis about an upgrade project from a Windows application using MDI to the .Net Framework. The architects he talked to pooh-poohed Windows Forms as "old school" and pushed Web applications, Windows Presentation Framework, and Silverlight. Bob said "it depends" and suggested another conversation with the architects abou Over on the Advice Line blog, a reader who signs himself “Need help from Bill Gates” asked Bob Lewis about an upgrade project from a Windows application using MDI to the .Net Framework. The architects he talked to pooh-poohed Windows Forms as “old school” and pushed Web applications, Windows Presentation Framework, and Silverlight. Bob said “it depends” and suggested another conversation with the architects about fashion vs. style.Here’s my answer:Dear Need-Bill … You need to talk to different architects, ones who will listen to what you want and analyze what you need instead of pushing the latest technology because it’s glitzy.Web applications have an advantage over desktop applications when it comes to installation and accessibility, but they aren’t as responsive as desktop applications at this point. Windows Forms (WinForms) is the right technology if you want to build a Windows desktop application with the .Net Framework that will provide maximum productivity to people who use the application heavily, especially if they enter lots of data. Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) offers additional graphical capabilities for desktop applications, but requires more in the way of hardware than WinForms to run well. I’m not sure your customers need or could benefit from the advanced graphics, and they might not want to upgrade their computers to run it. Silverlight is a rich Internet application technology. It implements a subset of WPF as a Web browser plug-in.Beautiful things can be done with Silverlight rich Internet applications, but you’d need Silverlight 2.0 if you wanted to build one that would be useful for line-of-business or data entry: Silverlight 1.0 doesn’t even have a native text input control. Silverlight 2.0 has not yet been released: it is still being beta tested, and beta 2 was just released on Friday. Software Development