Dynamic user-interface, WPF or not?

I'm currently working at a application that helps people understand how to do there job. You can see it as a personal coach that guides them trough all the steps they need to do that no normal person could keep remembering.

In my previous application we had the ability to show the user up to 4 pictures (what proves to be more then enough). The application would load the data and see how many pictures where in every instruction and then sort out the picture in the best fitting way without messing up the scale and resolution of the pictures. This all was done with GDI+ and worked very well.

Ofc, change is something that always happens, my bosses came up with some great ideas. So they want to be able to see movies on the screen, animated gif's, 3D models that can rotate or animate. So I think we had pushed GDI+ to it's limits and it's time to look for something different.

I have heard and readed about WPF but have no experience with it. Is it even possible to do all what I ask in WPF? And what about the old picture-merging thing I wrote, can we also get it done in wpf? I tried to make some things working but I didn't went as smooth as I ho开发者_运维问答ped.

I'm also concerned about the fact that the interface needs to be dynamic, the one moment it should be showing picture with some text above it, the other moment it should be showing another text with a video under it.

I would love to hear some opinions here and if you got some other suggestions I should look into pls tell me. Thnx in advance

PS: If WPF is the choice, should I convince my boss to change to .net 4.0?

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Although my answer can be termed subjective, I find WPF better than GDI+ anyday. You can do everything you can in WPF which you have done/could do in GDI+ (apart from pure games/game engines). If you can afford the steep learning curve of WPF, I think it will be better investment as this technology is not going anywhere soon.

As for .Net 4.0, WPF 4.0 does introduces some important functions in 4.0 (specially easing functions for animations) but there is nothing you cannot do without if you are using 3.5. I won't recommend 3.0 though mainly because of performance in animations.

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WPF is up to the task, but you could also check other options. You could go web based, and have either an XBAP (WPF in the browser), or Silverlight/Flash app.

Silverlight/Flash doesn't require that much from the client (to install), and is easily updatable, and both can do the job.