4 ms·

This is why the latest tool I did for Windows still was based on WinForms. Because you know the old crappy stuff will be supported forever and the new shiny bet

by dep_b 9y ago

This is why the latest tool I did for Windows still was based on WinForms. Because you know the old crappy stuff will be supported forever and the new shiny better stuff (WPF was pretty cool!) will be deprecated within two years and probably will not get significant developer traction. With a lot of confusing marketing from Microsoft. I don't think even the guru's within Microsoft itself can sum up all the different .Net versions that are out there and what they mean from the top of their heads.

cm2187 9y ago
As a punishment, the .net framework owners should be forced to learn and recite by heart the .net standard compatibility matrix!
- oblio 9y ago
  That's just part of growing pains. I imagine that when Microsoft finishes their long term plan for .NET the layers will basically be: .NET Core - implements .NET Standard. Everything else is layered on top of .NET Core: .NET Framework (Windows), Xamarin (Linux, MacOS GUI, Android, iOS). So basically everything in use will support .NET Standard. Retconning is a bitch :p
jmkni 9y ago
It looks like WPF will be supported for the forseeable future, but I get your overall point
- frik 9y ago
  WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, ... it doesn't matter. The whole .NET Framework 4.x and .NET Core 1 have the "legacy" tag on. Their new thing is .NET Core 2. The rest moved on to cross-platform.
  - garganzol 9y ago
    .NET Core 2 comes very close to the full .NET Framework. Microsoft just made a full circle. Everything legacy is the hot new thing again.
- shadowmint 9y ago
  We'll see. I think the netstandard -> all platforms approach, combined with the aggressive depreciation of old .Net 4.6.x versions is a road map for the future. Maintaining two entire release chains, the 4.x and the .Net core 2.x, is an impossible long term strategy. I would be absolutely astonished if the 4.x line is quietly folded away and depreciated ('unsupported') once the netstandard surface area means the code bases that no longer run on the .Net core fall to significantly small fraction. At that point there will just be 'one' .Net again, and it will be .Net core, on all platforms. Significantly, there seems little to no indication (https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues/43 https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues/43) that winforms and WPF are going to .Net core. You might argue that Microsoft is a legacy beast, and they won't abandon their developers by dropping support for old versions, but they already are doing that in the 'you can install it, sure, but it'll never get any more updates' (#1, #2), so you know. Don't bet the farm on a WPF app. Just saying. #1: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2015/12/09/support-ending-for-the-net-framework-4-4-5-and-4-5-1/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2015/12/09/support-e... #2: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17455/lifecycle-faq-net-framework https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17455/lifecycle-faq...
  - jmkni 9y ago
    IIRC Winforms relies on core, proprietary, parts of Windows which couldn't be feasibly ported to .net core. Not sure about WPF. It's a shame because it's a great development experience.
    - ygra 9y ago
      Windows Forms is a thin wrapper around the Win32 API and GDI+. Which is good if you want to customize things on a low level, but bad if you want to run it anywhere else. But cross-platform compatibility for a UI framework was probably a very low priority in 1999 or 2000. You could port it to .NET Core, but then you could only run it on Windows, since pretty much everything is a P/Invoke into user32.dll. Generally, having something cross-platform either means you're terrible everywhere (Swing), terrible on non-primary platforms (GTK), or have to invest a lot of work in making things work well and still don't quite feel native (Qt). Or you go the Xamarin Forms route and have a few core controls that have to be implemented natively on every platform, which reduces their features to the lowest common denominator, often doesn't expose or enable low-level platform details that may sometimes be needed for customization, and means that you have to invest thrice as much effort into making everything work. In my experience UI frameworks either are bound to a specific platform, or suck. Or both. But a cross-platform WPF would be awesome, but I'd rather expect UWP to become cross-platform instead of WPF.
tomaskafka 9y ago
Aaah, WPF. It's basically React (Native and hw accelerated!), 10 years earlier. On one side, I'm glad that declarative app UIs can now be built on a web, on the other side - come on, Microsoft, we could have skipped a whole jQuery era and be somewhere else with the web now. And react is still missing a big library of standard, well documented components with accesibility, performance and all the edge cases built in.
- roryisok 9y ago
  > Aaah, WPF. It's basically React (Native and hw accelerated!), 10 years earlier. I'd love if that were true, but of course the big selling point of React Native is that it works on several platforms. WPF works on one, and only a desktop one. Well, now that WP is dead at least. If WPF ran on iOS / Android, hell even if it just ran on MacOS, I think there'd be a lot more devs building apps in it than JavaScript.

by dep_b 9y ago

cm2187 9y ago

As a punishment, the .net framework owners should be forced to learn and recite by heart the .net standard compatibility matrix!

oblio 9y ago
That's just part of growing pains. I imagine that when Microsoft finishes their long term plan for .NET the layers will basically be: .NET Core - implements .NET Standard. Everything else is layered on top of .NET Core: .NET Framework (Windows), Xamarin (Linux, MacOS GUI, Android, iOS). So basically everything in use will support .NET Standard. Retconning is a bitch :p

jmkni 9y ago

It looks like WPF will be supported for the forseeable future, but I get your overall point

frik 9y ago
WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, ... it doesn't matter. The whole .NET Framework 4.x and .NET Core 1 have the "legacy" tag on. Their new thing is .NET Core 2. The rest moved on to cross-platform.
- garganzol 9y ago
  .NET Core 2 comes very close to the full .NET Framework. Microsoft just made a full circle. Everything legacy is the hot new thing again.
shadowmint 9y ago
We'll see. I think the netstandard -> all platforms approach, combined with the aggressive depreciation of old .Net 4.6.x versions is a road map for the future. Maintaining two entire release chains, the 4.x and the .Net core 2.x, is an impossible long term strategy. I would be absolutely astonished if the 4.x line is quietly folded away and depreciated ('unsupported') once the netstandard surface area means the code bases that no longer run on the .Net core fall to significantly small fraction. At that point there will just be 'one' .Net again, and it will be .Net core, on all platforms. Significantly, there seems little to no indication (https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues/43 https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues/43) that winforms and WPF are going to .Net core. You might argue that Microsoft is a legacy beast, and they won't abandon their developers by dropping support for old versions, but they already are doing that in the 'you can install it, sure, but it'll never get any more updates' (#1, #2), so you know. Don't bet the farm on a WPF app. Just saying. #1: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2015/12/09/support-ending-for-the-net-framework-4-4-5-and-4-5-1/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2015/12/09/support-e... #2: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17455/lifecycle-faq-net-framework https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17455/lifecycle-faq...
- jmkni 9y ago
  IIRC Winforms relies on core, proprietary, parts of Windows which couldn't be feasibly ported to .net core. Not sure about WPF. It's a shame because it's a great development experience.
  - ygra 9y ago
    Windows Forms is a thin wrapper around the Win32 API and GDI+. Which is good if you want to customize things on a low level, but bad if you want to run it anywhere else. But cross-platform compatibility for a UI framework was probably a very low priority in 1999 or 2000. You could port it to .NET Core, but then you could only run it on Windows, since pretty much everything is a P/Invoke into user32.dll. Generally, having something cross-platform either means you're terrible everywhere (Swing), terrible on non-primary platforms (GTK), or have to invest a lot of work in making things work well and still don't quite feel native (Qt). Or you go the Xamarin Forms route and have a few core controls that have to be implemented natively on every platform, which reduces their features to the lowest common denominator, often doesn't expose or enable low-level platform details that may sometimes be needed for customization, and means that you have to invest thrice as much effort into making everything work. In my experience UI frameworks either are bound to a specific platform, or suck. Or both. But a cross-platform WPF would be awesome, but I'd rather expect UWP to become cross-platform instead of WPF.

tomaskafka 9y ago

Aaah, WPF. It's basically React (Native and hw accelerated!), 10 years earlier. On one side, I'm glad that declarative app UIs can now be built on a web, on the other side - come on, Microsoft, we could have skipped a whole jQuery era and be somewhere else with the web now. And react is still missing a big library of standard, well documented components with accesibility, performance and all the edge cases built in.

roryisok 9y ago
> Aaah, WPF. It's basically React (Native and hw accelerated!), 10 years earlier. I'd love if that were true, but of course the big selling point of React Native is that it works on several platforms. WPF works on one, and only a desktop one. Well, now that WP is dead at least. If WPF ran on iOS / Android, hell even if it just ran on MacOS, I think there'd be a lot more devs building apps in it than JavaScript.