6 ms·

I hated to see this advice to contributors: "We will typically not accept contributions that implement support for an OS-specific technolology on another opera

I hated to see this advice to contributors: "We will typically not accept contributions that implement support for an OS-specific technolology on another operating system. . . We also do not intend to accept contributions that provide cross-platform implementations for Windows Forms or WPF." https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/blob/master/Documentation/contributing.md https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/blob/master/Documentation/cont... Microsoft seems to be actually refusing to accept contributions that could make WPF cross-platform - it's a bit beyond "no official plans for cross platform".

drewg123 8y ago
Its not that much different than the Linux kernel in that respect. Eg, you cannot submit a driver w/ifdefs and compat shims for other OSes.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  Theoretically you can still get WPF running on another OS, but you'd have to do it the same way that WSL gets an Ubuntu userland running on Linux: You introduce a compatibility layer that it runs on top of. I think I'd prefer that approach, anyway - I'd guess it's cleaner and ultimately more maintainable than introducing a whole bunch of conditional logic for handling all the cross-platform issues into an already complicated piece of software.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    WPF already has such a layer, actually - Media Integration Layer, MIL.
- mr_overalls 8y ago
  But this isn't a kernel - it's a framework with explicit goals of being cross-platform.
  - floatboth 8y ago
    No, it never had a goal of being portable to non-Microsoft platforms, and it doesn't suddenly add that as a goal just because it's open source now.
    - flukus 8y ago
      Well for WPF there was silverlight for a while, a limited but (gimped)cross platform version of WPF. I wouldn't be surprised if there were abstractions to make porting to openGL easier.
  - nikofeyn 8y ago
    > it's a framework with explicit goals of being cross-platform where did they notate their goals for wpf and winforms to be cross-platform? they specifically mentioned they open-sourced them to open up windows development.
    - mr_overalls 8y ago
      You're right. I mistakenly conflated the goals of wpf with dotnetcore.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
Someone1234 8y ago
In that Git repository. Nobody should be submitting pull requests for cross-platform support into WPF's main Windows repository. Instead they should branch WPF, make a platform specific version (e.g. WPF-Linux, WPF-MacOS, etc), and submit pull requests upstream that are platform agnostic (e.g. bug fixes).
- topbanana 8y ago
  That's not the approach they've taken for other cross-platform work. Doesn't sound very efficient either.
  - Someone1234 8y ago
    You cannot contrast a Windows specific piece of code like WPF with projects that were created with original cross-platform support like .Net Core, it is an apples and oranges comparison. If they were starting WPF again today they might create an agnostic master, which has a Windows specific branch. But they aren't restarting WPF, they're just open sourcing what they already have.
  - jhall1468 8y ago
    It's very efficient for Microsoft. Evaluating pull requests for a different OS requires entirely different QA. At the end of the day, it's open source. Fork it.
  - connicpu 8y ago
    The difference is that with .NET Core they are committed to providing support for the cross platform implementation. With WPF they don't want to provide any official support or the idea that they might, so they're leaving the implementation up to 3rd parties that would be responsible for keeping the whole system working with any upstream changes.
  - simonh 8y ago
    They don’t intend these to be cross platform, so what they do with cross platform work isn’t really the issue. Suppose someone came up with .NET bindings for MacOS GUI controls, or Gnome. Would you expect a Microsoft to adopt those into .Net Core? MicroSoft have two roles here. On the one hand they are the custodians of the cross platform .NET Core system. In the second role they are the Windows platform owner and provider of .NET bindings for some platform specific features. If you decide to contribute to .NET Core, you join them in the first effort. If you come up with Gnome bindings or such, you are in the latter role but just because you are creating those bindings you’re under no obligation to port Gnome to Windows or anywhere else. Bindings for existing platform specific features are clearly in a separate category from shared cross platform features.
lozenge 8y ago
How are they supposed to evaluate such contributions? They would need to set it up in their CI, know details about those platforms, etc. What if the first contributor uses X11 apis and then somebody else wants to use Wayland, another wants to use (whatever hardware accelerated graphics API)... are they to reject everybody who wasn't first?
- tracker1 8y ago
  I would suggest that any initial support for cross platform efforts be centered around WINE myself. Likely the least friction. Not that I care.
azurezyq 8y ago
Open source doesn't mean open development and liability & commitments. They are different things. I actually think MS did a great job by saying that. The purpose is to literally make the source public but they don't have resources to make a long commitment. Then it's better to not say it clearly and later got accused as not well performing.
- rococode 8y ago
  Right, by releasing the code they're saying "here's some nice code, do what you want with it", but not "oh and we're increasing our investment into this product by expanding the team" which is what adding non-Windows support to their official repository would entail.
- runfaster2000 8y ago
  Partially true .. > Open source doesn't mean open development and liability & commitments. Right. We are stating up-front what we intend to achieve. We will sart with making WPF on .NET Core have parity with .NET Framework and then expand from there. We'll stick to Windows as the OS for the project. > The purpose is to literally make the source public but they don't have resources to make a long commitment. We are not saying that. We intend to continue working on WPF. In fact, we are talking about moving some of Microsoft's 1st-party apps to WPF on .NET Core, just like how we're moving 1st-party web sites/services to ASP.NET Core and .NET Core. Same playbook.
- oh-kumudo 8y ago
  Exactly. I think MS is a doing a gesture job to showcase their code, but they are not open sourcing the roadmap to the community, which is fine by me actually.
partiallypro 8y ago
If you want to do that, then fork it. Microsoft isn't stopping you from doing that.
polskibus 8y ago
What a pity. It would be cool to target canvas with winforms somehow, and just use that through wasm.
jenscow 8y ago
Thank you, Microsoft. Keep it contained in Windows! WPF apps are shoddy.
migueldeicaza 8y ago
Neither Windows.Forms or WPF can easily be made portable, the code is really a thin layer on top of existing Windows services. I know, because I did this before with Mono, and the changes would be highly disruptive to the codebase.
- Drdrdrq 8y ago
  Which is probably the reason they open-sourced it... Not much difference anyway.
  - pknopf 8y ago
    Except people can contribute to features/bugs for the platform that they do support?
    - SllX 8y ago
      Not to be overly cynical, but this is kind of obvious: that means your contributions really only benefit Microsoft in the long run. Sure you might derive benefit, but Microsoft is the real beneficiary here, and they don’t even have any obligation to pay you.
      - TomVDB 8y ago
        "Is the current situation better for the customer than the one yesterday?" is the way I like to think about these things.
      - jodrellblank 8y ago
        Name an open source freemium project run by a for-profit company which /doesn't/ benefit the company more than the individual submitting patches?
- tracker1 8y ago
  Would it be relatively easy to shim to use Wine (where available)?
chrisseaton 8y ago
Open source doesn't mean they have to accept any old feature you want to add to their project. Who's going to pay to buy the new CI machines they need to run someone's macOS backend that they contribute for example? Be reasonable.
BonesJustice 8y ago
Supporting cross-platform WPF (or WinForms) at this point would be a terrible idea for Microsoft. These frameworks have been around for many years, and many (if not most) of the applications built on those frameworks make heavy use of third-party control libraries. Those libraries, whether open source or propriety, often include at least some win32-specific interop code that has also been around for many years. Most of those libraries are now in “maintenance only” mode, if they’re even being maintained at all. Realistically, most Windows GUI applications built on .NET will never run on any platform other than Windows, even if the core UI frameworks become cross-platform. As soon as Microsoft says, “WPF is cross-platform now”, they’d get flooded with bug reports that aren’t even related to their code.
- tamrix 8y ago
  Wow, someone who makes sense for once. I love and embrace open source but I'm sure as glue that the developers who want cross platform winforms and wpf will never use it.
  - cm2187 8y ago
    I agree. My thinking is that the only place where any desktop app is still actively developed is the enterprise (and even there the trend is to get everything web based), and this is predominantly a windows environment. Outside of the enterprise everything has gone mobile where wpf isn't really an option (solutions like Xamarin aren't fun to use). My guess is that desktop apps will come back with pwa+wasm. Then you can have a rich client that is fully cross platform, single code base, same behavior everywhere, easy to deploy, written in the language of your choice. But that doesn't involve wpf...
RickSanchez2600 8y ago
Can't you just fork the project and make your own cross platform WPF and Windows Forms? Name it something else and don't give the code to Microsoft?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
white-flame 8y ago
It's MIT licensed. Who cares about the rules on their repo when you can just fork it?
antaviana 8y ago
I guess that this very clear positioning from Microsoft means that there is still room for someone to come up with a XAML UI kit for .NET Core, and name it it CPF (Core Presentation Foundation) instead of WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). I understand that the open source WPF can be freely used as a reference from where to borrow a few things.
meuk 8y ago
If they gave people the illusion that they could make WPF cross-platform it would mean a lot of wasted time for both Microsoft and the contributors. So it's probably better to remove that illusion right away. People can always fork and work on it, Microsoft is just sending the message that they won't do any work to incorporate any of it. Open-sourcing something is not an obligation to keep maintaining something.
- Novashi 8y ago
  I don't even know what the appeal of WinForms/WPF is these days. They don't really offer UI controls or a user experience that's better than well-done websites or electron apps.
ackidacki 8y ago
Fork it, what's the big deal? What would you do if someone rejects your PR anyway?

drewg123 8y ago

Its not that much different than the Linux kernel in that respect. Eg, you cannot submit a driver w/ifdefs and compat shims for other OSes.

bunderbunder 8y ago
Theoretically you can still get WPF running on another OS, but you'd have to do it the same way that WSL gets an Ubuntu userland running on Linux: You introduce a compatibility layer that it runs on top of. I think I'd prefer that approach, anyway - I'd guess it's cleaner and ultimately more maintainable than introducing a whole bunch of conditional logic for handling all the cross-platform issues into an already complicated piece of software.
- int_19h 8y ago
  WPF already has such a layer, actually - Media Integration Layer, MIL.
mr_overalls 8y ago
But this isn't a kernel - it's a framework with explicit goals of being cross-platform.
- floatboth 8y ago
  No, it never had a goal of being portable to non-Microsoft platforms, and it doesn't suddenly add that as a goal just because it's open source now.
  - flukus 8y ago
    Well for WPF there was silverlight for a while, a limited but (gimped)cross platform version of WPF. I wouldn't be surprised if there were abstractions to make porting to openGL easier.
- nikofeyn 8y ago
  > it's a framework with explicit goals of being cross-platform where did they notate their goals for wpf and winforms to be cross-platform? they specifically mentioned they open-sourced them to open up windows development.
  - mr_overalls 8y ago
    You're right. I mistakenly conflated the goals of wpf with dotnetcore.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]

Someone1234 8y ago

In that Git repository. Nobody should be submitting pull requests for cross-platform support into WPF's main Windows repository. Instead they should branch WPF, make a platform specific version (e.g. WPF-Linux, WPF-MacOS, etc), and submit pull requests upstream that are platform agnostic (e.g. bug fixes).

topbanana 8y ago
That's not the approach they've taken for other cross-platform work. Doesn't sound very efficient either.
- Someone1234 8y ago
  You cannot contrast a Windows specific piece of code like WPF with projects that were created with original cross-platform support like .Net Core, it is an apples and oranges comparison. If they were starting WPF again today they might create an agnostic master, which has a Windows specific branch. But they aren't restarting WPF, they're just open sourcing what they already have.
- jhall1468 8y ago
  It's very efficient for Microsoft. Evaluating pull requests for a different OS requires entirely different QA. At the end of the day, it's open source. Fork it.
- connicpu 8y ago
  The difference is that with .NET Core they are committed to providing support for the cross platform implementation. With WPF they don't want to provide any official support or the idea that they might, so they're leaving the implementation up to 3rd parties that would be responsible for keeping the whole system working with any upstream changes.
- simonh 8y ago
  They don’t intend these to be cross platform, so what they do with cross platform work isn’t really the issue. Suppose someone came up with .NET bindings for MacOS GUI controls, or Gnome. Would you expect a Microsoft to adopt those into .Net Core? MicroSoft have two roles here. On the one hand they are the custodians of the cross platform .NET Core system. In the second role they are the Windows platform owner and provider of .NET bindings for some platform specific features. If you decide to contribute to .NET Core, you join them in the first effort. If you come up with Gnome bindings or such, you are in the latter role but just because you are creating those bindings you’re under no obligation to port Gnome to Windows or anywhere else. Bindings for existing platform specific features are clearly in a separate category from shared cross platform features.

lozenge 8y ago

How are they supposed to evaluate such contributions? They would need to set it up in their CI, know details about those platforms, etc. What if the first contributor uses X11 apis and then somebody else wants to use Wayland, another wants to use (whatever hardware accelerated graphics API)... are they to reject everybody who wasn't first?

tracker1 8y ago
I would suggest that any initial support for cross platform efforts be centered around WINE myself. Likely the least friction. Not that I care.

azurezyq 8y ago

Open source doesn't mean open development and liability & commitments. They are different things. I actually think MS did a great job by saying that. The purpose is to literally make the source public but they don't have resources to make a long commitment. Then it's better to not say it clearly and later got accused as not well performing.

rococode 8y ago
Right, by releasing the code they're saying "here's some nice code, do what you want with it", but not "oh and we're increasing our investment into this product by expanding the team" which is what adding non-Windows support to their official repository would entail.
runfaster2000 8y ago
Partially true .. > Open source doesn't mean open development and liability & commitments. Right. We are stating up-front what we intend to achieve. We will sart with making WPF on .NET Core have parity with .NET Framework and then expand from there. We'll stick to Windows as the OS for the project. > The purpose is to literally make the source public but they don't have resources to make a long commitment. We are not saying that. We intend to continue working on WPF. In fact, we are talking about moving some of Microsoft's 1st-party apps to WPF on .NET Core, just like how we're moving 1st-party web sites/services to ASP.NET Core and .NET Core. Same playbook.
oh-kumudo 8y ago
Exactly. I think MS is a doing a gesture job to showcase their code, but they are not open sourcing the roadmap to the community, which is fine by me actually.

partiallypro 8y ago

If you want to do that, then fork it. Microsoft isn't stopping you from doing that.

polskibus 8y ago

What a pity. It would be cool to target canvas with winforms somehow, and just use that through wasm.

jenscow 8y ago

Thank you, Microsoft. Keep it contained in Windows! WPF apps are shoddy.

migueldeicaza 8y ago

Neither Windows.Forms or WPF can easily be made portable, the code is really a thin layer on top of existing Windows services. I know, because I did this before with Mono, and the changes would be highly disruptive to the codebase.

Drdrdrq 8y ago
Which is probably the reason they open-sourced it... Not much difference anyway.
- pknopf 8y ago
  Except people can contribute to features/bugs for the platform that they do support?
  - SllX 8y ago
    Not to be overly cynical, but this is kind of obvious: that means your contributions really only benefit Microsoft in the long run. Sure you might derive benefit, but Microsoft is the real beneficiary here, and they don’t even have any obligation to pay you.
    - TomVDB 8y ago
      "Is the current situation better for the customer than the one yesterday?" is the way I like to think about these things.
    - jodrellblank 8y ago
      Name an open source freemium project run by a for-profit company which /doesn't/ benefit the company more than the individual submitting patches?
tracker1 8y ago
Would it be relatively easy to shim to use Wine (where available)?

chrisseaton 8y ago

Open source doesn't mean they have to accept any old feature you want to add to their project. Who's going to pay to buy the new CI machines they need to run someone's macOS backend that they contribute for example? Be reasonable.

BonesJustice 8y ago

Supporting cross-platform WPF (or WinForms) at this point would be a terrible idea for Microsoft. These frameworks have been around for many years, and many (if not most) of the applications built on those frameworks make heavy use of third-party control libraries. Those libraries, whether open source or propriety, often include at least some win32-specific interop code that has also been around for many years. Most of those libraries are now in “maintenance only” mode, if they’re even being maintained at all. Realistically, most Windows GUI applications built on .NET will never run on any platform other than Windows, even if the core UI frameworks become cross-platform. As soon as Microsoft says, “WPF is cross-platform now”, they’d get flooded with bug reports that aren’t even related to their code.

tamrix 8y ago
Wow, someone who makes sense for once. I love and embrace open source but I'm sure as glue that the developers who want cross platform winforms and wpf will never use it.
- cm2187 8y ago
  I agree. My thinking is that the only place where any desktop app is still actively developed is the enterprise (and even there the trend is to get everything web based), and this is predominantly a windows environment. Outside of the enterprise everything has gone mobile where wpf isn't really an option (solutions like Xamarin aren't fun to use). My guess is that desktop apps will come back with pwa+wasm. Then you can have a rich client that is fully cross platform, single code base, same behavior everywhere, easy to deploy, written in the language of your choice. But that doesn't involve wpf...

RickSanchez2600 8y ago

Can't you just fork the project and make your own cross platform WPF and Windows Forms? Name it something else and don't give the code to Microsoft?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

white-flame 8y ago

It's MIT licensed. Who cares about the rules on their repo when you can just fork it?

antaviana 8y ago

I guess that this very clear positioning from Microsoft means that there is still room for someone to come up with a XAML UI kit for .NET Core, and name it it CPF (Core Presentation Foundation) instead of WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). I understand that the open source WPF can be freely used as a reference from where to borrow a few things.

meuk 8y ago

If they gave people the illusion that they could make WPF cross-platform it would mean a lot of wasted time for both Microsoft and the contributors. So it's probably better to remove that illusion right away. People can always fork and work on it, Microsoft is just sending the message that they won't do any work to incorporate any of it. Open-sourcing something is not an obligation to keep maintaining something.

Novashi 8y ago
I don't even know what the appeal of WinForms/WPF is these days. They don't really offer UI controls or a user experience that's better than well-done websites or electron apps.

ackidacki 8y ago

Fork it, what's the big deal? What would you do if someone rejects your PR anyway?