4 ms·

> On the Windows side, isn't it a side-effect of the shift from standardized common controls to WPF that happened around the vista time-frame? It's much harder

> On the Windows side, isn't it a side-effect of the shift from standardized common controls to WPF that happened around the vista time-frame? It's much harder to provide consistent user theming against non-standard controls. Not directly. If you code in Win32 on modern Windows, you pretty much have to enable themed widgets. Once you've enabled themed widgets, you give up the ability for the user to control the appearance. I don't believe there was any technical reason for the change; it was the desire to have themed widgets (or in plain English: branded widgets) which made them uncustomisable.

marwis 6y ago
Most native desktop development in Windows is nowadays based on WPF and as parent mentioned WPF broke the consistency with the rest of Win32. WPF does it's own vector-based drawing that completely ignores legacy Win32 API except for some basics such as control colors. Even its standard Windows theme is a poor imitation of actual Windows style - you can easily spot WPF apps with default theme because they stick out like an eye sore.
- cgrealy 6y ago
  Is WPF actually that popular though? Honest question... last time I did any WPF dev was 2008 and I haven’t really seen it used much since. MS certainly aren’t hyping it much (although that could just be the decline of the desktop app in general). My impression was that it wasn’t worth it for small apps and not performant enough for things like CAD, etc.
  - marwis 6y ago
    It's highly popular for enterprise line of business and industrial apps you'll never hear about. Some of it is moving to web but web is not really competitive in terms of performance and integration (lots of legacy COM/ActiveX or closed source native libraries to integrate with). The only realistic alternative is using WinForms (more dead than WPF) or Qt but then you have to hire C++ programmers. It's certainly perfomant enough (much faster than web) for complex apps like CAD - the actual editor/renderer won't be WPF of course but some custom OpenGL/Direct3D code.

marwis 6y ago

Most native desktop development in Windows is nowadays based on WPF and as parent mentioned WPF broke the consistency with the rest of Win32. WPF does it's own vector-based drawing that completely ignores legacy Win32 API except for some basics such as control colors. Even its standard Windows theme is a poor imitation of actual Windows style - you can easily spot WPF apps with default theme because they stick out like an eye sore.

cgrealy 6y ago
Is WPF actually that popular though? Honest question... last time I did any WPF dev was 2008 and I haven’t really seen it used much since. MS certainly aren’t hyping it much (although that could just be the decline of the desktop app in general). My impression was that it wasn’t worth it for small apps and not performant enough for things like CAD, etc.
- marwis 6y ago
  It's highly popular for enterprise line of business and industrial apps you'll never hear about. Some of it is moving to web but web is not really competitive in terms of performance and integration (lots of legacy COM/ActiveX or closed source native libraries to integrate with). The only realistic alternative is using WinForms (more dead than WPF) or Qt but then you have to hire C++ programmers. It's certainly perfomant enough (much faster than web) for complex apps like CAD - the actual editor/renderer won't be WPF of course but some custom OpenGL/Direct3D code.