5 ms·

You don't have to be under an anti-microsoft rock. If you were a VB/WinForms type person - you've been wondering where Microsoft has been going with their deskt

You don't have to be under an anti-microsoft rock. If you were a VB/WinForms type person - you've been wondering where Microsoft has been going with their desktop ecosystem for AGES now. Ahh, finally we are told, this new release of .NET solves all the issues. Except when I try to do a simple forms based app with a drag and drop designer (something supported trivially decades ago) it's a constant list of errors, unsupported notices etc. I'm serious. What's the quickest way to drag a button onto a form that when I click it will change a label text to "hello world" with the new .net desktop platform?

zubspace 5y ago
I feel with you. The last time I tried to use Windows Forms with .NET Core was underwhelming. What some people don't realize how huge the .NET sector is (at least here in Europe). A lot of businesses and public services are running on Windows Server and their pace is glacial. Our company is still stuck in the Windows Forms world and slowly transitioning to WPF and even though .NET Core has been around for a while it's truly hard to move old code to the new world. And UI is not the only thing, which hinders us. WCF for example or windows only components (registry or auth-things) are hard to migrate and sometimes require a whole rewrite of some parts. It very much feels like the python 2 to python 3 migration, but the with the risk of Microsoft completely abandoning the old legacy tech in a few years (while python 2 apps could still chug along fine, if you're not in the mood of upgrading).
- to11mtm 5y ago
  > I feel with you. The last time I tried to use Windows Forms with .NET Core was underwhelming. I recently opined about the UI story on HN[0] and was met with a lot of 'who cares?' Which is really unfortunate, in the process of making .NET 'Webscale' we completely forgot about the desktop workflows that brought so many into the language in the first place. > What some people don't realize how huge the .NET sector is (at least here in Europe). Yeah, a lot of folks here have no idea. I've come to realize it over the years (interacting with a number of very talented European .NET devs, seeing the variety of tech from Europe/Russia) but a lot of American devs really seem to have their blinders on. Odd to note, of all the non-Microsoft OSS libraries I knowingly pull into my app, not very many of them have a US origin or majority of contributions from the US. IDK how much of that is mindset vs contracts (i.e. difficulty perceived or real to get approval to work on or make an OSS project) but it's something I've noticed. > And UI is not the only thing, which hinders us. WCF for example or windows only components (registry or auth-things) are hard to migrate and sometimes require a whole rewrite of some parts The biggest problem though is that there are -footguns- in upgrading. For example, if your old Web calls were using HttpWebRequest or an abstraction over it (like RestSharp,) all of the old assumptions about it not caching like HttpClient go out the window. IDK if you tried CoreWCF, but it's a thing. (I have never worked with WCF.) I know it's limited though. I'll admit that I understand why Microsoft made some of these decisions around killing off certain technologies. I -do- wish they would have handled the process better though. I think one big problem overall though is the community has in many cases not really 'stepped in' to fill these gaps. This is not to detract from the people that are -trying-. But projects like Avalonia have had a hard time building momentum. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29155173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29155173
  - ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
    > But projects like Avalonia have had a hard time building momentum. That's because they're mainly useful for people who want to make GUIs for Linux or OS X and/or use F# (with Avalonia.FuncUI).
siva7 5y ago
Is it that bad? I remember back in the Delphi days it were a few easy clicks.
- chadcmulligan 5y ago
  Software development tools have been going backwards since then.
starik36 5y ago
I am not sure why you are getting these results. The Visual Designer has worked for a solid release. I just did you what you asked in VS2019 (albeit with C#). File/New Project. Select Winforms App for .NET Core. A new form comes up. Click to Toolbox on the left. Drag a button to the form. Double click on the button to handle the click event. It's that simple. No errors.
- slownews45 5y ago
  Interesting, last time I tried doing this I had problems, I will try again.
jmnicolas 5y ago
It's not my experience: last week at work I converted one of my WPF app from .net 4.6 to .net 6 without a glitch. The only things I had to touch wasn't related to the graphic part. But to be fair I wrote all the XAML by hand, I never build a UI with the drag and drop tools. I never manage to get the result I want with these tools.

zubspace 5y ago

I feel with you. The last time I tried to use Windows Forms with .NET Core was underwhelming. What some people don't realize how huge the .NET sector is (at least here in Europe). A lot of businesses and public services are running on Windows Server and their pace is glacial. Our company is still stuck in the Windows Forms world and slowly transitioning to WPF and even though .NET Core has been around for a while it's truly hard to move old code to the new world. And UI is not the only thing, which hinders us. WCF for example or windows only components (registry or auth-things) are hard to migrate and sometimes require a whole rewrite of some parts. It very much feels like the python 2 to python 3 migration, but the with the risk of Microsoft completely abandoning the old legacy tech in a few years (while python 2 apps could still chug along fine, if you're not in the mood of upgrading).

to11mtm 5y ago
> I feel with you. The last time I tried to use Windows Forms with .NET Core was underwhelming. I recently opined about the UI story on HN[0] and was met with a lot of 'who cares?' Which is really unfortunate, in the process of making .NET 'Webscale' we completely forgot about the desktop workflows that brought so many into the language in the first place. > What some people don't realize how huge the .NET sector is (at least here in Europe). Yeah, a lot of folks here have no idea. I've come to realize it over the years (interacting with a number of very talented European .NET devs, seeing the variety of tech from Europe/Russia) but a lot of American devs really seem to have their blinders on. Odd to note, of all the non-Microsoft OSS libraries I knowingly pull into my app, not very many of them have a US origin or majority of contributions from the US. IDK how much of that is mindset vs contracts (i.e. difficulty perceived or real to get approval to work on or make an OSS project) but it's something I've noticed. > And UI is not the only thing, which hinders us. WCF for example or windows only components (registry or auth-things) are hard to migrate and sometimes require a whole rewrite of some parts The biggest problem though is that there are -footguns- in upgrading. For example, if your old Web calls were using HttpWebRequest or an abstraction over it (like RestSharp,) all of the old assumptions about it not caching like HttpClient go out the window. IDK if you tried CoreWCF, but it's a thing. (I have never worked with WCF.) I know it's limited though. I'll admit that I understand why Microsoft made some of these decisions around killing off certain technologies. I -do- wish they would have handled the process better though. I think one big problem overall though is the community has in many cases not really 'stepped in' to fill these gaps. This is not to detract from the people that are -trying-. But projects like Avalonia have had a hard time building momentum. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29155173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29155173
- ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
  > But projects like Avalonia have had a hard time building momentum. That's because they're mainly useful for people who want to make GUIs for Linux or OS X and/or use F# (with Avalonia.FuncUI).

siva7 5y ago

Is it that bad? I remember back in the Delphi days it were a few easy clicks.

chadcmulligan 5y ago
Software development tools have been going backwards since then.

starik36 5y ago

I am not sure why you are getting these results. The Visual Designer has worked for a solid release. I just did you what you asked in VS2019 (albeit with C#). File/New Project. Select Winforms App for .NET Core. A new form comes up. Click to Toolbox on the left. Drag a button to the form. Double click on the button to handle the click event. It's that simple. No errors.

slownews45 5y ago
Interesting, last time I tried doing this I had problems, I will try again.

jmnicolas 5y ago

It's not my experience: last week at work I converted one of my WPF app from .net 4.6 to .net 6 without a glitch. The only things I had to touch wasn't related to the graphic part. But to be fair I wrote all the XAML by hand, I never build a UI with the drag and drop tools. I never manage to get the result I want with these tools.