5 ms·

As a WPF developer, is it really modern though? Everyday at work I feel like I’m on the Titanic. Well built, well designed, but sinking.

int_19h 5y ago
How is it sinking, though? It's not getting improvements, but that's a very different thing.
- ripley12 5y ago
  It's a similar thing IMO. WPF is understaffed to the point where it might as well be dead in my mind. It hasn't received major new features in a decade. It's currently owned by the Windows team (not the .NET team) and they have staffed it with a skeleton crew. They don't even have bandwidth to review most community PRs. Even the .NET team doesn't get responses to issues they raise on the WPF repo: https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/issues/3811 https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/issues/3811 Adding to all that, WPF has a massive dependency on C++/CLI which means it cannot take advantage of many new .NET features until that is rewritten. And from what I can tell (from the outside) that will never happen.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    At least C++/CLI isn't like the C++/WinRT dependency on WinUI/UWP. Editing IDL files without VS tooling just like in the good old COM days pre-.NET, lovely.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    This is all true, but the framework doesn't just stop working because of that, and the tooling continues to support it. Hell, even WinForms is still chugging along, remaining a valid way to write desktop apps for Windows - and it has been in similar limbo for much longer.
    - pipeline_peak 5y ago
      Yeah, but like WPF, very little companies are writing promising new software using WinForms. I stripped my resume of anything WinForm related because I kept getting god damn DoD legacy-ware jobs.
    - ripley12 5y ago
      Hmm, I wouldn’t say WinForms is in a similar limbo right now. It's maintained by the .NET team and it gets more attention than WPF. Work is happening to make WinForms compatible with NativeAOT and trimming, I think it will land in .NET 7 or 8. (but yes, true, WPF still works and it gets enough support to keep it limping along)
- mastax 5y ago
  Adding to what ripley said, there's never been a great (FOSS) ecosystem of WPF libraries. By now half of them haven't been updated since 2012 and half of those have bugs if you try to use them in .NET 5+.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    It's not surprising, Microsoft seemed to abandon it at birth. If Microsoft can't be bothered then why should anybody else.
    - int_19h 5y ago
      Visual Studio still has large parts of its UI written in WPF.
      - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
        That's a good example. Where is the property grid in WPF, a component that is central to Visual Studio's UI.
        int_19h 5y ago
        Visual Studio has bits and pieces written in pretty much all UI frameworks that Microsoft ever had - at some point there were even HTAs there, not sure if that's still the case. Some bits get rewritten, like the main window chrome / menus / toolbars (all WPF now). Some do not. That said, as I recall, the property editor that you get when editing WPF controls and forms is itself WPF these days. But anyway, my point is that it was hardly "abandoned at birth", given that WPF was originally released with .NET 3.0 in 2006, while the first version of VS to get WPF UI was VS 2010 - and more was rewritten since then. Even if no new VS components are ever going to be written in it, maintaining the existing ones makes it necessary to maintain WPF to some bare minimum standard. (The same goes for WinForms and other UI stacks that VS still uses in places.)
        5y ago
lopiranti 5y ago
I have never really understood what 'modern' means whenever someone shows their new library / framework / tool. We're mostly just re-hashing ideas from the 60s and the 70s anyway. I think modern simply means "similar to what big tech does". So those ugly characters with big arms and small heads? Modern. Flat design? Modern. Is it good? Who cares, it's modern. When it comes to GUI it looks like we are slowly converging back to Windows 3.1 in terms of visual and programming style. Is it modern?
- tata71 5y ago
  > I have never really understood what 'modern' means whenever someone shows their new library / framework / tool. It means they think it can do modern web api stuff without having huge issues. It also signals that the speaker thinks others would make a similar choice in the future, for a dev tool etc., hoping for network effect . community familiarity and support.
- cosmotic 5y ago
  Win 3.1 shipped with zero-effort dark mode, so maybe a bit before windows 3.1 =)
  - nine_k 5y ago
    You of course could switch color schemes easily. But a lot of apps ignored them, wholly or partially, and just hard-coded colors. Try it with e.g. MS Word 6.
    - cosmotic 5y ago
      I find that as time passes, more and more apps are custom rendered and don't use system color settings. Peak support was way back in the nineties.
      - oneplane 5y ago
        Peak support seems to be around the platinum/CDE time where everything was just happy to finally have consistent sets of widgets to work with.
UglyToad 5y ago
Have you got any views on whether Avalonia might have legs?
- wiso 5y ago
  It has and it has WinUI fluent theme built-in.

int_19h 5y ago

How is it sinking, though? It's not getting improvements, but that's a very different thing.

ripley12 5y ago
It's a similar thing IMO. WPF is understaffed to the point where it might as well be dead in my mind. It hasn't received major new features in a decade. It's currently owned by the Windows team (not the .NET team) and they have staffed it with a skeleton crew. They don't even have bandwidth to review most community PRs. Even the .NET team doesn't get responses to issues they raise on the WPF repo: https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/issues/3811 https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/issues/3811 Adding to all that, WPF has a massive dependency on C++/CLI which means it cannot take advantage of many new .NET features until that is rewritten. And from what I can tell (from the outside) that will never happen.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  At least C++/CLI isn't like the C++/WinRT dependency on WinUI/UWP. Editing IDL files without VS tooling just like in the good old COM days pre-.NET, lovely.
- int_19h 5y ago
  This is all true, but the framework doesn't just stop working because of that, and the tooling continues to support it. Hell, even WinForms is still chugging along, remaining a valid way to write desktop apps for Windows - and it has been in similar limbo for much longer.
  - pipeline_peak 5y ago
    Yeah, but like WPF, very little companies are writing promising new software using WinForms. I stripped my resume of anything WinForm related because I kept getting god damn DoD legacy-ware jobs.
  - ripley12 5y ago
    Hmm, I wouldn’t say WinForms is in a similar limbo right now. It's maintained by the .NET team and it gets more attention than WPF. Work is happening to make WinForms compatible with NativeAOT and trimming, I think it will land in .NET 7 or 8. (but yes, true, WPF still works and it gets enough support to keep it limping along)
mastax 5y ago
Adding to what ripley said, there's never been a great (FOSS) ecosystem of WPF libraries. By now half of them haven't been updated since 2012 and half of those have bugs if you try to use them in .NET 5+.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  It's not surprising, Microsoft seemed to abandon it at birth. If Microsoft can't be bothered then why should anybody else.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    Visual Studio still has large parts of its UI written in WPF.
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      That's a good example. Where is the property grid in WPF, a component that is central to Visual Studio's UI.
      - int_19h 5y ago
        Visual Studio has bits and pieces written in pretty much all UI frameworks that Microsoft ever had - at some point there were even HTAs there, not sure if that's still the case. Some bits get rewritten, like the main window chrome / menus / toolbars (all WPF now). Some do not. That said, as I recall, the property editor that you get when editing WPF controls and forms is itself WPF these days. But anyway, my point is that it was hardly "abandoned at birth", given that WPF was originally released with .NET 3.0 in 2006, while the first version of VS to get WPF UI was VS 2010 - and more was rewritten since then. Even if no new VS components are ever going to be written in it, maintaining the existing ones makes it necessary to maintain WPF to some bare minimum standard. (The same goes for WinForms and other UI stacks that VS still uses in places.)
        5y ago

lopiranti 5y ago

I have never really understood what 'modern' means whenever someone shows their new library / framework / tool. We're mostly just re-hashing ideas from the 60s and the 70s anyway. I think modern simply means "similar to what big tech does". So those ugly characters with big arms and small heads? Modern. Flat design? Modern. Is it good? Who cares, it's modern. When it comes to GUI it looks like we are slowly converging back to Windows 3.1 in terms of visual and programming style. Is it modern?

tata71 5y ago
> I have never really understood what 'modern' means whenever someone shows their new library / framework / tool. It means they think it can do modern web api stuff without having huge issues. It also signals that the speaker thinks others would make a similar choice in the future, for a dev tool etc., hoping for network effect . community familiarity and support.
cosmotic 5y ago
Win 3.1 shipped with zero-effort dark mode, so maybe a bit before windows 3.1 =)
- nine_k 5y ago
  You of course could switch color schemes easily. But a lot of apps ignored them, wholly or partially, and just hard-coded colors. Try it with e.g. MS Word 6.
  - cosmotic 5y ago
    I find that as time passes, more and more apps are custom rendered and don't use system color settings. Peak support was way back in the nineties.
    - oneplane 5y ago
      Peak support seems to be around the platinum/CDE time where everything was just happy to finally have consistent sets of widgets to work with.

UglyToad 5y ago

Have you got any views on whether Avalonia might have legs?

wiso 5y ago
It has and it has WinUI fluent theme built-in.