6 ms·

WPF will be community run project

52 points by philonoist 4y ago

dt3ft 4y ago
Is this a generational problem? They can’t find any younger devs willing to work on WPF?
- mawadev 4y ago
  I had an interviewer ask me about my WPF experience in 2018. I told them I don't believe in the technology since everything went towards HTML/CSS/JS. Looks like I was right. You couldn't honestly pay me enough to touch WPF in 2023. I remember burning out on making WPF look decent and like a web ui back in 2016. The dual way databinding is awesome, but XAML can't and will never reach the maturity of HTML and CSS. They sent me a contract with a bad salary, I didn't accept it. I hope beginners stick to the web.
- Archelaos 4y ago
  Just look for older devs then.
  - NullPrefix 4y ago
    older devs are more expensive
    - dnndev 4y ago
      Exactly - pay top dollar for crud forms makes no sense just for them to be written in wpf…. Hello JavaScript
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Actually they can, that is the problem, all Windows UI frameworks suffer from the same issues that plagued IE, everyone moved on and the new intern's don't have any idea. You see this in several community talks, where .NET old timers ask about feature X in framework Y being available on framework Z, and many times they don't really understand what is being talked about. Most Microsoft veterans are now on Azure or Windows Server business units.
  - exceptione 4y ago
    Ow wow. Since you are a bit in the know, do you think wpf might start a new life on Linux as it gets opened? Xaml wasn't bad.
    - cjbgkagh 4y ago
      I’d like to see it get merged into AvaloniaUI which is already cross platform and built by smart people with experience.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Besides Avalonia, there is Uno as well. The difference being Avalonia uses WPF XAML, whereas Uno uses UWP/WinUI XAML. However they are community projects. From Microsoft, maybe MAUI one day gets to support Linux, which again, uses its own XAML flavour due to its Xamarin origins.
      - exceptione 4y ago
        Thank you. I get the feeling that MS is not too interested in the desktop at all though. I can see the money is in the cloud and I don't complain from my KDE desktop, but from a distance it looks quite radical to see them throw their crown jewels into the river.
        to11mtm 4y ago
        > I get the feeling that MS is not too interested in the desktop at all though. It hasn't served them well with WinUI (I tried it, but the versioning hell was too much.) That said, They over-compensated for over-focusing on desktop pre 2012ish. And now, they are acting completely silly in regards to MAUI (supporting Windows, Android, iOS, macOS, but -not- linux)
- dnndev 4y ago
  Not just younger devs. I am an older dev who has extensive experience with WPF and was relieved when I moved on to another stack. Having worked with winforms extensively wpf sucks on every level. Xaml is an atrocity that should not exist. Please Microsoft abandon xaml and back fully another established framework like react native for windows.
  - colde 4y ago
    Interestingly, my experience is totally different. I loved working with XAML and C# for building Silverlight apps, and would have preferred using that across more platforms. Especially with a nice editor like Expression Bland that got folded into VS.
    - spookthesunset 4y ago
      Totally had your experience as well. I thought that the bridge between XAML and the underlying object model was pretty rad. There were quite some rough edges, especially surrounding dependency properties. Those had way too much boilerplate. Also their hip new event system needed some fine tuning too.
- ripley12 4y ago
  No, it's not a generational thing. WPF hasn't had significant feature updates in the last 10 years, because MS abandoned it in favour of UWP. I wrote a bit about this recently: https://www.reillywood.com/blog/windows-ui-frameworks/ https://www.reillywood.com/blog/windows-ui-frameworks/
onphonenow 4y ago
As an early winForms developer how the hell did Microsoft lose its way so badly in terms of building an app on windows? Almost anyone could build a data bound app ages ago - then they burnt this all on a WPF / UPF / silver light etc bonfire. Back to the electron apps I go
- pipeline_peak 4y ago
  Because development firms don’t want to invest everything in one OS / platform.
- cjbgkagh 4y ago
  Microsoft steadily replaced their staff with increasingly dumber and more complaint developers. I was shocked with how bad it was when I worked there and I’ve only seen it get worse since. A lot of the damage was done by Steven Sinofsky and his vicious war with Dev Div. People wonder why the company hasn’t failed yet, it’s due to the incredible power of inertia. But even inertia runs out eventually - it’s a slow process but it is happening.
  - type0 4y ago
    Lobbying (bribing?) politicians is why they won't fail. They are like IBM, MS wouldn't hesitate to collaborate with Nazis if they have to. They surveil population on behalf of governments, existence of Windows 10 China Government Edition is evidence to why all Windows is essentially spyware.
    - cjbgkagh 4y ago
      I don’t disagree but I would consider MS turning into the modern day IBM to be a failure.
  - lostmsu 4y ago
    Now Dev Div feels like it's been divested. Since the last year I've been thinking its time to go for me too, but I still have a few dependencies.
- 4y ago
Khelavaster 4y ago
Younger devs didn't care about spending a few months learning to build efficient desktop applications.
- sirjaz 4y ago
  Also, all the college classes and the bootcamps for programming are geared towards webdev. Skipping the largest desktop platform in the world with 80% market share, and 38% share overall for all OSes both mobile and desktop.
  - gabereiser 4y ago
    Everything is a service now, ownership of software doesn't exist outside of forced arbitration through terms of service.
323 4y ago
Now that the standard GUI framework for Windows apps is Electron, there is no point in spending resources on legacy WPF. Much better investing that time in the actual tools that devs use, VS Code and Chromium.
tomalaci 4y ago
I remember when I wanted to get into C# desktop app development years ago and it was either WinForms or the newer WPF. I chose WPF and it took a while to get a hang of it (mostly I had to either import some libraries or create some common ones to handle variable updates through UI bindings). Unfortunately, WPF always felt unfinished and missing many QoL features. I was hoping they would further refine and make it easier to work with but I guess it was never meant to be. Windows 10 was coming around corner with UWP being pushed as the big desktop app SDK. Then they ditched that because people just didn't like Windows Store and how they did the apps on it (I also wasn't big fan of it). Then everything went to extremely resource-hungry Electron. Now there is .NET MAUI and and some general WinUI framework [1]. I am utterly confused what is happening with UI development on Windows ecosystem. On rare occasion I want to develop desktop app, I have used Avalonia UI [2] which seems to be something more stable than what MSFT churns out every year or two, can highly recommend that. Either way, they are really destroying Windows ecosystem by pushing out new framework every few years that always feels half-finished before they move on to the next one. This is, of course, on top of Windows versions in general with how they pile new half-finished UI reworks that just keeps piling on insane amounts of technical debt and legacy for future maintenance. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/ [2] https://avaloniaui.net/ https://avaloniaui.net/
- arkitaip 4y ago
  Never heard of Avalonia before but Win development is a solved problem in the form of Electron. No, seriously. Microsoft's own frameworks are in various states of limbo and increasingly confusing to get started with.
- geodel 4y ago
  > I am utterly confused what is happening with UI development on Windows ecosystem. As you said MS is all in with React based development for UI nowadays. I read somewhere that new versions of Office 365 applications would be in React.
  - recursive 4y ago
holbrad 4y ago
Been working on a legacy WPF project recently. C# has been pretty great to work with. (Updating from framework to NET 6 has been a slog though) Anything to do with the WPF and the UI just seems way too complicated. I can 100% understand why electron has taken over. Keeping my eye on blazor for desktop as I think that would be ideal.
- to11mtm 4y ago
  > Anything to do with the WPF and the UI just seems way too complicated. I can 100% understand why electron has taken over. I've found that doing WPF well requires very careful setup of your architecture. My biggest piece of advice; unless it's a simple CRUD app learn how to use the Dispatcher and pick how you want to handle background work. Especially if you're doing anything like WebSockets/SignalR. In my case I was on a deadline so I just pulled Akka.Net in and set up an actor to handle outbound and an actor to handle inbound. It made things -so- much easier to reason about, even if it was a bit of a 'bulldozer making a sand-castle' moment. OTOH it did also make the UI much more responsive so I have no regrets. WPF had some nice points. My first WPF app was actually a simple 'form' that field workers could use to fill out pole survey data. They'd send the files back to us, we could load the data in, finalize/check it... then run some funky flow that saved the screen as an XPF before converting to PDF. the 'fanciest' thing it did was look up a google maps image for a lat/lon and add it in. But when I tried to convert all of my existing winforms stuff to WPF (Fun tools that used COM to talk to CAD programs) It was a living nightmare and I gave up pretty quick (The winforms stuff worked, it worked well, and at the time WPF had caching issues that caused long cold starts anyway.) Hopefully Blazor works out. I'm hoping the internal inertia at Microsoft is in that direction (i.e. I think theres rumblings about Office moving to React, but perhaps Blazor would be a better option, I think it would be great for PowerApps.) But really, Microsoft lost the plot somewhere after VS2010 on Desktop/Productivity building. Workflow Foundation is a good example. Frankly, it was pretty powerful as far as what it could do, But it was clunky as hell, slow, and the overall API needed a good spit and shine (perhaps an easy way to do things in a more declarative way via code.) Come and think of it the time after that was when it became obvious Microsoft's lunch was starting to get eaten by Python, Ruby, and JVM ORMs, to say nothing of everything happening on the mobile side and the implications for devshare. (To be clear; I'm a Windows Phone apologist, Ironically the platform had a great focus on app-level privacy and sandboxing compared to competition. But it, like WinUI, stole resources from more 'global' solutions.) So it got quietly pushed to the side, used by others with the time to build some cool things (SSIS packages are similar in concept and somewhat workable,) and inspired/powered a wave of overpriced low/no code tools.
pitaj 4y ago
I recently built a brand new internal GUI tool in WPF. It wasn't bad but it has a few sharp edges: - documentation is lacking - open popups overlay EVERYTHING even windows from other applications - no easy way to create a component with a XAML template - no way to set dimensions to a proportion of the parent dimension
- lostmsu 4y ago
  > no way to set dimensions to a proportion of the parent dimension Grid's rows and columns are proportional. Or do you mean something else?
  - pitaj 4y ago
    I meant something else. In this case I wanted to set the margin property of an element to a certain % of the parent.
gigel82 4y ago
"Community run" is code for dead. See ChakraCore as an example.
- lostmsu 4y ago
  Chakra was not really ever used outside of Edge. WPF is widespread.
to11mtm 4y ago
If there is one sin here it's that Microsoft waited so long to do so while giving it little to no care in the meantime. AvaloniaUI and Uno have been around for YEARS now, and could have used this announcement earlier to get more inertia behind them.

52 points by philonoist 4y ago

dt3ft 4y ago

Is this a generational problem? They can’t find any younger devs willing to work on WPF?

mawadev 4y ago
I had an interviewer ask me about my WPF experience in 2018. I told them I don't believe in the technology since everything went towards HTML/CSS/JS. Looks like I was right. You couldn't honestly pay me enough to touch WPF in 2023. I remember burning out on making WPF look decent and like a web ui back in 2016. The dual way databinding is awesome, but XAML can't and will never reach the maturity of HTML and CSS. They sent me a contract with a bad salary, I didn't accept it. I hope beginners stick to the web.
Archelaos 4y ago
Just look for older devs then.
- NullPrefix 4y ago
  older devs are more expensive
  - dnndev 4y ago
    Exactly - pay top dollar for crud forms makes no sense just for them to be written in wpf…. Hello JavaScript
pjmlp 4y ago
Actually they can, that is the problem, all Windows UI frameworks suffer from the same issues that plagued IE, everyone moved on and the new intern's don't have any idea. You see this in several community talks, where .NET old timers ask about feature X in framework Y being available on framework Z, and many times they don't really understand what is being talked about. Most Microsoft veterans are now on Azure or Windows Server business units.
- exceptione 4y ago
  Ow wow. Since you are a bit in the know, do you think wpf might start a new life on Linux as it gets opened? Xaml wasn't bad.
  - cjbgkagh 4y ago
    I’d like to see it get merged into AvaloniaUI which is already cross platform and built by smart people with experience.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Besides Avalonia, there is Uno as well. The difference being Avalonia uses WPF XAML, whereas Uno uses UWP/WinUI XAML. However they are community projects. From Microsoft, maybe MAUI one day gets to support Linux, which again, uses its own XAML flavour due to its Xamarin origins.
    - exceptione 4y ago
      Thank you. I get the feeling that MS is not too interested in the desktop at all though. I can see the money is in the cloud and I don't complain from my KDE desktop, but from a distance it looks quite radical to see them throw their crown jewels into the river.
      - to11mtm 4y ago
        > I get the feeling that MS is not too interested in the desktop at all though. It hasn't served them well with WinUI (I tried it, but the versioning hell was too much.) That said, They over-compensated for over-focusing on desktop pre 2012ish. And now, they are acting completely silly in regards to MAUI (supporting Windows, Android, iOS, macOS, but -not- linux)
dnndev 4y ago
Not just younger devs. I am an older dev who has extensive experience with WPF and was relieved when I moved on to another stack. Having worked with winforms extensively wpf sucks on every level. Xaml is an atrocity that should not exist. Please Microsoft abandon xaml and back fully another established framework like react native for windows.
- colde 4y ago
  Interestingly, my experience is totally different. I loved working with XAML and C# for building Silverlight apps, and would have preferred using that across more platforms. Especially with a nice editor like Expression Bland that got folded into VS.
  - spookthesunset 4y ago
    Totally had your experience as well. I thought that the bridge between XAML and the underlying object model was pretty rad. There were quite some rough edges, especially surrounding dependency properties. Those had way too much boilerplate. Also their hip new event system needed some fine tuning too.
ripley12 4y ago
No, it's not a generational thing. WPF hasn't had significant feature updates in the last 10 years, because MS abandoned it in favour of UWP. I wrote a bit about this recently: https://www.reillywood.com/blog/windows-ui-frameworks/ https://www.reillywood.com/blog/windows-ui-frameworks/

onphonenow 4y ago

As an early winForms developer how the hell did Microsoft lose its way so badly in terms of building an app on windows? Almost anyone could build a data bound app ages ago - then they burnt this all on a WPF / UPF / silver light etc bonfire. Back to the electron apps I go

pipeline_peak 4y ago
Because development firms don’t want to invest everything in one OS / platform.
cjbgkagh 4y ago
Microsoft steadily replaced their staff with increasingly dumber and more complaint developers. I was shocked with how bad it was when I worked there and I’ve only seen it get worse since. A lot of the damage was done by Steven Sinofsky and his vicious war with Dev Div. People wonder why the company hasn’t failed yet, it’s due to the incredible power of inertia. But even inertia runs out eventually - it’s a slow process but it is happening.
- type0 4y ago
  Lobbying (bribing?) politicians is why they won't fail. They are like IBM, MS wouldn't hesitate to collaborate with Nazis if they have to. They surveil population on behalf of governments, existence of Windows 10 China Government Edition is evidence to why all Windows is essentially spyware.
  - cjbgkagh 4y ago
    I don’t disagree but I would consider MS turning into the modern day IBM to be a failure.
- lostmsu 4y ago
  Now Dev Div feels like it's been divested. Since the last year I've been thinking its time to go for me too, but I still have a few dependencies.
4y ago

Khelavaster 4y ago

Younger devs didn't care about spending a few months learning to build efficient desktop applications.

sirjaz 4y ago
Also, all the college classes and the bootcamps for programming are geared towards webdev. Skipping the largest desktop platform in the world with 80% market share, and 38% share overall for all OSes both mobile and desktop.
- gabereiser 4y ago
  Everything is a service now, ownership of software doesn't exist outside of forced arbitration through terms of service.

323 4y ago

Now that the standard GUI framework for Windows apps is Electron, there is no point in spending resources on legacy WPF. Much better investing that time in the actual tools that devs use, VS Code and Chromium.

tomalaci 4y ago

I remember when I wanted to get into C# desktop app development years ago and it was either WinForms or the newer WPF. I chose WPF and it took a while to get a hang of it (mostly I had to either import some libraries or create some common ones to handle variable updates through UI bindings). Unfortunately, WPF always felt unfinished and missing many QoL features. I was hoping they would further refine and make it easier to work with but I guess it was never meant to be. Windows 10 was coming around corner with UWP being pushed as the big desktop app SDK. Then they ditched that because people just didn't like Windows Store and how they did the apps on it (I also wasn't big fan of it). Then everything went to extremely resource-hungry Electron. Now there is .NET MAUI and and some general WinUI framework [1]. I am utterly confused what is happening with UI development on Windows ecosystem. On rare occasion I want to develop desktop app, I have used Avalonia UI [2] which seems to be something more stable than what MSFT churns out every year or two, can highly recommend that. Either way, they are really destroying Windows ecosystem by pushing out new framework every few years that always feels half-finished before they move on to the next one. This is, of course, on top of Windows versions in general with how they pile new half-finished UI reworks that just keeps piling on insane amounts of technical debt and legacy for future maintenance. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/ [2] https://avaloniaui.net/ https://avaloniaui.net/

arkitaip 4y ago
Never heard of Avalonia before but Win development is a solved problem in the form of Electron. No, seriously. Microsoft's own frameworks are in various states of limbo and increasingly confusing to get started with.
geodel 4y ago
> I am utterly confused what is happening with UI development on Windows ecosystem. As you said MS is all in with React based development for UI nowadays. I read somewhere that new versions of Office 365 applications would be in React.
- recursive 4y ago

holbrad 4y ago

Been working on a legacy WPF project recently. C# has been pretty great to work with. (Updating from framework to NET 6 has been a slog though) Anything to do with the WPF and the UI just seems way too complicated. I can 100% understand why electron has taken over. Keeping my eye on blazor for desktop as I think that would be ideal.

to11mtm 4y ago
> Anything to do with the WPF and the UI just seems way too complicated. I can 100% understand why electron has taken over. I've found that doing WPF well requires very careful setup of your architecture. My biggest piece of advice; unless it's a simple CRUD app learn how to use the Dispatcher and pick how you want to handle background work. Especially if you're doing anything like WebSockets/SignalR. In my case I was on a deadline so I just pulled Akka.Net in and set up an actor to handle outbound and an actor to handle inbound. It made things -so- much easier to reason about, even if it was a bit of a 'bulldozer making a sand-castle' moment. OTOH it did also make the UI much more responsive so I have no regrets. WPF had some nice points. My first WPF app was actually a simple 'form' that field workers could use to fill out pole survey data. They'd send the files back to us, we could load the data in, finalize/check it... then run some funky flow that saved the screen as an XPF before converting to PDF. the 'fanciest' thing it did was look up a google maps image for a lat/lon and add it in. But when I tried to convert all of my existing winforms stuff to WPF (Fun tools that used COM to talk to CAD programs) It was a living nightmare and I gave up pretty quick (The winforms stuff worked, it worked well, and at the time WPF had caching issues that caused long cold starts anyway.) Hopefully Blazor works out. I'm hoping the internal inertia at Microsoft is in that direction (i.e. I think theres rumblings about Office moving to React, but perhaps Blazor would be a better option, I think it would be great for PowerApps.) But really, Microsoft lost the plot somewhere after VS2010 on Desktop/Productivity building. Workflow Foundation is a good example. Frankly, it was pretty powerful as far as what it could do, But it was clunky as hell, slow, and the overall API needed a good spit and shine (perhaps an easy way to do things in a more declarative way via code.) Come and think of it the time after that was when it became obvious Microsoft's lunch was starting to get eaten by Python, Ruby, and JVM ORMs, to say nothing of everything happening on the mobile side and the implications for devshare. (To be clear; I'm a Windows Phone apologist, Ironically the platform had a great focus on app-level privacy and sandboxing compared to competition. But it, like WinUI, stole resources from more 'global' solutions.) So it got quietly pushed to the side, used by others with the time to build some cool things (SSIS packages are similar in concept and somewhat workable,) and inspired/powered a wave of overpriced low/no code tools.

pitaj 4y ago

I recently built a brand new internal GUI tool in WPF. It wasn't bad but it has a few sharp edges: - documentation is lacking - open popups overlay EVERYTHING even windows from other applications - no easy way to create a component with a XAML template - no way to set dimensions to a proportion of the parent dimension

lostmsu 4y ago
> no way to set dimensions to a proportion of the parent dimension Grid's rows and columns are proportional. Or do you mean something else?
- pitaj 4y ago
  I meant something else. In this case I wanted to set the margin property of an element to a certain % of the parent.

gigel82 4y ago

"Community run" is code for dead. See ChakraCore as an example.

lostmsu 4y ago
Chakra was not really ever used outside of Edge. WPF is widespread.

to11mtm 4y ago

If there is one sin here it's that Microsoft waited so long to do so while giving it little to no care in the meantime. AvaloniaUI and Uno have been around for YEARS now, and could have used this announcement earlier to get more inertia behind them.