5 ms·

WPF has been superseded (supposedly) by UWP / WinGUI / MAUI / Blazor?

Const-me 2y ago
UWP was designed primarily for Windows phones, usability on desktops suffers. And it requires windows store, you can’t just ship an installer .exe WinUI seems to be copy-pasted from UWP, same usability issues on desktops. Unlike UWP, it’s a mess in terms of software quality. Also the runtime is huge, I think the size in MB even exceeds Electron. About MAUI, it seems Microsoft decided to make an abstraction over native controls. It’s been tried for decades and it always results in the same suboptimal result because these GUI frameworks implement the least common denominator of available UX. In addition to that, on Windows that thing uses WinUI3 backend, see the previous paragraph. I don’t know anything about Blazor, but it seems that thing is for web apps?
- pjmlp 2y ago
  MAUI is basically Xamarin.Forms, rebranded and rewritten, thus forcing the whole Xamarin community to rewrite their stuff, or go elsewhere. Miguel de Icaza is pretty sour on this, and quite likely one of the reasons he is now fully into Apple ecosystem and Swift. Blazor started with being only a WebAssembly based framework, then they decided to put everthing on ASP.NET under Blazor umbrella, and are now pushing Blazor into everything that has a Webview, including the stupid idea of Hybrid Blazor in MAUI, basically Electron in .NET.
  - glzone1 2y ago
    Blazor is interesting. They are biting off an absolutely metric done of stuff. I will say their development style -> social media etc seems good which might help drive some buyin. They have public roadmaps. The outcomes still pretty rough ("Could not reconnect to the server") when falling off the happy path. So it still had a bit of that "in theory" development style that in terms of use annoys developers.
pjmlp 2y ago
Nope, the GUI story is so bad, that at BUILD 2024, WPF was made again an official Windows GUI framework for .NET devs, see BUILD 2024 sessions regarding Windows programming.
- glzone1 2y ago
  Haha.. That is too funny - I haven't been following this closely anymore. It's honestly wild. Does WPF still do data binding by reflection? I can usually "feel" a WPF app if I'm doing a lot of data work. I remember when WinForms (which I thought was fine!) was killed. Why they just didn't continue to build on that I don't know (yes, I've heard the explanations, the importance of things like having XML (barf) in the framework). How can you not be absolutely kicking butt on your own platform with a great story especially because they absolutely HAD a great story both at entry level LOB and advanced LOB.
  - Kwpolska 2y ago
    WinForms is still actively developed (although it wasn't always). I prefer XML to manually placing controls in a window and clicking around a designer GUI at all times. XML is trivially editable by hand, WinForms auto-generated C# isn't.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Supposedly is being worked on for making it more Native AOT friendly. How we got into this mess? WinDev and DevDiv politcs. After the Longhorn debacle, its technologies landed on DevDiv, like WCF and WPF. Sinofsky and friends never were that keen in having .NET coming into their turf, it is no surprise that Hilo sample for Windows 7, then praises COM and C++ for Windows applications[0][1]. Then coming in this path, WinRT came to be, with roots as how .NET was being designed, before Microsoft decided to pivot it as another Java like technology[2]. A bunch of folks in WinDev, weren't happy with C++/CX, so they united to replace it with C++/WinRT, because extensions, when clang and GCC are full of extensions, promised to give back a C++/CX like developer experience in 2017[3], never delivered, went to have fun with Rust/WinRT. Now C++/WinRT is in maintenance mode[4], and Rust/WinRT never took off, and is now Rust/windows-rs[5]. As paying customer, impacted by those childish attitudes, I would have had the whole team fired. Finally, check the amount of bugs and complaints on their respective repos, https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsAppSDK https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsAppSDK https://github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt/ https://github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt/ And then compare with Project Reunion vision from 2021, and where we are three years later https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/03/29/announcing-project-reunion-0-5/ https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/03/29/announ... Mainly because along the way, as if those changes weren't enough, they also decided to reboot their initial approach with Project Reunion, WinAppSDK took another route, and here we are. This is only a short overview of how WinRT went down since Windows 8, thus only those that never advocated for it, can honestly suggest WinUI, as they lack the background of how chaotic it all is. [0] - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/announcing-hilo/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/announcing-hilo/ [1] - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/msdn10/ff795785(v=msdn.10) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/msdn10/f... [2] - https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt-everything-old-is-new-again/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt... [3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TdpWB_vRZM&t=2983s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TdpWB_vRZM&t=2983s [4] - https://github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt/issues/1289#issuecomment-1481303844 https://github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt/issues/1289#issuecomme... [5] - https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs
gardaani 2y ago
WPF seems to be one of the preferred native UI platforms: "Microsoft will refresh WPF with new Windows 11 theming and hyphen-based ligatures support for Microsoft .NET 9 and will continue to invest in WPF as one of the two preferred native user interface platforms on Windows." The other preferred native UI platform seems to be WinUI 3: "WinUI 3 joins Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) as the two recommended native UI platforms for developers." https://news.microsoft.com/build-2024-book-of-news/ https://news.microsoft.com/build-2024-book-of-news/ I don't know about MAUI / Blazor.

UWP was designed primarily for Windows phones, usability on desktops suffers. And it requires windows store, you can’t just ship an installer .exe WinUI seems to be copy-pasted from UWP, same usability issues on desktops. Unlike UWP, it’s a mess in terms of software quality. Also the runtime is huge, I think the size in MB even exceeds Electron. About MAUI, it seems Microsoft decided to make an abstraction over native controls. It’s been tried for decades and it always results in the same suboptimal result because these GUI frameworks implement the least common denominator of available UX. In addition to that, on Windows that thing uses WinUI3 backend, see the previous paragraph. I don’t know anything about Blazor, but it seems that thing is for web apps?

pjmlp 2y ago
MAUI is basically Xamarin.Forms, rebranded and rewritten, thus forcing the whole Xamarin community to rewrite their stuff, or go elsewhere. Miguel de Icaza is pretty sour on this, and quite likely one of the reasons he is now fully into Apple ecosystem and Swift. Blazor started with being only a WebAssembly based framework, then they decided to put everthing on ASP.NET under Blazor umbrella, and are now pushing Blazor into everything that has a Webview, including the stupid idea of Hybrid Blazor in MAUI, basically Electron in .NET.
- glzone1 2y ago
  Blazor is interesting. They are biting off an absolutely metric done of stuff. I will say their development style -> social media etc seems good which might help drive some buyin. They have public roadmaps. The outcomes still pretty rough ("Could not reconnect to the server") when falling off the happy path. So it still had a bit of that "in theory" development style that in terms of use annoys developers.

pjmlp 2y ago

Nope, the GUI story is so bad, that at BUILD 2024, WPF was made again an official Windows GUI framework for .NET devs, see BUILD 2024 sessions regarding Windows programming.

glzone1 2y ago
Haha.. That is too funny - I haven't been following this closely anymore. It's honestly wild. Does WPF still do data binding by reflection? I can usually "feel" a WPF app if I'm doing a lot of data work. I remember when WinForms (which I thought was fine!) was killed. Why they just didn't continue to build on that I don't know (yes, I've heard the explanations, the importance of things like having XML (barf) in the framework). How can you not be absolutely kicking butt on your own platform with a great story especially because they absolutely HAD a great story both at entry level LOB and advanced LOB.
- Kwpolska 2y ago
  WinForms is still actively developed (although it wasn't always). I prefer XML to manually placing controls in a window and clicking around a designer GUI at all times. XML is trivially editable by hand, WinForms auto-generated C# isn't.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Supposedly is being worked on for making it more Native AOT friendly. How we got into this mess? WinDev and DevDiv politcs. After the Longhorn debacle, its technologies landed on DevDiv, like WCF and WPF. Sinofsky and friends never were that keen in having .NET coming into their turf, it is no surprise that Hilo sample for Windows 7, then praises COM and C++ for Windows applications[0][1]. Then coming in this path, WinRT came to be, with roots as how .NET was being designed, before Microsoft decided to pivot it as another Java like technology[2]. A bunch of folks in WinDev, weren't happy with C++/CX, so they united to replace it with C++/WinRT, because extensions, when clang and GCC are full of extensions, promised to give back a C++/CX like developer experience in 2017[3], never delivered, went to have fun with Rust/WinRT. Now C++/WinRT is in maintenance mode[4], and Rust/WinRT never took off, and is now Rust/windows-rs[5]. As paying customer, impacted by those childish attitudes, I would have had the whole team fired. Finally, check the amount of bugs and complaints on their respective repos, https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsAppSDK https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsAppSDK https://github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt/ https://github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt/ And then compare with Project Reunion vision from 2021, and where we are three years later https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/03/29/announcing-project-reunion-0-5/ https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/03/29/announ... Mainly because along the way, as if those changes weren't enough, they also decided to reboot their initial approach with Project Reunion, WinAppSDK took another route, and here we are. This is only a short overview of how WinRT went down since Windows 8, thus only those that never advocated for it, can honestly suggest WinUI, as they lack the background of how chaotic it all is. [0] - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/announcing-hilo/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/announcing-hilo/ [1] - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/msdn10/ff795785(v=msdn.10) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/msdn10/f... [2] - https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt-everything-old-is-new-again/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt... [3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TdpWB_vRZM&t=2983s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TdpWB_vRZM&t=2983s [4] - https://github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt/issues/1289#issuecomment-1481303844 https://github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt/issues/1289#issuecomme... [5] - https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs

gardaani 2y ago

WPF seems to be one of the preferred native UI platforms: "Microsoft will refresh WPF with new Windows 11 theming and hyphen-based ligatures support for Microsoft .NET 9 and will continue to invest in WPF as one of the two preferred native user interface platforms on Windows." The other preferred native UI platform seems to be WinUI 3: "WinUI 3 joins Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) as the two recommended native UI platforms for developers." https://news.microsoft.com/build-2024-book-of-news/ https://news.microsoft.com/build-2024-book-of-news/ I don't know about MAUI / Blazor.