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WPF is dead in the sense that Microsoft doesn't want to be promoting a non-cloud, non-mobile technology. WPF is alive in the sense that it is the best solution
by steven777400 12y ago
WPF is dead in the sense that Microsoft doesn't want to be promoting a non-cloud, non-mobile technology. WPF is alive in the sense that it is the best solution for meeting certain customer needs today.
For example, we have a very heavy desktop application that needs to run on Windows 7 PCs with IE 8. When we started developing this application a year ago, the cost to do it in HTML5/CSS/JS given the maturity of the tools at that time, compared to WPF, made WPF the obvious choice. In a few years when local web databases and synchronization frameworks have improved (we just saw a really neat one a day or two ago here on HN) and all the machines have been replaced with Windows 10 and IE 11, an offline web app would be the right choice. But we can't (or, don't want to) delay development until that time. So, for now, WPF is the right answer.
But anyone who thinks WPF is still a first-class citizen or that Microsoft is going to come back in marketing support of it is probably kidding themselves.
- _random_ 12y agoEnjoy it while it lasts, Bootstrap/HTML and JS are so lame after XAML and C# :(.
- jenscow 12y agoIn my opinion, Dart makes JS less lame (via dart2js). It's the closest you'll get to C# in the browser.
- MichaelGG 12y agoOr just write in F# and compile to JavaScript. That's better than C# in the browser.
- tonyedgecombe 12y agoI just started a new WPF application, I don't think it is going away any time soon.
- _pmf_ 12y ago> WPF is dead in the sense that Microsoft doesn't want to be promoting a non-cloud, non-mobile technology. Which is strange, since this is the only place where they still dominate and offer tangible advantages over practically all other fat client solutions. Java desktop UIs are dead (except from Eclipse, which is a walking zombie despite their e4 efforts), and there are not many other options if you want a solution that supports bidirectional data binding. The recent trend of using web applications inside a Webkit/Chromium container has a strange attraction, as convoluted as this solution is.