21–30 of 102 posts
WPF was fantastic for rich desktop applications. It makes me very happy that there is active effort from Microsoft to port it to .NET Core. If only it was cross platform...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neah, the internals are too Windows specific (Win32/DirectX) to be easely portable. Maybe this will be the basis of a cross platform toolkit in the future , but right now MS doesn't seem to really care....
...which is really unfortunate. If they did care, it could easily lead to a renaissance of desktop apps.
Also why would C# and WPF do that instead of the myrriads of other languages and desktop tech? WPF alone wasn't exactly popular on Windows itself.
WPF was fantastic for rich desktop applications. It makes me very happy that there is active effort from Microsoft to port it to .NET Core. If only it was cross platform...
You want Avalonia for that: https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia
And I really hope MS is neglecting WPF because some key insiders are looking to hand over the desktop story to some combination of Avalonia and Blazor.
Prior to creating Tag That Photo, we had little experience with the WPF beyond simple demo type applications. Of course we've come a long way over the course of development but it certainly hasn't been easy. We have extensive experience with many other UI frameworks such as WinForms, Android / iOS as well as various web frameworks, and I think it's safe to say that once you wrap your head around it, the WPF has the slickest architecture. The team that designed this really knew what they were doing. It has this "peeling-the-onion" mentality to it where it's simple to implement straight-forward use-cases but if you want lower-level control of essentially every aspect of rendering, binding, input handling etc it's all exposed for you.
In case you want to see the final product: https://www.tagthatphoto.com
Compared to winforms, WPF has an incredibly steep learning curve. Working with it was always painful to me. The vector graphics architecture they mention makes it even harder. While it's rich capabilities enable you to implement everything you can dream of, doesn't the same hold for JS desktop apps? (+ they are cross platform) I don't see the use case anymore...
It is brittle because XAML itself is a compiled language without the ability to step through or debug well, which means runtime errors in the object tree usually causes the entire app to crash with very abstract error messages.
it is complex because the language is supposed to be an object tree building mechanism and thus needs to be quite generic.
It is verbose because of the underlying abstracted data model. e.g dependency properties etc.
Compared to HTML, where the 'evolutionary' pressure to create a workable compromise is much higher.
I used to think XAML could be better if architected well, but the missing ecosystem and usage around it made it so, that HTML was and still is massively more productive.
What are the implications of this? WPF in Linux?
Neah, the internals are too Windows specific (Win32/DirectX) to be easely portable. Maybe this will be the basis of a cross platform toolkit in the future , but right now MS doesn't seem to really care....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
...which is really unfortunate. If they did care, it could easily lead to a renaissance of desktop apps.
Why? The Windows desktop is by a gigantic margin the most popular desktop environment. Mac and Linux combined cover perhaps a 10% or less, so if 90% coverage isn't enough for such a renaissance, why would a +~10% change that (especially considering that most of that 10% is Mac where anything except Cocoa feels weird and wrong to a very picky userbase)? Also why would C# and WPF do that instead of the myrriads of othe…
XAML makes it very easy to layout apps that scale well, and it's built-in states for controls and easy styling is very handy.
Compared to winforms, WPF has an incredibly steep learning curve. Working with it was always painful to me. The vector graphics architecture they mention makes it even harder. While it's rich capabilities enable you to implement everything you can dream of, doesn't the same hold for JS desktop apps? (+ they are cross platform) I don't see the use case anymore...
It's that composable.