Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub • Hacker News Board

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#31

Post by klodolph » Thu, May 23, 2019, 2:34 PM UTC

skc wrote: post #30

When I had the chance to use it seriously many years ago, what I found about WPF is that once you got the hang of it, you could literally look at any sufficiently complex application UI and know immediately how to build it using WPF in record time. It's that composable.

Agreed. People are complaining about it in this thread, but I thought it was almost on par with Cocoa, overall. Just like Cocoa, you have to "drink the Kool-aid" a bit and decide to structure your application to match the framework rather than adapt the framework to match your preconceived notion of how your application should be structured. Once you did, You could get a lot of work done.

Personally think that these frameworks, like WPF and Cocoa, are still easier than working with Angular/React/Vue, but TBH that might be a reflection of my weaknesses with web development more than anything else. XAML is a bit of a mess but compares favorably to HTML+CSS, and XAML is almost as good as Interface Builder in my mind. The MVVM approach in WPF could be improved but it makes sense.

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#32

Post by maxxxxx » Thu, May 23, 2019, 2:34 PM UTC

gzimhelshani wrote: post #9

Kuraj wrote: post #6

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...

.Net Core is cross platform. So, WPF is cross plaftorm now as well

Actually C/C++ is cross platform that means if windows is written in C/C++ Windows is cross platform.

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#33

Post by maxxxxx » Thu, May 23, 2019, 2:38 PM UTC

klodolph wrote: post #31

skc wrote: post #30

When I had the chance to use it seriously many years ago, what I found about WPF is that once you got the hang of it, you could literally look at any sufficiently complex application UI and know immediately how to build it using WPF in record time. It's that composable.

Agreed. People are complaining about it in this thread, but I thought it was almost on par with Cocoa, overall. Just like Cocoa, you have to "drink the Kool-aid" a bit and decide to structure your application to match the framework rather than adapt the framework to match your preconceived notion of how your application should be structured. Once you did, You could get a lot of work done. Personally think that these…

I still don’t understand why instead of evolving WPF MS keeps cranking out similar but incompatible XAML frameworks like Silverlight, WinRT and UWP. If they had stuck to WPF and made the syntax less verbose and easier to understand and fixed some other warts WPF would be a kick ass development tool.

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#34

Post by cltsang » Thu, May 23, 2019, 2:55 PM UTC

Reading this official Xamarin Forms document https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/cross-platform/desk... It's really hard to tell how the 2 offerings from Microsoft differs. It looks like Xamarin Forms is fairly mature, and supports Mac and Windows. Does anyone have production experience on both? When sould one choose one over another?

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#35

Post by moron4hire » Thu, May 23, 2019, 2:58 PM UTC

phdsolutions wrote: post #24

Totally agree with previous comments about WPF having a steep learning curve. We recently released our photo-tagging application called Tag That Photo. It's currently available for Windows and built on the WPF platform (Mac client coming in future). It detects & recognizes faces in user's local photo collections, allowing them to tag people, add keywords and location data to the images. All the data can be written ba…

Yeah, I agree completely. WPF may not be as "pick up and run" as WinForms was, and perhaps some of that "pick up and run" of WinForms was hold-over from VB6, or being young enough to spend tons of time on it. But once I stopped just trying to "hack" at it and started actually reading the documentation, I really came to appreciate WPF, how it's put together, how it all works. Wish I had gotten on board with it when it first came out, rather than putting it off until just a few years ago.

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#36

Post by maxxxxx » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:00 PM UTC

cltsang wrote: post #34

Reading this official Xamarin Forms document https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/cross-platform/desk... It's really hard to tell how the 2 offerings from Microsoft differs. It looks like Xamarin Forms is fairly mature, and supports Mac and Windows. Does anyone have production experience on both? When sould one choose one over another?

Maybe things have changed but my company did a Xamarin test two years ago and the results were horrible. They quickly went back to native apps.

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#37

Post by acct1771 » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:02 PM UTC

maxxxxx wrote: post #33

klodolph wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. People are complaining about it in this thread, but I thought it was almost on par with Cocoa, overall. Just like Cocoa, you have to "drink the Kool-aid" a bit and decide to structure your application to match the framework rather than adapt the framework to match your preconceived notion of how your application should be structured. Once you did, You could get a lot of work done. Personally think that these…

I still don’t understand why instead of evolving WPF MS keeps cranking out similar but incompatible XAML frameworks like Silverlight, WinRT and UWP. If they had stuck to WPF and made the syntax less verbose and easier to understand and fixed some other warts WPF would be a kick ass development tool.

What evolutions are you looking for that aren't covered in their .NET Core/.NET 5 plan?

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#38

Post by maxxxxx » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:03 PM UTC

m_fayer wrote: post #19

alkonaut wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern js frameworks makes mvvm/similar quite pleasant. Some of the binding in WPF is quite complex, especially since you don't get proper type safety for all that effort (there is a lot of stringly typed things sticking out). On the other hand, the layout model of WPF is a lot easier than mastering html+css. JS desktop apps still mostly don't work without embedding a browser like electron and that ranges from annoyi…

WPF never quite made the leap from data-binding and MVVM to a component-based + state-management architecture like React&friends. A consequence of that is a hairy overcomplicated mess of a binding system that's full of footguns. But it was still ahead of its time - that one last step would have made it amazing.

They could easily have done this but instead chose to make several new frameworks that didn’t improve anything. Very sad. Now MS has several mediocre not well maintained frameworks instead of a really good one. The constant churn also killed off a lot of open source efforts

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#39

Post by maxxxxx » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:19 PM UTC

acct1771 wrote: post #37

maxxxxx wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don’t understand why instead of evolving WPF MS keeps cranking out similar but incompatible XAML frameworks like Silverlight, WinRT and UWP. If they had stuck to WPF and made the syntax less verbose and easier to understand and fixed some other warts WPF would be a kick ass development tool.

What evolutions are you looking for that aren't covered in their .NET Core/.NET 5 plan?

Debugging data binding is hard. There could be a tighter coupling and type safety between view model and view. MVVM could be better integrated. The syntax generally could be simplified (MVC did this when they introduced Razor). There is a lot of room for improvement. The foundation is very good but very hard to learn and you need a ton of obscure little tricks.

The .NET 5 doesn’t address any of these. They do a lot of good stuff for server side development but the story for desktop development is bad.

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#40

Post by m_fayer » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:22 PM UTC

acct1771 wrote: post #37

maxxxxx wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don’t understand why instead of evolving WPF MS keeps cranking out similar but incompatible XAML frameworks like Silverlight, WinRT and UWP. If they had stuck to WPF and made the syntax less verbose and easier to understand and fixed some other warts WPF would be a kick ass development tool.

What evolutions are you looking for that aren't covered in their .NET Core/.NET 5 plan?

A Windows UI framework that's modern and performant (so not WPF), at least somewhat competitive in flexibility and expressiveness and tooling with HTML/CSS (not WPF or UWP), and does not have a sandbox or mobile-style process lifecycle chained to its ankle (so not UWP).

I'd throw xplat in there, but I think I'm already asking for too much.