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Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

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Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#41

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

maxxxxx wrote: post #38
m_fayer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This isn't my area of expertise. What are some of the other MS frameworks or OSS projects you refer to?

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#42

Post by contextfree »

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.

Because WPF is .NET based and internal Microsoft teams with C++ codebases (like Windows and Office) didn't want to take a dependency on .NET (or rather they tried with Longhorn and couldn't make it work).

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#43

Post by maxxxxx »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #41
maxxxxx wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This isn't my area of expertise. What are some of the other MS frameworks or OSS projects you refer to?

WPF started XAML, then came Silverlight, WinRT and UWP. They are superficially similar but under the hood the code is quite different and each has its own set of weird limitations so you can't just reuse code. Also, in the case of WinRT and I think also UWP the new framework had less features than its predecessor so in a sense it was worse and less powerful which is not a good way to convince people to port their code.

When WPF came out there were quite a few very cool open source projects that built on top of it because it's really easy to extend WPF and build components for it. But then every two or three years MS announced a new framework so most of these efforts died out. When you look at commercial third party suppliers like Developer Express they have the same component in three or four flavors. this must be a huge and expensive effort to maintain.

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#44

Post by balabaster »

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…

The steep learning curve is worth it because most of the paradigms of WPF are transferable to other frameworks. It's my opinion that learning it well will actually make you a more organized programmer in terms of your architectural chops.

Its heavy use of binding, aspect oriented programming, dependency injection, cascading styling dictionaries, converters etc. are heavily leaned upon in a number of other UI frameworks. Once you understand how to organise these paradigms properly, you'll find a lot of other frameworks far easier to migrate to.

It's well worth learning, even if it's just as a transitory learning mechanism. I'm a big fan of learning frameworks that change your way of thinking and reduce the learning curve of other technologies. It's not for the feint of heart though - if you've never learned architecture to a level where you can separate your UI concerns from your logic properly and learned how to inject function into your UI from your viewmodel, there are some hard concepts to wrap your head around - especially when it comes to debugging - if you don't separate your concerns properly, it will make testing and debugging a bitch.

There are a lot of "Oh wow! I never thought about it like that!" moments of realization on the curve - rather like that moment when Scotty realizes that he never considered that it was space that was moving in his transporter algorithms.

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#45

Post by contextfree »

m_fayer wrote: post #40
acct1771 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Windows UI platform team recently posted their roadmap for the platform https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/blob/master/d... and they have a GitHub issue thread requesting comment on the roadmap https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/issues/717 , you might want to take a look and post your thoughts

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#46

Post by contextfree »

maxxxxx wrote: post #43
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't my area of expertise. What are some of the other MS frameworks or OSS projects you refer to?

WPF started XAML, then came Silverlight, WinRT and UWP. They are superficially similar but under the hood the code is quite different and each has its own set of weird limitations so you can't just reuse code. Also, in the case of WinRT and I think also UWP the new framework had less features than its predecessor so in a sense it was worse and less powerful which is not a good way to convince people to port their cod…

"WinRT and UWP" in this context are just two names for the same thing, though

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#48

Post by Crinus »

colde wrote: post #28
Crinus wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because once you understand it, WPF and C# is fantastic to work with. It's hands down the best UI framework i have ever worked with. 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.

Personally i find writing XAML a step backwards when it comes to UI design and WYSIWYG tools like Lazarus which has some great layout tools are much better (and BTW personally i'd say that LCL is the best UI framework i've worked with, but it isn't without its warts - it just has less warts than anything else).

But my question was more towards how making WPF portable will create a renaissance for the desktop considering the market share it already can cover and that even among that market share isn't exactly popular, not how good WPF is.

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#49

Post by maxxxxx »

contextfree wrote: post #46
maxxxxx wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WPF started XAML, then came Silverlight, WinRT and UWP. They are superficially similar but under the hood the code is quite different and each has its own set of weird limitations so you can't just reuse code. Also, in the case of WinRT and I think also UWP the new framework had less features than its predecessor so in a sense it was worse and less powerful which is not a good way to convince people to port their cod…

"WinRT and UWP" in this context are just two names for the same thing, though

Sort of. They were released some years from each other. WinRT was super weak and never took off and then suddenly UWP came up.

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#50

Post by maxxxxx »

contextfree wrote: post #45
m_fayer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Windows UI platform team recently posted their roadmap for the platform https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/blob/master/d... and they have a GitHub issue thread requesting comment on the roadmap https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/issues/717 , you might want to take a look and post your thoughts

It's hard to trust their roadmaps. They always look good but get abandoned every few years.
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