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Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

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Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#61

Post by contextfree »

maxxxxx wrote: post #49
contextfree wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

APIs were the same, just with some upgraded and new stuff

I think the various name changes have been extremely confusing and created the perception of more "resets" than actually happened at the code and API level. They dropped the ball by not bothering to have a good compatibility and migration story across WPF->Silverlight->WinUI, but since Windows 8 they've been pretty good about maintaining continuity for WinRT APIs

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#62

Post by JamesBarney »

moron4hire wrote: post #35
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…

I think just in general databinding has a steeper learning curve then the code based update approach. Kind of how Angular has a much steeper learning curve than j-query.

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#63

Post by maxxxxx »

JamesBarney wrote: post #57
maxxxxx wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

I mentioned this elsewhere in the thread but you can get compile time warnings and autocomplete on data binding by adding a design time view model.

To some degree yes but it really doesn't work well for complex cases. During runtime they spit out data binding warnings too but these are hard to trap. at least I haven't been able to figure it out.

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#64

Post by maxxxxx »

contextfree wrote: post #61
maxxxxx wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

APIs were the same, just with some upgraded and new stuff I think the various name changes have been extremely confusing and created the perception of more "resets" than actually happened at the code and API level. They dropped the ball by not bothering to have a good compatibility and migration story across WPF->Silverlight->WinUI, but since Windows 8 they've been pretty good about maintaining continuity for WinRT A…

After trying WinRT and seeing that everything was async (WTF?) and a ton of APIs were missing I admit I stopped bothering to look any further. UWP (the UI part) is also not really a step up from WPF either.

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#65

Post by thrower123 »

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

From what I have seen, the WinUI story is a complete shitshow[1]. Apparently they realized that tying it directly to Windows releases was a bad idea, and want to packagize it into NuGet assemblies, but kind of can't. They appear to be trying to distance themselves from even calling it UWP anymore, which I suppose makes sense, because it was dead-on-arrival and never gained any momentum.

Windows 8 is still casting a long shadow of half-baked bad ideas.

[1] https://www.sharpgis.net/post/2019/05/14/The-future-UWP

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#66

Post by m_fayer »

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

Don't mean to be disrespectful, but that sounds an awful lot like the standard corporate non-reply of "Thank you for your feedback requesting the dead-obvious thing that everyone wants and that we know everyone wants but we are not doing for undisclosed internal reasons. Your feedback is interesting and novel and will be read and carefully considered if you will just put it right here into >/dev/null. Thanks for your time!"

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#67

Post by iforgotpassword »

Is there some simple summary somewhere about the state of GUI development on Windows? I haven't used Windows seriously for almost a decade now and my understanding was that WPF was mostly dead because it made win32 developers mad so Microsoft buried it and developed UWP and Xamarin and now nobody has a clue what to actually use. But since Windows phone is dead now everybody can go back to just using win32?

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#68

Post by joelfolksy »

alkonaut wrote: post #14
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #11

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...

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…

> On the other hand, the layout model of WPF is a lot easier than mastering html+css

Thank you. I've never been able to figure out if web layout is as terrible as it seems, or if I'm just missing something.

Once you spend the 20 minutes to learn the WPF layout algorithm, you can reason about why every element is located where it is, down to the pixel. To get there with HTML/CSS, I feel like I would have to memorize and recall a huge list of ad-hoc rules, and their combinatorial interactions. Usually I just give up and accept the mysterious 3-pixel gaps that seem to crop up randomly, and I don't even attempt complex layouts.

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#69

Post by maxxxxx »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #67

Is there some simple summary somewhere about the state of GUI development on Windows? I haven't used Windows seriously for almost a decade now and my understanding was that WPF was mostly dead because it made win32 developers mad so Microsoft buried it and developed UWP and Xamarin and now nobody has a clue what to actually use. But since Windows phone is dead now everybody can go back to just using win32?

My plan is go web as much as possible and maybe Electron :-). Windows desktop is not much fun anymore.

Re: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on GitHub

#70

Post by maxxxxx »

mgoetzke wrote: post #25
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #11

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...

We developed a number of applications on it, but found it to be very verbose, quite brittle and needlessly complex. 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…

The sad thing is that XAML could be great if they just had put a little more work into it.
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