221–230 of 428 posts
I wish they put more effort into round 10 version of C# . Features presented will have minimal impact on productivity and maintainability.
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Replace ".NET" with "Windows" maybe? AS a longtime original VB/Winforms developer - MS lost their mind on desktop development and didn't look back. They chased EVERY fad that could be chased. Silverlight, UPF, XAML, WPF, Islands, MAUI. This is one of those things - imagine if they'd focused on building an amazing and cross platform (ultimately) toolkit with just a basic drag and drop designer? Who cares about "stylin…
> Replace ".NET" with "Windows" maybe? There's Uno, Avalonia, Xamarin Forms, and MAUI, all cross-platform. I think it's a mess no matter what.
Unless I'm misremembering, until recently Avalonia was still being touted as primarily a replacement for Desktop WPF. I was shocked to see they're talking about mobile now too. I guess it's somewhat expected.
Uno basically does what MAUI does. The main difference being, Uno has been around for a while longer and something you've been able to use for some time. I'm pretty sure they had usable versions for well over a year before MAUI was even announced.
In any case...
Microsoft's UI story is a non-starter until they get back to the point that a user can:
- Click new project - Fill out the form - Get a Design window, - Drag a 'Textbox' into the design window, - Drag a 'Button' into the design window, - Double click on the button, get taken into a generated event handler, and the user can intuitively put in the right code (i.e. updating the viewmodel with 'hello world'.) - Click 'run'
That's the Story that got an untold number of new developers -enamored- with VB6, a language that got so entrenched Microsoft had a hard time killing it. It brought a number of developers into the world of C#, making it easy for to write applications used at work that a whole team could use. That's actually how I 'eased' into programming at my first workplace; I wrote an app with a big ugly panel and a bunch of big buttons with labels that would automate tasks. Need a variation on a theme? Drag a new button over, maybe do some light refactoring, test, publish, tell the guys to restart the app. 10-15 minutes tops.
Sure, Eventually I had to go through a spaghetti mess of callbacks and crappy generated code, but it was good refactoring practice ;). And when I left the company, someone else took over the code and now they are a software developer too.
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WinForms is still around, and works as well as it always did. That or WPF are still the sanest choices for desktop apps in .NET, IMO, so long as you're only targeting Windows. And WinForms specifically resembles VCL a lot.
I skipped .NET bandwagon for desktop completely. Comparatively to Delphi there were exactly zero business reasons for me to move my code or use .NET for new apps. On a technical side there were no gains and numerous limitations.
But, yes, if you looked at it in 1.x days, it really looked a lot like Delphi libraries with Java-like syntax. So if you were already using Delphi, there wasn't much point.
.NET 6 seems like a pretty good release with a few cool new features. But it's funny how the infographic in the post mentions MAUI for desktop development, but the "desktop" keyword in the text is referring to the WinForms github repository. I can't think of a more concise statement about the state of GUI development on .NET. I would really wish for less fragmentation and churn in that space.
There are very few applications that simply cannot work in a web browser in 2021. Even accounting for all the inconsistent bullshit between browser vendors, you can still arrive at something that works as far back as IE6 if you are conservative with your footprint.
Do you really need flexbox, webgl2 and GPS navigation for that warehouse inventory management application? Does everything have to live the various app stores? Will your users revolt if there isn't some ceremonial download & install phase of using your product?
I would go so far as to argue for deployment of a self-contained webservice to the end users that could be accessed via any arbitrary localhost browser before succumbing to the Microsoft Desktop GUI framework du jour.
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I can chime in on this one. I think it's very much a 'culture' thing. So, I'm a *nix guy. You know, running Sway WM, using Doom Emacs as my daily driver, that sort of a thing. Learned vim to write my thesis at night on an armchair where using the mouse was not comfortable. Not long ago I accidentally got involved with a kind of a .NET consulting gig. Rather, I got involved as a domain expert to help out some SaaS sta…
The .NET people were likely right in your case. In C# structs are allocated on the stack, that's why you'd use them. Unless you have a specific reason you'd generally keep pure data objects as classes and not structs. And there can certainly be a culture clash, there is a bit of a tendency towards more complex patterns in the .NET world. But you don't have to do that, and MS is quite explicitly adding versions with l…
Basically, I consciously researched the differences between class and struct in C# beforehand. And decided to use struct as the 'thing' was a kind of a coordinate that would be instantiated a lot for simple coordinate-space transformations, so it made sense for it to actually be a value type.
I should've been more assertive about it. Well, worst case some periodic imports are taking somewhat longer than they should.
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The whole runtime gets included in the binary.
This actually makes sense in 2021 since we have the resources to allow things like this. 20 years ago this might have seemed insane.
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>> Single files apps no longer extract any core runtime assemblies to temporary directories I might be ignorant here but if you're not specifically pointing out what version DLL's you want, aren't you in fact publishing a dynamically linked executable instead of a statically linked one? Doesn't these single-file apps rely on the GAC?
There is no GAC. > .NET Core and .NET 5 and later versions eliminate the concept of the global assembly cache (GAC)
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* Runs great on Linux in my experience & others * Great performance - https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r20&hw=... * Open source - Microsoft has made a lot of missteps but they have came a very long way. The bright side is both how far they've came & the outcomes of the recent missteps. * Very productive toolset imo. I focus mostly on web based tech though. I really like the syntax & type system. *…
I don't think F# is that second class anymore especially if you are developing on Linux/Mac OSX. The more concise language/syntax is a big plus when you don't want the heavy IDE and want to be cross platform. The VS Code plugin for example seems more mature than Omnisharp and while like any other Code plugin less flaky than many of the others. It seems to be keeping up with the broader .NET ecosystem pretty well I th…
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And the crazy thing is that all these frameworks were basically incompatible variations of the same thing. Since WPF nothing has really gotten better. Just different for no good reason. I will never bet on any new MS desktop development framework anymore . It’s either WPF or preferably web (even Electron) for me.
To be fair to UWP XAML, it's more efficient than WPF. I don't mean because it's written in C++ instead of C#. The render pipeline of WinUI is more efficient. It's really interesting, but unfortunately I can't find the technical blog I was thinking on.
.NET 6 seems like a pretty good release with a few cool new features. But it's funny how the infographic in the post mentions MAUI for desktop development, but the "desktop" keyword in the text is referring to the WinForms github repository. I can't think of a more concise statement about the state of GUI development on .NET. I would really wish for less fragmentation and churn in that space.
They just keep recognizing that WinForms is the best. And you can still use it
I am basically stuck on .net 4.8 because of that.