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Is WPF dead: the present and future of WPF

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Re: Is WPF dead: the present and future of WPF

#31
post #29
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all the features that is needed to create rich applications, while having a nice developer experience I wouldn't say that is true. For example even renaming a Window/UserControl in Visual Studio doesn't work correctly. There are a ton of things that could be improved about WPF, not least (off the top of my head): * Use Direct2D instead of DirectX9. The renderer used by WPF has been shown to be very inefficient comp…

One should not confuse the IDE with the technology, but I'd agree that the Visual Studio integration with WPF (although amazing in theory) feels constantly buggy - even after years of work.

I agree except that the OP mentioned "while having a nice developer experience" which I assumed was speaking about VS.

Re: Is WPF dead: the present and future of WPF

#32

WPF is dead in the sense that Microsoft doesn't want to be promoting a non-cloud, non-mobile technology. WPF is alive in the sense that it is the best solution for meeting certain customer needs today. For example, we have a very heavy desktop application that needs to run on Windows 7 PCs with IE 8. When we started developing this application a year ago, the cost to do it in HTML5/CSS/JS given the maturity of the to…

Enjoy it while it lasts, Bootstrap/HTML and JS are so lame after XAML and C# :(.

Re: Is WPF dead: the present and future of WPF

#33
I've been doing Windows development for over a decade now. WPF was too different from WebForms (or less often, WinForms) to get most of the other developers on every team I've worked on to agree to switch to it. I wish we had switched way back when, because it is a much better design than (Web|Win)Forms.

That said, now that I'm on my own, I'm not switching to it. The legacy windows-only apps I support I'm sticking to WinForms, because I don't want to spend effort on learning yet another Microsoft ecosystem API. I'm actively getting out of MS-only work now.

Unfortunately, there are no UI toolkits that I would call "good". They all have some weird idiosyncrasy to them. It's like they all start out with a great idea, and then beef it in the face halfway through completing the full set of controls that would be useful to most people. It necessitates 3rd party control libraries of vastly variable quality, and makes it extremely difficult to tell clients "yes, we can do that, and it will be done by XYZ date".

So, lacking a better alternative, I'm going all-in on HTML5. It's the closest to "ideal" of what I want for a UI toolkit. I've about decided that I really, really don't want my UI to be anywhere near my application layer. A node-webkit-style deal might be bothersome to some people, but for my ideals, it's exactly how I want to arrange my applications.

I'd just like it very much if Node weren't my only readily available option. I like Node for small things, and I use it in a few projects, but there are some other projects where I'd really prefer to be writing the backend in C#, or C, or anything with a wide variety of libraries that aren't mostly just a weekend project for a CS grad somewhere like half of everything on NPM often appears to be.

Re: Is WPF dead: the present and future of WPF

#35
We make a software for licensing WPF applications, http://www.licensespot.com, and it's been growing pretty steady in the last few months so I guess there are still a lot of people developing and selling apps in WPF.

It just works. Some niche markets still prefer to use desktop applications.

Re: Is WPF dead: the present and future of WPF

#36

A lot of the criticism I've heard stems around the steep XAML learning curve. OTOH I've only done WinForms and ASP.NET stuff, so I haven't had first hand experience.

Half of Angular is pretty much a WPF/MVVM rip-off, so it's a good experience.

Re: Is WPF dead: the present and future of WPF

#38
post #17

WPF is another victim in ever changing technological landscape in Microsoft. Who uses or even remembers these days ATL/WTL, MFC, OLE DB, ADO, DAO, ODBC etc. etc.?

I still use ADO and ODBC (oh, and the BDE, remember that one?) on a regular basis. I wish I didn't, but I do.

Re: Is WPF dead: the present and future of WPF

#39
post #24
post #21

What is never really can grasp is the conclusion that no new versions equals a dead platform. In the case with WPF(and Silverlight to some degree) the platform is so mature, that one got all the features that is needed to create rich applications, while having a nice developer experience. It`s just done, no need for future versions and fixes, so one can start build things with it instead. I have(as many others) made…

> all the features that is needed to create rich applications, while having a nice developer experience I wouldn't say that is true. For example even renaming a Window/UserControl in Visual Studio doesn't work correctly. There are a ton of things that could be improved about WPF, not least (off the top of my head): * Use Direct2D instead of DirectX9. The renderer used by WPF has been shown to be very inefficient comp…

> Use Direct2D instead of DirectX9. The renderer used by WPF has been shown to be very inefficient compared to Direct2D.

Is that why the capability of a user's video card had an appreciable impact on the performance of a WPF-based app that's little more than a text viewer and editor, at least as of 2009 (see http://community.logos.com/forums/t/6200.aspx)? Is the WPF renderer still suboptimal on today's graphics hardware? I'm thinking in particular of Intel's integrated graphics starting with Sandy Bridge. And does Direct2D have a better software fallback?

Re: Is WPF dead: the present and future of WPF

#40
post #21

What is never really can grasp is the conclusion that no new versions equals a dead platform. In the case with WPF(and Silverlight to some degree) the platform is so mature, that one got all the features that is needed to create rich applications, while having a nice developer experience. It`s just done, no need for future versions and fixes, so one can start build things with it instead. I have(as many others) made…

I'd say the reason is because bitrot is happening faster than ever before, and if something is not being maintained and you are depending on it for a long-lived application you are going to be burned sooner or later. Granted with Microsoft this is much less of a problem than in the open-source world, but given their scattershot strategy over the last decade it's no wonder that people get jittery at the smell of something withering on the vine (especially after Microsoft stopped being up front about killing things).
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