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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

#61

Post by rwallace »

triangleman wrote: post #53

I'm planning on developing a collaborative helpdesk application for my small team (perhaps 30 users), having only previous experience in standard HTML/CSS/JS/PHP/SQL development. I was thinking of going the web application route but I get the sense that a Windows executable is the way to go here, with its faster/more responsive interface. Major features needed: Embed and modify web pages in tabs (recreate a web brows…

Given your stated requirements, I'd use Qt. There's a learning curve, but no worse than with WPF or anything else.

But those are hefty requirements for a small in-house project! Spending a lot of extra programming time on production values is what you do when you're trying to appeal to the mass market. If nobody outside your team is ever going to use the program, that kind of effort doesn't pay off. Who decided the feature list and designed the user interface? Do they realize the cost and schedule implications?

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

#62

Post by rmsaksida »

I've had limited exposure to WPF, but I found it absolutely delightful. When you work with web development for so long, working on a desktop app feels very refreshing. The toolkit lets you focus (choice is hard); data binding is awesome; components are all readily available; there's rich IDE integration which mostly just works; you can easily offload almost everything from the backend; and with some good sense, you can drag & drop yourself to a reasonably good looking and usable interface in record time.

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

#63

Post by triangleman »

rwallace wrote: post #61
triangleman wrote: post #53

I'm planning on developing a collaborative helpdesk application for my small team (perhaps 30 users), having only previous experience in standard HTML/CSS/JS/PHP/SQL development. I was thinking of going the web application route but I get the sense that a Windows executable is the way to go here, with its faster/more responsive interface. Major features needed: Embed and modify web pages in tabs (recreate a web brows…

Given your stated requirements, I'd use Qt. There's a learning curve, but no worse than with WPF or anything else. But those are hefty requirements for a small in-house project! Spending a lot of extra programming time on production values is what you do when you're trying to appeal to the mass market. If nobody outside your team is ever going to use the program, that kind of effort doesn't pay off. Who decided the f…

Maybe I oversold the feature list... I'm really just trying to do an incremental thing, a "single-page app" that helps tech support agents keep track of their tickets and what's going on with the rest of the team. Because the ticketing system is web based I figure I need to embed the web pages into the app. Then I need to make DOM calls to the page to get some info out of them, or perhaps make various GETs and POSTs to get the info I need, displayed alongside the webpage.

Not a crazy feature list, and like I said I am learning how to do this from scratch so it's kind of a 20% time hobby that I hope turns into something usable in a reasonable amount of time (3-6 months).

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

#64

Post by codereflection »

bdavisx wrote: post #47
codereflection wrote: post #16

It will be interesting to see if the editor in Visual Studio is re-written again (it has been WPF based since VS 2012). If a hint of that comes out, then I think we can safely declare WPF as dead.

I think it was WPF based starting with VS 2010 actually.

You are correct, it was 2010.

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

#65

Post by MichaelGG »

jenscow wrote: post #55
_random_ wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In my opinion, Dart makes JS less lame (via dart2js). It's the closest you'll get to C# in the browser.

Or just write in F# and compile to JavaScript. That's better than C# in the browser.

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

#66

Post by danbruc »

You can get quite far with the simple equation XAML + Control Library = WPF = Silverlight = Windows Phone UI = ... some of the runtimes are more powerful, some are less powerful, but they are really similar to develop with. I can see runtimes come and go but the way you build UIs on top of them does not look like going away soon. And - at least to me - this is a good thing, it is a great way to build UIs.

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

#67

Post by pjmlp »

WPF is only dead for those that cannot think out of the box.

What matters is XAML and data binding and it is pretty much alive.

Just because the XAML and .NET classes used by WPF are a little different than the XAML and .NET classes from Silverlight or XAML and .NET classes from WinRT, the concepts are always the same ones.

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

#68

Post by pjmlp »

amaks wrote: 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.?

Who uses or even remembers these days QuickDraw, QuickDraw 3D, WebObjects, Carbon, Qt for Java, Java Bridge, Nettalk, Hypercard, NewtonScript, etc

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

#69

Post by jenscow »

emodendroket wrote: post #54
_random_ wrote: post #27

I am a Microsoft fan but my thinking recently is like this: why WPF => why Windows => why Microsoft? If crappy HTML5 and JS are their agenda, then what's the point sticking to their ecosystem?

So you can leverage your/your team's existing knowledge of C#/the .NET Framework, which seems like a good enough reason. Lots of Web sites are still built on ASP.NET MVC. Also, one unfortunate aspect of the .NET community is a lot of people know next to nothing about anything outside the MS ecosystem and have a blindly dismissive attitude toward it (at least until MS latches onto it like they have with Angular and ot…

With asp.net vNext able to run on Linux (officially), the question still remains: Why Windows => Why Microsoft? (apart from leeching their tech)

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

#70

Post by randunel »

I felt a similar betrayal that this author felt when Adobe started to drop support for Flash, stopping any development. Their claim of supporting every device with AIR went south not by dropping AIR support (which happened when they stopped Linux support), but by not developing the Flash platform as new devices and OSes poured into the markets. I have since successfully moved on, but I did feel weary for more than a year, unsure where I was heading.

Consider this a mistake, and learn from it: don't depend on any vendor's altruism, always look to diversify your knowledge and options, avoid vendor lock-in at all costs. I believe Apple will be a much bigger drama when this happens.

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