Is WPF dead: the present and future of WPF • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by ygra » Thu, Oct 16, 2014, 10:20 AM UTC

GlennS wrote: post #28

I was told 3 or 4 years ago by a Microsoft MPV that WPF was effectively in maintenance mode with only a single guy working on it. A shame, because it's probably the best UI framework I've used. I liked it much better than HTML.

Given that HTML is probably the worst UI framework that ever existed, that doesn't say much. However, WPF is so far ahead of every other UI framework I used (WinForms, Swing, Qt, Android, MFC) that its descent into maintenance mode is a bit sad. Also that no one bothers to look at what WPF did right when starting new UI toolkits and frameworks and we get more stuff that awkward and clunky to develop for that looks like all other UI APIs from the 90s.

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

#82

Post by tonyedgecombe » Thu, Oct 16, 2014, 12:29 PM UTC

_random_ wrote: post #32

steven777400 wrote: post #11

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# :(.

I just started a new WPF application, I don't think it is going away any time soon.

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

#83

Post by maxxxxx » Thu, Oct 16, 2014, 4:25 PM UTC

Thieum22 wrote: post #76

mu_killnine wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is most companies will skip Win8 like they skipped Vista. Windows 10 looks to be what enterprise will rally around. But for fat applications, what's your alternative? Java is, at best, parity with something like WinRT but can't leverage the benefits that MS can bring to users with its native platform (assuming a big, MS-centric enterprise). WPF, as we've already said, isn't going to get any more of the pie.…

Winforms has data binding. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ef2xyb33 WPF main advantage over Winforms is XAML vs tool-generated designer class IMHO. Most of the other concepts have their equivalents in both technology.

WPF data binding is vastly superior to Winforms.

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

#84

Post by mpthrapp » Thu, Oct 16, 2014, 4:58 PM UTC

dvere wrote: post #46

mpthrapp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Raises hand, still have a VM with Delphi 7 that is opened once a week or so....

Only once a week? Can I have your job, please? I get to use that and 5 on a daily basis.

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

#85

Post by ygra » Fri, Oct 17, 2014, 7:46 AM UTC

Thieum22 wrote: post #76

mu_killnine wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is most companies will skip Win8 like they skipped Vista. Windows 10 looks to be what enterprise will rally around. But for fat applications, what's your alternative? Java is, at best, parity with something like WinRT but can't leverage the benefits that MS can bring to users with its native platform (assuming a big, MS-centric enterprise). WPF, as we've already said, isn't going to get any more of the pie.…

Winforms has data binding. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ef2xyb33 WPF main advantage over Winforms is XAML vs tool-generated designer class IMHO. Most of the other concepts have their equivalents in both technology.

In my eyes WPF's advantage usually boiled down to:

• databinding (which it shares with most other things coming from MS; I think even VB had it; interestingly enough, it's somewhat absent everywhere else)

• decoupling behaviour from visuals

• somewhat related to the last point: templating

Especially the last two are what makes WPF awesome. Databinding is just the glue that's needed for the other two to work awesomely. Being able to say »I want this to work like a ToggleButton but look slightly different« (and keeping all the behavioural logic in place without needing to reimplement it) and »I define how my data will look like in terms of the same containers and controls that I build my UI with and (usually) have no performance disadvantage« are the things that are really nice. I take a collection of things, databind them to a ListBox, use a DataTemplate to control how each of them looks and am able to use normal controls in said template that can interact with the data and are not just images pasted onto the UI (like in Swing or Android). And all that without the need to write a single line of code that moves my data from code to UI (or back).