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Comment by tener | Hacker News Reader

Interesting to see any improvements for WPF. I thought it is dead for good.

I hear that a lot, but why do folks say that? It has just become a mature and stable UI platform suitable for long-term development. What's the alternative?

>but why do folks say that?

Because it was at some point IIRC,they didn't have a team for it internaly. This was back in the silverlight shutdown, html5/winrt win8 drama. Silverlight actually died, WPF got revived. This is just going on memory, and I wasn't really paying attention to it anyway.

Not sure about WPF, but DLR was pretty much left to die on the vine, which is somewhat sad.

Arguably the DLR accomplished what it set out to do and it is very usable. I've used C#'s dynamic in a number of production project and even a deeper use of DLR constructs (IDynamicObject expression generation) in a few particular sets of circumstances. You can kind of see how Microsoft felt the DLR was "finished" because they solved a lot of the hard problems and made them seem simple and easy.

IronPython and IronRuby are still useful for doing .NET things in a REPL or scripting, though Roslyn's support for C# (and VB) REPL/scripting and F# have lessened the amount of time I spend with IronPython.

(I did recently hear IronPython rebooted and is trying to build out a full CPython 3.5+ compatible version, which was exciting to hear.)

Happy to hear about IronPython trying to get up to speed, I'm using it a lot and it's pretty awesome.

I haven't had the chance to play with Roslyn yet, though. Seems promising.

Nice to hear that IronPython is still seeing some love... I was sad to see (whatever the DLR JavaScript runtime was called) go away when IronRuby and IronPython were picked up.

The UWP XAML stack should be considered the successor to WPF (and for old die hards, Silverlight for that matter as well).

I would like to understand where all the hate comes from. I haven't done any .Net work in about 6 years, but I loved WPF. It's the only UI framework I thought was _okay_.

I'm the opposite, I really don't like it at all.

What hate?

WPF may not be the best thing ever, but it certainly isn't totally broken either.

WPF is a complex beast. It works pretty differently from every other GUI framework out there¹ and has a steep learning curve. While you can program WPF and pretend it's Windows Forms, all that gets you is not very idiomatic code and confusion why you would even put up with that when WinForms is so much easier (except maybe XAML for building the GUI). Now, there's the other extreme as well: people who pretend XAML to be a programming language and try to bash at everything with templates and styles, trying to never have to write a single line of C#. In my experience people scoffing at or hating WPF come from one of those two camps.

I use WPF every day and it is a powerful framework. That said there are definitely aspects that are very poorly designed. It desperately needs a fork to catch up with the modern framework (no support for generic types, async Task-based commands, etc.). Not to mention that the slow measure/layout pass means that we still have UIs that 'hang' even when absolutely all programmatic work is done on a background thread.

It never really went away.

Its foundation XAML + .NET API has always been around in different forms.

The only issue is the implementation isn't 1:1 compatible across all its variants.

Even if nothing else (sorry, UWP), Xamarin uses WPF as its view language and MSFTs recent critical acquisition I think keeps WPF alive for at least another 5 years.

Are you sure you're not thinking that Xamarin uses XAML and not WPF? XAML is used by WPF, UWP, & Xamarin Forms, but I don't recall WPF being on anything other than Windows.

Oh, damn, you're right. I only just now realized I've erroneously used those interchangeably for years. /humbly skitter away

Note that XAML is nothing more than a way of serializing object graphs to XML. WPF uses XAML (as do a bunch of others), but the objects created when parsing the XAML can be pretty much anything and all that is not tied to WPF in any way. Case in point: Our main product is a graph display and editing component, using GraphML as its native file format. We serialize visualization and business data attached to the graph as XAML, and while that particular code portion originated in the WPF branch, the format is the same, even in the Java product.

Thought the same of WCF. Could've sworn Web API was going to replace WCF.

I think Web API was just intended to be a lightweight replacement for RESTful API in WCF. WCF does so much more, the most popular probably being SOAP, but I believe it does much more in the messaging, queue, workflow space as well.

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