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Comment by xamluser | Hacker News Reader

UWP XAML has pretty much surpassed WPF with the latest SDK. There are some things missing, but the new features outweigh that and the performance is significantly better since it's all C++ and sits on top of DirectComposition instead of milcore. Many of the things that were removed (like FindAncestor bindings and DataContext inheritance) were done so for perf reasons or because they were refundant.

I'd use it as the basis for Avalonia instead of WPF. If only to have x:Bind instead of {Binding}, which thanks to function bindings removes a lot of ViewModel boilerplate.

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I'm not on Win10 - are UWP apps still slow and clunky? Like they don't really act like normal windows? Still tablet-optimized or whatever? Last I checked on the W10 beta calc took several seconds to launch. (And had far less features, like no editable history.)

MS flubbed the launch and followup on Metro so hard (not to mention the shitware on the Store) it's really, really, turned me off from using or playing with it.

In general, UWP apps that feel slow or somehow off are web apps. UWP XAML is really fast.

WinRT XAML is much faster than WPF ever was, it's just that they've started using it in very performance sensitive places where they never used any form of XAML before, like the calculator and start menu (the XAML calculator definitely doesn't take several seconds for me BTW, more like one second, but that's still too slow IMO), and it's still slower than the internal frameworks and bare Win32 calls they used to use. If they were WPF they'd be even slower.

I'm not super familiar with x:Bind, but based on what you're describing, it sounds like something that could be done in WPF (or, presumably, something that copies its design), as a markup extension. Fpr example (note wpf:Lambda):

https://github.com/Microsoft/RTVS/blob/828b4e3919cbed507a4d0...

Obviously this is still more verbose, because it is a converter on a binding (although it could be shortened further by providing a custom Binding-derived class, I think).

do you know any good resources that provide insights on the differences between WPF and UWP?

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