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Comment by tonyedgecombe | Hacker News Reader

For a moment I got all excited and thought they had ported WPF to OS/X.

As someone who wrote quite sized WPF application in hope that WPF will be in future be cross-platform I had a minute of silence.

No way. WPF is too tightly bound to DirectX. Yes there are a lot of requests to do so, but effort is enormous.

Though there are projects that might indicate something (SkiaSharp and VulcanSharp) on mono project github organisation.

I get the impression that WPF is pretty much on life support.

It's merged to Xaml not? And what do you want more for WPF?

PS. According to me it was difficult to port the Graphic part of WPF to Linux/Mac.

XAML is just a way of writing object graphs in XML. It is not tied to WPF or anything (heck, we use it to represent user data and style information within GraphML).

And yes, XAML is used by more than WPF at this point (Silverlight, UWP, and possibly more).

The markup is a pretty small part of XAML/WPF. The actual framework, controls, and rendering are the bulk of it.

Also Xamarin.Forms

Shit, last time I was on Windows, WPF was the new hotness. What is the latest thing?

UWP, I guess. It's still similar enough from what I've seen, but I haven't used it yet. And WPF is still by far the best UI framework I've ever used.

Windows 10 only rules it out for me, also I think it might be tied to the Windows store although I'm not absolutely sure.

Absolutely not tied to the Store, you can distribute your appx packages any way you want and the users can install them with a double click. The only requirement is that the packages must be signed, so you have to buy a codesigning certificate or ask your users to install your self-signed certificate.

The app also doesn't have to be an UWP app: you can wrap bog-standard desktop applications (even Electron apps), HTML/JS apps (with direct access to UWP APIs) or even nothing: your manifest can just point to your live site, that can check if it's running in this context and then use UWP APIs, those are called "hosted web apps".

It is my belief that Windows Forms will outlive WPF and/or XAML. Currently WPF is still the "modern" way to doing Windows applications, but at some point Microsoft will come up with some new scheme, and all the WPF developer will jump onto that.

The developers that have still not abandoned WinForms will not jump shit when the next thing hits either. To keep the huge group of WinForms developers happy, Microsoft will continue to support and develop Winforms. For many, WinForms are still the fasted way to develop simple applications.

So if you want develop for the Windows (desktop) platform, WinForms will be a clear winner for many many years into the future.

Except that WinForms doesn't work on UWP applications other than via Project Centipede and is officially on support as it was communicated at BUILD 2014.

Of cause. My point is that so many business applications are Windows Forms, and will continue to be so for many years to come.

Removing WinForms will disenfranchise a large group of developers, that for one reason or another, it could just be stubbornness, won't switch. Microsoft will sooner kill of WPF than WinForms, to not lose those developers. At least that's my belief.

But we're talking for desktop applications only.

I only use Windows Forms for legacy applications.

As for the official statement, here is the InfoQ overview of BUILD 2014.

https://www.infoq.com/news/2014/04/WPF-QA

"Windows Forms is continuing to be supported, but in maintenance mode. They will fix bugs as they are discovered, but new functionality is off the table. Oh, they stress that it isn’t called “WinForms”."

As I don't have time to search for the video on Channel 9.

The Roadmap for WPF

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2014/11/12/the-roadm...

WinForms are still the fastest way to develop complex applications as well. From soup to nuts, it's probably the pinnacle of front end development.

Trends started going from WinForms to web around 2000 as pushback against Microsoft so here we are today. I still think from a business standpoint, it was a very expensive thing to do.

I'm still using it but there are some things that are quite painful, in particular supporting high-dpi displays.

Not really.

WPF is based on XAML and XAML is the future of UWP.

Just because the API is a little different it doesn't make it in life support, also there were updates on .NET 4.6.

As for Windows Forms, it is officially on life support as communicated at BUILD 2014.

WPF has a lot of flaws, but it is definitely still the most relevant platform for standard desktop applications (LOB, enterprise, etc.).

For native UIs on Windows, there are few better choices. Most line of business applications tend to be spreadsheets on steroids with lots of custom business-related functions, and for that kind of thing web-based UIs are far more difficult to deal with (think displaying thousands of rows, potentially 100+ columns, quick grouping and pivot-table-esque functionality, etc). You can do it with something like Electron and some open source JS libraries, but as someone who has gone down that rabbit hole it is a nightmare compared with using an out-of-the-box component from Infragistics, DevExpress, or Telerik that is much faster than a HTML/CSS/JS interface.

Awesome Idea. No market.

There are still people doing desktop development, not as many as web but it hasn't completely gone away. Sadly we are being ignored.

Not even for mobile apps?

That's basically what they're doing with Xamarin.Forms

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