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Comment by Crinus | Hacker News Reader

Why? The Windows desktop is by a gigantic margin the most popular desktop environment. Mac and Linux combined cover perhaps a 10% or less, so if 90% coverage isn't enough for such a renaissance, why would a +~10% change that (especially considering that most of that 10% is Mac where anything except Cocoa feels weird and wrong to a very picky userbase)?

Also why would C# and WPF do that instead of the myrriads of other languages and desktop tech? WPF alone wasn't exactly popular on Windows itself.

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Because once you understand it, WPF and C# is fantastic to work with. It's hands down the best UI framework i have ever worked with.

XAML makes it very easy to layout apps that scale well, and it's built-in states for controls and easy styling is very handy.

Personally i find writing XAML a step backwards when it comes to UI design and WYSIWYG tools like Lazarus which has some great layout tools are much better (and BTW personally i'd say that LCL is the best UI framework i've worked with, but it isn't without its warts - it just has less warts than anything else).

But my question was more towards how making WPF portable will create a renaissance for the desktop considering the market share it already can cover and that even among that market share isn't exactly popular, not how good WPF is.

Ever bothered using Blend?

Former Delphi / C++ Builder fanboy here.

No, isn't Blend just a separate designer though? A big plus for Lazarus (and Delphi and C++ Builder) is that the designer is integrated with the IDE and you are working with 'live' objects which extends even beyond the GUI designer but also to visual object editors. I have written several non-visual components myself that are exposed to the IDE for visual editing (and if anything, my two main issues with Lazarus is that it isn't doing enough on that front - it isn't that others are better, but Lazarus could do even more - and that the component palette cannot install components dynamically from the open projects and need to installed globally, otherwise i'd be writing even more components to be edited visually).

Yes, it is installed alongside Visual Studio.

But even Visual Studio XAML designer is relatively good. I used it is mostly.

And both do allow to work with live objects and mock data, as well, even if it isn't as clear as with Borland products.

Actually during the last 4 years, which I used to do consultancy on Windows native apps, all of the green field apps were either WPF or UWP.

The only exception was one that had to integrate with an existing Forms one.

I'm sure people are making WPF apps, but they (the apps) were always a minority and they always had issues like weird text rendering ignoring the system settings, recreated controls that look 'kinda' like the native ones but actually are a bit off, etc.

I have only seen it happen in WPF apps with "programmer art", delivered without having designers in the team.

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