Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

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I still don’t understand why instead of evolving WPF MS keeps cranking out similar but incompatible XAML frameworks like Silverlight, WinRT and UWP. If they had stuck to WPF and made the syntax less verbose and easier to understand and fixed some other warts WPF would be a kick ass development tool.

Because WPF is .NET based and internal Microsoft teams with C++ codebases (like Windows and Office) didn't want to take a dependency on .NET (or rather they tried with Longhorn and couldn't make it work).

That's a big issue but it doesn't explain why instead of developing WPF they released WinRT and UWP.

The purpose of WinRT was to avoid having to depend on .NET. Developing WPF to fix this would have meant rewriting the whole thing in C++, which is what Silverlight/WinUI sort of was, but I agree they dropped the ball on compatibility and migration

I think it was more a thing of those teams torpedoing Longhorn efforts than actually trying.

To be fair, UWP and WPF aren't that dissimilar (and both are XAML), with differences in the readymade UI elements and a stricter subset of the binding markup.

They are dissimilar enough to make a port of a large app very difficult.

What evolutions are you looking for that aren't covered in their .NET Core/.NET 5 plan?

Debugging data binding is hard. There could be a tighter coupling and type safety between view model and view. MVVM could be better integrated. The syntax generally could be simplified (MVC did this when they introduced Razor). There is a lot of room for improvement. The foundation is very good but very hard to learn and you need a ton of obscure little tricks.

The .NET 5 doesn’t address any of these. They do a lot of good stuff for server side development but the story for desktop development is bad.

I mentioned this elsewhere in the thread but you can get compile time warnings and autocomplete on data binding by adding a design time view model.

To some degree yes but it really doesn't work well for complex cases. During runtime they spit out data binding warnings too but these are hard to trap. at least I haven't been able to figure it out.

Agree. That's why we have this for Avalonia XAML debugging (XAML is compiled to IL) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VtwwEL1SJM

A Windows UI framework that's modern and performant (so not WPF), at least somewhat competitive in flexibility and expressiveness and tooling with HTML/CSS (not WPF or UWP), and does not have a sandbox or mobile-style process lifecycle chained to its ankle (so not UWP).

I'd throw xplat in there, but I think I'm already asking for too much.

Windows UI platform team recently posted their roadmap for the platform https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/blob/master/d... and they have a GitHub issue thread requesting comment on the roadmap https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/issues/717 , you might want to take a look and post your thoughts

It's hard to trust their roadmaps. They always look good but get abandoned every few years.

From what I have seen, the WinUI story is a complete shitshow[1]. Apparently they realized that tying it directly to Windows releases was a bad idea, and want to packagize it into NuGet assemblies, but kind of can't. They appear to be trying to distance themselves from even calling it UWP anymore, which I suppose makes sense, because it was dead-on-arrival and never gained any momentum.

Windows 8 is still casting a long shadow of half-baked bad ideas.

[1] https://www.sharpgis.net/post/2019/05/14/The-future-UWP

Don't mean to be disrespectful, but that sounds an awful lot like the standard corporate non-reply of "Thank you for your feedback requesting the dead-obvious thing that everyone wants and that we know everyone wants but we are not doing for undisclosed internal reasons. Your feedback is interesting and novel and will be read and carefully considered if you will just put it right here into >/dev/null. Thanks for your time!"

You talked yourself out of trying.

Is it different if you send your comments to /dev/null or if they do? I think it is. In one scenario you at least gave it a try.

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