Comment by Multicomp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Multicomp | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The value proposition for winforms and WPF for me is that they have been around forever and will continue to be around forever.

Under normal circumstances I dismiss any new Microsoft UI framework like uwp or winui3 out of hand because I know in two years or so, some other product manager will take over and will need to make their own stamp on the organization, so they will introduce yet another UI framework and Winui3 will be stagnated just like silverlight was.

I use F# Fable right now for web applications with intentions to learn Avalonia and eventually trim down my use of good old winforms when I'm writing desktop only applications.

Having said all that, I do like the idea of being able to write code in one code base and have it be compiled via xamarin to other runtimes.

Does this platform deliver on that promise?

Is anyone who has a few battle scars using this tool able to give a small review?

> Under normal circumstances I dismiss any new Microsoft UI framework like uwp or winui3 out of hand because [...]

You do realize that the 3 implies it is the 3rd version of a project? WinUI 3 is just the "third version" of the UI component library used inside UWP originally, but now with bonus compatibility with WinForms and WPF.

To me that's the opposite of "stagnated" or "deprecated every two years". The UI parts of UWP and WinUI3 are more the same thing, just versions over time, than they are different. It just continues to evolve with each new versions that include new features (such as the new "Now with much better WPF and WinForms support" features for people in brownfield applications).

You should be excited about WinUI3 because it lets you dip your toes in what UWP added to the UI framework from your WinForms and WPF development. You'll probably find it feels a lot more like WPF than you'd think given how demonized UWP's UI framework has been. (It's not WPF, of course, and there are compatibility breaks to learn/deal with, but it's still XAML-based UI design with a lot of very similar controls and tools in the toolkits.)

It is version 3 and I still prefer WPF. WPF is a masterpiece. It is a shame it is essentially abandoned.

> The value proposition for winforms and WPF for me is that they have been around forever and will continue to be around forever.

Checking on wikipedia shows that winforms was introduced in 2002 and wpf in 2006. This makes me feel very old.

When I started at my current C# job in 2009, I decided to choose (being the sole dev) WPF for the UI because it was the future. The future is now, I'm still coding in WPF!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com