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Comment by grokys | Hacker News Reader

> all the features that is needed to create rich applications, while having a nice developer experience

I wouldn't say that is true. For example even renaming a Window/UserControl in Visual Studio doesn't work correctly. There are a ton of things that could be improved about WPF, not least (off the top of my head):

* Use Direct2D instead of DirectX9. The renderer used by WPF has been shown to be very inefficient compared to Direct2D.

* Multiple selection is a hack.

* Can't bind data grid column properties.

* BasedOn="{StaticResource {x:Type Button}}" -- eurgh

* How fucking difficult it is to save an image?

* How fucking difficult it is to get an image's pixels (how do you work out Stride?)

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> Use Direct2D instead of DirectX9. The renderer used by WPF has been shown to be very inefficient compared to Direct2D.

Is that why the capability of a user's video card had an appreciable impact on the performance of a WPF-based app that's little more than a text viewer and editor, at least as of 2009 (see http://community.logos.com/forums/t/6200.aspx)? Is the WPF renderer still suboptimal on today's graphics hardware? I'm thinking in particular of Intel's integrated graphics starting with Sandy Bridge. And does Direct2D have a better software fallback?

You can find a study of how WPF and Direct2D's renderers compare here: http://jeremiahmorrill.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/a-critical-d...

One should not confuse the IDE with the technology, but I'd agree that the Visual Studio integration with WPF (although amazing in theory) feels constantly buggy - even after years of work.

I agree except that the OP mentioned "while having a nice developer experience" which I assumed was speaking about VS.

The form renaming im absolutely with you on, horribel. Once you tried it you learn to stick with your original name.

Direct2D vs DX9 is probably a valid point, I have never faced any issue with this.

The rest of them I don`t think I follow you on. Two trivial image tasks, one ugly syntax and two issue I can`t seem to have encountered.

It should be noted that I always have used telerik`s awesome UI components together with WPF. Which both features and documentation are top notch.

Yes, I'll accept that some of them may be issues that aren't encountered too often, but they are things that I'm battling with right now so are on my mind ;) But for saving images, why isn't there a Save method to BitmapSource! This to me seems endemic to WPF where the API isn't optimized for common tasks.

Also: regarding multiple selection, this series of blog posts explains the problems: namely that there is no built in way to do MVVM multiple selection with virtual list boxes, a common use-case at least for me.

http://grokys.blogspot.it/2010/07/mvvm-and-multiple-selectio...

(unfortunately the images seem to have expired, grr)

* terrible WebBrowser control

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