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Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

I know lots of people don't care about Windwos Forms anymore but it would been GREAT if they were also included in the Core, may be re-labeled as just "Forms" with as many platform independent goodies as possible. Native desktop apps are no longer for consumer at large but I keep finding myself developing new desktop app every now and then for development tasks. For example, right now I'm working on desktop app that allows you to quickly browse, slice and dice very large data files of order of 100s of GBs. It would be nice if I can release this kind of apps for all platforms using .net.

PS: I don't want WPF in Core. It's over-engineered uglyness I care lease about.

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Winforms has a lot of really counterintuitive and cumbersome widgets. It's well-known and traditional and straightforward, but there's too much MFC baggage in the various widgets' behavior. The data-binding system is a mess, the DataGridView is utterly dire... so many simple things are just such a pain.

Unless you just want to throw some textboxes and buttons on a screen, it's just not good. I mean, ever do some dynamic forms and run out of window handles? Really?

Winforms look good... until you know better.

As far as doing GUIs? The golden standard is Delphi, and from the MS camp, Visual FoxPro.

I started working at Microsoft in 2007, and so have never been exposed to Winforms. It seems archaic to WPF, which can do almost anything. I don't bother with high level WPF widgets however, and mostly just roll my own because it is so easy to do (plus my interests usually require custom widgets).

I've been finding WPF development very slow going, I know this is partly due to inexperience but I suspect mostly because WPF and its tooling is not polished enough.

In particular I find myself diving into the XAML all the time, whereas I hardly look at the generated code in my WinForms application.

That was my experience with WPF as well - I would far rather use Winforms. (n.b., if there's a library & GUI designer for the web that emulates Winforms well enough, I would love that).

Only when the HTML/CSS/JavaScript Frankenstein gets fixed.

This is why I never liked frontend web development, it is such a pain compared with what native toolkits are capable of.

Maybe webcomponents will finally fix this.

XAML is evil, thankfully you don't have to use it with WPF, and I dont.

So are you building your application by just creating the object model in code or using the designer and never looking at the XAML?

All code, i even wrote a helper framework to make coded wpf more powerful:

http://bling.codeplex.com

You can write things like button.Left = label.Right + 20 and it will synthesize the data binding code automatically.

Sadly, there are some circumstances where XAML is virtually inescapable (e.g. constructing templates; you can use the deprecated FrameworkElementFactory, but it's pretty ugly).

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