[pjc50]

> The story is so bad Microsoft’s own flagship software has to build their own UI frameworks

I think this might be the other way round: if they're not eating their own dogfood, it's much easier for the UI framework to come adrift from actual use cases.

It's really telling that in Windows 8/10 they "modernised" some, but not all, of the control panel UI. It's basically random as to whether a setting you need will be in a Metro-flavoured window or a Win32-flavoured one.

To me, the trouble with everything after WinForms is that it lacks a really compelling reason to upgrade. It's not easier to develop for and it's not nicer to use, and on many desktop systems the font rendering is much uglier in the new system. It does perform better at high DPI, but (catch-22) few people use high DPI windows systems because it's not well supported by even the OS let alone the applications.

[maxxxxx]

"It's really telling that in Windows 8/10 they "modernised" some, but not all, of the control panel UI. It's basically random as to whether a setting you need will be in a Metro-flavoured window or a Win32-flavoured one."

That's really infuriating. Makes me wonder what all these devs they have are doing the whole day.

"To me, the trouble with everything after WinForms is that it lacks a really compelling reason to upgrade. It's not easier to develop for and it's not nicer to use, and on many desktop systems the font rendering is much uglier in the new system. It does perform better at high DPI, but (catch-22) few people use high DPI windows systems because it's not well supported by even the OS let alone the applications. "

WPF had great potential and I think they could have made it a wonderful environment if they had kept improving it. Clean up XAML syntax (maybe something like they with ASP.NET and Razor) , simplify data binding syntax and debugging, make MVVM first class citizen and it would be great. Instead they (almost) stopped development of WPF and cranked out a series of half baked successors like WinRT, Silverlight and UWP.

[dep_b]

WPF was really nice from what I remember of it. MVVM was super easily integrated with XAML.

[tonyedgecombe]

MVVM is great if you want to unit test all your UI code but who wants to do that.

For me the whole thing was cumbersome and nowhere near as productive as WinForms. Not only that but problems it purported to solve like high-dpi support still had issues.

[maxxxxx]

With some more work like better Visual Studio integration and maybe some compiler magic it could have been fantastic.

[pjmlp]

I do Windows development since 3.0, currently maintaining a couple of Forms and WPF applications, the Forms are the hardest to maintain due event handling spaghetti code instead of proper MVVM with data binding, no use of Table/StackLayout components and still do background handling in BackgroundWorker classes.

[GordonS]

How is the Visual Studio WPF designer these days? I worked on a WPF app around 5 years ago, and the form designer in Visual Studio was appalingly slow and quite buggy.

I also wasn't a big fan of XAML - no matter how much time I spent using it, it mostly seemed more difficult and awkward to get components where you wanted them than with WinForms.

[pjmlp]

Quite good. I always do a mixture of Blend and Studio.

Never had any big problem that I can remember of since Visual Studio 2012.

[NordSteve]

2012 had big internal architecture changes that did a lot to stabilize the designer.

[maxxxxx]

The designer is fine now.

[snaky]

High DPI support for WinForms has been improved in the .NET Framework 4.8 https://github.com/Microsoft/dotnet-framework-early-access/b...