[privateSFacct]

My question - what happened to microsoft in this space?

The get up and go speed of the super old windows forms approach was fantastic.

Now I'm supposed to use - XAML? UWP? WPF? Do these have great windows form designer still?

I'm talking speed between download and go with an GUI, a button, a text box (maybe data bound) etc.

This will age me, but for all the decades of "improvements" this tooling has, every time I've tried to do the little widget apps thing I used to be able to do trivially I end up wondering in the woods.

[jordwest]

I'm pretty excited to see where the new .NET MAUI [1] goes. It's still in development, but it seems like it could be a great contender for fully cross-platform native UIs.

Paired with F# the proposed Elm-like model-view-update style would be the dream.

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-multi-...

[tonyedgecombe]

I was just thinking we are about due another UI framework from Micrsoft.

In addition, we are enabling developers to write fluent C# UI and implement the increasingly popular Model-View-Update (MVU) pattern.

Ah, some SwiftUI envy.

[numlock86]

You can do the "WinForms approach" with WPF/XAML still, but once you got the ideas and concepts behind MVVN, observables, bindings, converters, collection controls and so on, there is absolutely no turning back and you start to miss that stuff on WinForms.

[pjmlp]

You can partially use them on WinForms, I have done so in several projects.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.windows.f...

It isn't as powerful as WPF/UWP, and it has some caveats depending on the .NET Framework version, but it does the job.

[privateSFacct]

Is WPF/XAML the right way now to do quick get going windows app development?

[pjmlp]

Yes, although the future is WinUI.

https://microsoft.github.io/microsoft-ui-xaml/about.html

[tonyedgecombe]

It wasn't for me, it felt like wading through treacle.

However if you want to unit test your UI then it makes more sense.

[ChicagoDave]

Still think WPF/XAML was the best layout engine and I'd cry if it replaced CSS.

[EamonnMR]

Visual Studio was a very nice wyswyg but they ceded the mobile space to others.