[greatgib]

I stand corrected: The Microsoft era (2007-2014) In Jan 2007 I joined Microsoft as an evangelist.

Exactly at the time that Microsoft pushed for the XAML crap... So indeed not reinvented the wheel, just not having giving it up despite the complete failure of it.

[cjbgkagh]

I like XAML, the whole point of it is tooling support which was undermined when the tools were so buggy for so long. Now that many of the bugs have been fixed and computers are much faster it’s become a really productive UI paradigm for me. I’ll eventually switch over to Avalonia for better performance and cross platform support.

[greatgib]

You do Windows GUI development?

[cjbgkagh]

Yes, among many other things. Applied Researcher so full stack and constant greenfield.

I also worked at DevDiv MS during the Foundation series era so I know why many of the issues with WPF are there, basically political infighting and penny pinching. It didn’t help that Gates quit and Balmer took over. Patterns and Practices didn’t properly understand WPF so they gave bad official advice on how to solve problems, it didn’t help that this was near peak Object Oriented mania and language features like generics were still new so there was a lot of unnecessary boilerplate. Code generation did help with this. WPF has a very high skill threshold for making custom controls that are not just compositions of existing controls, open sourcing WPF has helped a lot with this.

WPF is a flawed implementation of a really good idea, and if you can work around the flaws like I do then it’s actually really great. I totally understand why other people don’t like it.

I know it’ll sounds like I’m a snobbish hipster but the vast majority of people never get to the skill level required to properly use these tools. And while React starts out easier it doesn’t stay that way.