[jorgeleo]

"The sad thing is so many web devs have never written a desktop app of any kind, so have no idea how painful the web really is."

Agree fully. there are concepts that are fully mature in desktop applications, that the web has yet to come close.

[cmdkeen]

Alternatively writing web apps using Knockout seems so much nicer than WinForms and INotifyPropertyChanged hell. Maybe WPF solves this, but I wouldn't want to go back.

[Pxtl]

I was interviewing student devs recently and was flabbergasted how many of the kids doing greenfield personal projects were still using WinForms. It's frustrating how Visual Studio pushes them to work with this bone-headed warty out-of-date technology. These weren't old hands using somethign familiar just to get an MVP for a personal project, these were kids who didn't know any existing GUI frameworks and started using WinForms because it's the default in VS.

[jongalloway2]

I agree. I'm asking around to see if we can get the default changed in Visual Studio.

[pjmlp]

Meanwhile I am doing a greenfield project in WinForms, because it needs to be integrated into an existing eco-system of applications and components built around WinForms.

[Pxtl]

I don't think we'd call it greenfield, then, if you're constrained by tech you need to interact with.

[pjmlp]

Yeah, kind of. Not much I can disclose.

[mike_hearn]

Knockout is a data binding framework for DOM/HTML based apps.

WPF and JavaFX both have a mature reactive data binding framework so altering your model causes updates to the UI and vice-versa. JavaFX has an entire functional reactive framework in it so you can build lazy functional transforms over observable collections and the like. The fact that it's an API rather than a DSL makes it kind of ugly, I believe LINQ is a little similar but much more nicely integrated for the .NET world. But it's all there.

[blencdr]

I must agree on that, knockout make things much nicer. KO components are a great thing also.