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Comment by dep_b | Hacker News Reader

This is why the latest tool I did for Windows still was based on WinForms. Because you know the old crappy stuff will be supported forever and the new shiny better stuff (WPF was pretty cool!) will be deprecated within two years and probably will not get significant developer traction. With a lot of confusing marketing from Microsoft. I don't think even the guru's within Microsoft itself can sum up all the different .Net versions that are out there and what they mean from the top of their heads.

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As a punishment, the .net framework owners should be forced to learn and recite by heart the .net standard compatibility matrix!

That's just part of growing pains. I imagine that when Microsoft finishes their long term plan for .NET the layers will basically be:

.NET Core - implements .NET Standard.

Everything else is layered on top of .NET Core: .NET Framework (Windows), Xamarin (Linux, MacOS GUI, Android, iOS).

So basically everything in use will support .NET Standard.

Retconning is a bitch :p

Aaah, WPF. It's basically React (Native and hw accelerated!), 10 years earlier.

On one side, I'm glad that declarative app UIs can now be built on a web, on the other side - come on, Microsoft, we could have skipped a whole jQuery era and be somewhere else with the web now.

And react is still missing a big library of standard, well documented components with accesibility, performance and all the edge cases built in.

> Aaah, WPF. It's basically React (Native and hw accelerated!), 10 years earlier.

I'd love if that were true, but of course the big selling point of React Native is that it works on several platforms. WPF works on one, and only a desktop one. Well, now that WP is dead at least.

If WPF ran on iOS / Android, hell even if it just ran on MacOS, I think there'd be a lot more devs building apps in it than JavaScript.

It looks like WPF will be supported for the forseeable future, but I get your overall point

WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, ... it doesn't matter. The whole .NET Framework 4.x and .NET Core 1 have the "legacy" tag on. Their new thing is .NET Core 2. The rest moved on to cross-platform.

.NET Core 2 comes very close to the full .NET Framework. Microsoft just made a full circle. Everything legacy is the hot new thing again.

We'll see.

I think the netstandard -> all platforms approach, combined with the aggressive depreciation of old .Net 4.6.x versions is a road map for the future.

Maintaining two entire release chains, the 4.x and the .Net core 2.x, is an impossible long term strategy.

I would be absolutely astonished if the 4.x line is quietly folded away and depreciated ('unsupported') once the netstandard surface area means the code bases that no longer run on the .Net core fall to significantly small fraction.

At that point there will just be 'one' .Net again, and it will be .Net core, on all platforms.

Significantly, there seems little to no indication (https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues/43) that winforms and WPF are going to .Net core.

You might argue that Microsoft is a legacy beast, and they won't abandon their developers by dropping support for old versions, but they already are doing that in the 'you can install it, sure, but it'll never get any more updates' (#1, #2), so you know.

Don't bet the farm on a WPF app. Just saying.

#1: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2015/12/09/support-e...

#2: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17455/lifecycle-faq...

IIRC Winforms relies on core, proprietary, parts of Windows which couldn't be feasibly ported to .net core.

Not sure about WPF. It's a shame because it's a great development experience.

Windows Forms is a thin wrapper around the Win32 API and GDI+. Which is good if you want to customize things on a low level, but bad if you want to run it anywhere else. But cross-platform compatibility for a UI framework was probably a very low priority in 1999 or 2000. You could port it to .NET Core, but then you could only run it on Windows, since pretty much everything is a P/Invoke into user32.dll.

Generally, having something cross-platform either means you're terrible everywhere (Swing), terrible on non-primary platforms (GTK), or have to invest a lot of work in making things work well and still don't quite feel native (Qt). Or you go the Xamarin Forms route and have a few core controls that have to be implemented natively on every platform, which reduces their features to the lowest common denominator, often doesn't expose or enable low-level platform details that may sometimes be needed for customization, and means that you have to invest thrice as much effort into making everything work.

In my experience UI frameworks either are bound to a specific platform, or suck. Or both. But a cross-platform WPF would be awesome, but I'd rather expect UWP to become cross-platform instead of WPF.

Strongly agree with ygra on the cross platform GUI view. This has been my experience since I coded against XVT [1] 25 years ago. I suspect it's a general truth that applies to any abstraction layer; for instance ORMs or AMQP. Abstraction layers attempt to hide complexity, but they can't make it go away.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XVT

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Message_Queuing_Proto...

Thanks for going into more detail, very interesting!

What the heck can replace winforms and wpf apps though?

I've seen them promote at least 2 different technologies since the first time I heard WPF was dying, and both of them are dead already, so far as I can tell.

Apparently Xamarin.Forms, from the .NET Conf 2017 roadmap talks.

lol, so not only is the replacement technology none of the tech previously promised to replace wpf / winform, its a piece of tech that is still roadmapped?

Yeah, I don't think winform / wpf is going anywhere quite yet.

Xamarin.Forms is currently available for iOS, Android, UWP.

At .NET Conf 2017 they announced support for macOS, Linux and WPF. And demoed macOS and Linux current status.

While previously at BUILD 2017 they announced XAML Standard for interoperability between WPF, UWP and Xamarin.Forms.

Which kind of implies it is the way forward.

UWP's XAML stack is alive and growing. The cool "Fluent" stuff like acrylic brushes and active focus highlights want you to use UWP XAML, and while shiny things aren't necessarily a reason to pick a dev stack, they do seem signs of health in that dev stack.

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