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Comment by quickthrower2 | Hacker News Reader

So does this mean WPF is alive? Is it sane to develop something new in WPF again?

I've done a bunch of WPF in my time, but I struggle to see what I'd use it for now. For line-of-business type apps I'd do it on the web, and for anything that had to be desktop I'd need to be really, really sure that it didn't need to be cross platform.

Yes I like WPF's model, but it's not worth investing my mental energy into something that is self-obsoleting. Although you can make a career out of WPF, there is a lot of stuff that needs to be maintained, and trading companies around where I live seem to favour it. Probably because they use it to make internal software, they can dictate everyone uses Windows, and they need to build stuff fast but it also needs that native performance, flexibility and power you don't get with HTML.

Depends if you subscribe to the idea that open-sourcing something is equivalent to putting it out to pasture.

MS’ problem is that Visual Studio is the only “real” software they produce that uses WPF - which also happens to be a flagship product. They need WPF to stay up-to-date but they can’t afford to invest their own FTE resources into it either when other products are more important as far as the C-levels are concerned.

I’m curious what this means for UWP XAML - as it has its origins in WPF. Can Microsoft use open contributed WPF code in UWP?

OneNote was a flagship WPF software as well. OneNote has announced it's all in on UWP moving forward.

WinUI included in the announcement above is the UWP XAML controls and their "XAML Islands" wrappers, so Microsoft is directly taking UWP open source contributions now, too.

OneNote never used WPF AFAIK, Win32 OneNote used the same internal UI framework other Office Win32 apps used (and still use)

So far as I'm aware, Microsoft's Ink controls have never had Win32 versions. For a few years they were System.Windows.Forms-only, for many more years they were WPF-only, and now the latest versions are UWP-only. That's a pretty core component part of OneNote. I don't think OneNote was WPF for all of its history, but there was certainly a time where a large percentage of it was WPF, from what I've heard. Which is also why I've heard OneNote led the vanguard to UWP and has been the Fluent Design 2.0 test bed for where Office's Fluent Design is moving, because it was the easiest to integrate UWP controls into the fastest.

My understanding is that most everything ink-related in OneNote is custom on top of the lowest-level APIs available. That tends to be Office's MO in general.

> Can Microsoft use open contributed WPF code in UWP?

They can, because the open source version of WPF is MIT-licensed.

No one wants desktop apps anymore. Everyone wants web apps. Except for legacy software WPF is dead unfortunately.

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