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Comment by noitsnot | Hacker News Reader

WPF hasn't succeeded? What am I missing?

WPF definitely falls in the didn't succeed category. Microsoft grossly mismanaged everything around WPF and C# during the Sinofsky era. It's doing much better on the C# side today but the UI developer community left WPF long ago and will never return.

WPF is still pretty much the standard on Windows but it definitely could be much better. They just abandoned it and then went on these weird detours with Silverlight, WinRT and now UWP.

I suspect the actual standard on Windows today, as hated as it is here on HN, is now Electron.

The HTML based UI ecosystem is just so much richer and better supported than WPF that any theoretical advantages WPF might have are dwarfed by the practical considerations of just build it in Electron and be done with it.

"I suspect the actual standard on Windows today, as hated as it is here on HN, is now Electron."

You may be right :-)

Yes with VSCode being the poster child of that movement (I.e. towards web tech for desktop apps)

No, Eclipse. Just think about how many "enterprise grade" applications are built on Eclipse.

OT: At one of my former employers we were building a PLC. The sister team was building the IDE to program the PLC, and the compiler.

All of us were behind schedule. But our colleagues from IDE world staged a presentation for the whole project including top management (owner, CEO etc.) where they showed how far they were.

They showed how they have multiple windows inside the main application window, minimizing and maximizing those. Syntax highlighting. Basically everything Eclipse is giving you for free. Actual business logic: none to be seen.

WPF evolved into XAML. WPF is considered stable and feature complete.

Now they are working on cross-platform and that's why it had a feature freeze ( + because of graphics). It's now being added in .net core though.

So it's not dead at all

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