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Comment by privateSFacct | Hacker News Reader

Question:

I haven’t tried building a windows app in 10 years.

That said, in the past I found it darn easy to wire an interface up quickly.

I recently downloaded visual studio and could not quickly figure out how to get a GUI going (design view would not show).

What is the recommended approach with this new stuff?

Some buttons and textboxes on a form with an onChange method and a data bound grid?

This used to be pretty easy.

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If you were trying WinForms, the designer does not yet work for .NET Core apps. The WPF designer is supposed to work with .NET Core, but there was a bug in it in the first VS release that might have been the cause of your issue[0].

I also had problems doing anything other than toy WPF projects. IMO the .NET Core support for the GUI frameworks is not ready for prime time. Building GUI apps in .NET Framework is still a great experience though.

[0] https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/...

Very helpful. I thought WPF / Core was the recommended / modern approach.

I just fired up an attempt using Windows Forms / Net Framework after scrolling down to that combo. It looks good so far.

Yeah, I think the Microsoft messaging would naturally lead you to that conclusion, though generally they avoid saying it explicitly. I think in a year WPF and WinForms will probably work great under .NET Core, but I wouldn't use either for real work right now. My recommendation would be to use .NET Framework for GUI work right now, but do it in such a way that the upgrade path is easy. The way to do that is to create the project under .NET Core, and then hand edit the project file to change the <TargetFramework> element from "netcoreapp3.0" to "net472". That will give you the new project file format and make it easy to upgrade when they finish getting the bugs out. The other main thing you should do is to create any libraries as .NET Standard 2.0 libraries, which work with both .NET Framework and .NET Core.

Can you put WPF code in .NET Standard 2.0 libraries somehow?

> I thought WPF / Core was the recommended / modern approach.

The recommended / modern approach for 100% new applications would probably still be UWP (WinRT XAML) / Core, except getting that up-to-date with the latest .NET Core improvements is currently delayed until .NET 5.

Await the November update. When I remember right, they will update the designer till then.

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