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Comment by moogly | Hacker News Reader

As someone who used to make a bunch of WPF apps, and hated the framework from day one almost 15 years ago (it was a half-baked, over-/underdesigned mess that felt dated on release day, and was never updated to take advantage of newer C# language features), did things ever improve with Metro or UWP?

At least they got rid of that buggy crash-prone Blend designer (that wasn't truly WYSIWYG) and the idea of using DI for design-time data instead of just doing hot-reloading during runtime (which I believe they finally embraced, after AmmyUI showed the way).

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I've never used WPF, but I've done alot of UWP, and from the code samples I've run into for WPF while searching for UWP solutions, UWP feels like it is pretty much the same thing as WPF, with a few namespaces or classes missing. I can look at WPF code, and easily copy+paste or translate it to UWP with minimal effort.

Alright, thanks. I'm pragmatic enough to see some value in that (easier to transition, no retraining), but man, I would not be happy.

UWP is WPF done right. You were right about the problem with WPF. The other problem was that it was very different from WinForms. But WinForms was also fundamentally broken, in a way that didn't appear until you had to make anything larger than a basic calculator app. UWP fixed all of that. If you take the time to learn it, it makes a lot of sense.

Can you promise that it's good? When I try to read up on it, it just seems to be some 'android clone' intended for playing-card-stack-navigation? (IE UI's where you keep flipping back and forth between full-page layouts) ?

That’s the first time I’ve heard anyone complement UWP. I thought it doesn’t support anything useful like datagridview?

Stuff like datagrid tends to live in the Windows Community Toolkit (https://github.com/windows-toolkit/WindowsCommunityToolkit) these days. Though there's apparently an effort to reimplement it natively in WinUI (https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/issues/1500)

(one difference is that the WCT is mostly C# and WinUI/the built-in controls are C++)

DataGridView had huge problems if you wanted to do anything even slightly off the beaten path. UWP forgoes opinionated controls.

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