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It's not as if WPF was the only way to make UIs for apps.

But it was the primary, endorsed way for several years. WinForms was deprecated, and WPF was the new thing you were supposed to use.

Now you're putting words into Microsoft's mouth to make your point stick. WinForms was never deprecated, WPF was never meant as a replacement for it.

My mistake, I was under the impression that WinForms had been formally deprecated in favor of WPF. It doesn't appear to be such a rare feeling; there are 1.59 million results in Google for "WinForms deprecated".

Regardless of the formal action, the clear message from MS upon release of WPF was: "This is the new official GUI builder, please use it, it should be preferred". Indication of such preferences is relevant. Or do you suggest that MS released WPF with the intention that no one would ever use it?

I think they released WPF with the understanding that WinForms has very Windows-specific features that were preventing people from adopting .NET for cross-platform development. WinForms is Java AWT, WPF is Java Swing. WinForms is meant to be a basic wrapper around GDI, WPF is a completely different rendering engine separate from Windows. I think they were hoping people would choose appropriately based on their needs.

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