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Comment by M8 | Hacker News Reader

After having to switch from WPF to crap-HTML5 due to the Great Silence and lying Guthrie's betrayal: not betting my carrier on a Microsoft-only tech again.

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I never understood or do understand that reaction.

WPF, Silverlight and WinRT all have XAML at their core.

Sure there are few APIs differences among those versions, but so what?

UIKit is not the same as Cocoa Touch, and I don't see these reactions on Apple Forums.

Nor on Google forums, when they keep changing the UI classes between each Android release.

The whole concepts in the XAML and .NET stack, how bindings work, data templates, DirectX integration and so on are the same, even if there are a few changes required.

I know...its like Guthrie slapped him or something. It's weird.

I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Care to elaborate?

Microsoft marketed WPF as the way to make Windows applications going forward. It turned out that it sucked for things like tablets or phones, and everyone cared about tablets and phones. WPF is not exactly abandoned, but people who learned WPF to develop with it are somewhat bitter (and understandably so) about the experience, and about the transition to Windows 8 / phones / tablets.

WPF lives on as...WinRT. I mean, the APIs are 80% identical. WPF also has fairly decent support for touch, what WinRT did was improve performance a lot through a new architecture.

I personally still use WPF for all my development given its richer API. I'm not a big fan of XAML, but WPF has a good basic API for putting stuff on the screen and handling input in C# (disclosure: MS employee, but research).

> but people who learned WPF to develop with it are somewhat bitter

Only those not able to grasp that what matters is the XAML stack, not the little layer that is put on top of it.

WPF is a lot more than just XAML, and you can totally write entire WPF apps without a line of XAML. XAML is mainly useful for tooling and lacks many of the niceties of C# while operating on a DOM that is a bit more complex than HTML. I'm not sure if anyone wants to edit it by hand, which is true of any XML dialect.

I really wish JavaFX Script would have taken off. It provided a nice balance between code and markup.

For me and many other .NET developers I know, speaking about XAML means the whole stack, e.g. XAML, .NET APIs, Blend integration and third party components.

I just tend to abbreviate to XAML when speaking about it.

There changes on the APIs between WPF, WinRT and Silverlight if you will, and not all features are exposed across all stacks.

Yet, any developer knowing XAML, the usual programming idioms and the respective .NET APIs can easily transition among all of them.

This has been mentioned at multiple PDC and BUILD conferences in the last years, but I guess many at HN and Reddit don't follow them.

I just see XAML itself as totally optional, and it is weird to hear it used to represent the entire architecture. One of the reasons I haven't even tried WinRT yet is because it seems much more XAML heavy than classic WPF (it is also missing font metric APIs my programs depend on...). I'm also a bit of a code traditionalist, and find transitioning between the two (markup and code behind) a bit jarring.

Plenty of Microsoft haters on HN, this post has already been flagged or flamed off the front page. Oh well.

That little layer on top is the one beneath their app with which they interact, is it not? I'm really asking, not being a Windows developer but looking to get into it - and being a bit confused as to how to proceed.

It goes like this, back when Longhorn was the codename for Windows Vista, with the big plans of using .NET for everything, the next generation UI engine was named Avalon.

Parts of it eventually became what is known as WPF. The whole set of concepts that it embraces are as follows:

- XML based "language" for describing UI layouts (XAML)

- A set of .NET APIs for buttons, dialogs, windows, and so on

- A set of .NET APIs for manipulating the XAML DOM

- A set of .NET APIs for handling application resources

- A set of abstraction concepts, namely binding, data templates, triggers, MVVM, storyboards

When Silverlight came out, the team responsible for it adapted all these concepts to the platform. Similarly to the WinRT platform.

The main differences are the XML namespaces used by XAML, which expose different set of UI widgets in each platform.

Also some .NET APIs are a bit different as the classes aren't 100% equal across all platforms, e.g. TypeConverters are not available in WinRT.

However those basic concepts originally from Avalon are still there.

They suddenly stopped actively developing WPF 5 years ago, now it's just some small unimportant team cleaning up the backlog. I went to a conference where Guthrie told us that Silverlight 5 is the future. Less than a year later and he was focused only on ASP and JS. As if it's OK.

You believed that flash's poor cousin will be next big thing? In 2010?

In terms of features it's actually Flash's rich cousin because Silverlight is multi-language (C#, Python, etc) and multi-threaded among many other features.

Do you actually think that HTML, CSS and Javascript are good technologies to build applications on top of compared to something like Silverlight, which is purpose-built for the task?

But flash was already dying at the time. Flash has "died" because web applications had gotten more powerful.

"Do you actually think that HTML, CSS and Javascript are good technologies to build applications on top" Are you serious? I am not saying "the web" is perfect, but this just nonsense.

For native apps? Yes, I think web tech sucks immensely compared to Silverlight.

Unfortunately, the XAML everywhere people lost at Microsoft, so we're stuck with half-baked, kludgy and limited solutions like atom/electron/node-webkit for building cross platform desktop apps. XAML everywhere (Silverlight) is so much more precise and it's compiled. I would have preferred that they continued developing Silverlight at least as a means of building cross platform desktop apps, but I understand why they don't want to expend the energy.

Read the sibling's reply. I was going to say exactly that. See the 2nd sentence in my comment? It's not without meaning.

And my reply to that - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9597857

@LogoThete I work in enterprise and don't care about wider landscape.

I'm not really i really understand that statement. What is enteprise and why can it ignore the wider landscape?

You can use non-legacy non-ubiquitous languages (as opposed to HTML/JS/CSS), because it's not public-facing. Microsoft is sending a mixed message to enterprise: should they bet on HTML5 and possibly quit the MS ecosystem whatsoever, or XAML is still a major investment for Microsoft? They need to demonstrate that WPF/XAML team is more important than ASP/Azure team.

That doesn't make any sense.

Azure and web tech is incredibly important. XAML can be used for desktop apps and store apps...thats been the story for about three years now.

They have said for years that WPF is the way to go if you are writing a desktop app that has rich UI needs.

I really don't understand this kind of thing...was C++ dead even though MFC is only getting minor updates?

Azure is literally the most important thing that the server and tools division is working on. Just because they are developing cloud tools doesn't mean that they wont support desktop apps.

The "mixed message" they have been sending to the enterprise is around licensing. Dev technology changes and this isn't anything new.

Well obviously you can do that, under the assumption that the company you work for is locked down and isn't going to even remotly consider any type of BYOD, you could get away with pushing any tech you want, considering you control the clients.

However, that doesn't mean that you should and if you're going to lock yourself in to a single priopritory vendor, you're doing yourself and the people you work for a disservice if you haven't weighed it against the alternatives.

I highly doubt the GP really meant that, which is what I was really referring to. What is it about "enteprise" which makes them think they're different? Honest question.

So do I and we're very happy with WPF.

This doesn't make any (long term) sense..

You're betting that Microsoft (or any other company) will continue to support all it's api's indefinitely. And when it doesn't, you not caring about a "wider landscape", will bite you.

Silverlight is great example of this, one year it's "the best" (enterprise) technology the next year it's dead. I wonder if it's even officially supported on Windows 10.

WPF was basically html like XML (it had a grid element for one thing) but with all the crap thrown out and native support for two-way binding of values and event which meant it was extremely easy to e.g make a front end to a database but also to make GUIs in general.

Sadly MS seem to have abandoned it.

The "WPF is dead" thing is weird seeing as how you have been able to build an application with supported technology the whole time.

They have tried to fight the impression, but people don't seem to listen.

What does WPF not have already that needs to be added?

I usually end up using WinForms for my limited GUI needs (very limited, desktop only), and that's mostly a wrapper around Win32 APIs that haven't really changed in 15 years or more. Does that mean WinForms is dead?

Although from what i heard at Ignite, they are making some improvements for touch support for WPF, XAML debugging, rendering performance, etc. It had maybe five minutes during an hour-long session on the future of .NET that I went to.

edit: link http://channel9.msdn.com/events/Ignite/2015/BRK2702

XAML is quite verbose, they are not making any radical changes - that's the problem. There is no daring attitude that you can see in the ASP team.

I don't know what to say to that. If you look at what's going on with the new app model...its pretty aggressive what they are doing. Btw...you know that they are going to let .net/winform/wpf and win32 apps be published to the store and use the new API's right? There is a build session about that as well...they are using a type of container technology to wrap them to make them safer. (ish)

I'm just saying...i think they have heard everybody and have tried to bring all of their dev's along on the new app model.

Win32 apps, WPF and .net, objective-c for chrissake...android APIs...what more do you want?

Not sure why you think WPF is dead. A simple google shows many projects at MS actively using it, it still being developed, active support on WPF codebases, and that it is big in enterprise, which MS actively encourages.

For example, here is a recent post on WPF work for VS 2015 [1]. It is very much alive and being used.

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/11/12/the-roadma...

If you compare the amount of activity coming out of the ASP.Net MVC team with that of the WPF team you can see why people are worried.

Only those that don't get that what matters is XAML.

XAML is the least important part, it's the underlying object model where the value is.

In fact if they were starting from scratch now I doubt they would even use XML, it's not great a great way to edit large documents.

The ASP.NET team is slamming things around to decouple it from IIS and Windows so that they can make a push into the server-side Linux world. ASP.NET MVC is still a relatively new technology stack, as well - three years ago I was only just thinking about getting some of our WebForms apps converted to, I believe, MVC 2.

Those two technologies serve two completely different needs. Would you claim C++ is dead because it doesn't have releases each year?

WPF is quite mature for what it does. The components underlying the web are changing rapidly. Comparing these two does not mean WPF is dead.

Is Visual Studio Code made with WPF? Is Visual Studio Online made with WPF? Is WPF open-source and multi-platform? Guess which one(s) will survive in 5 years?

WPF is supported as part of the OS until at the earliest 2024, and given MS ability to keep backwards compatibility longer than the web has even existed, I'm betting WPF will be the last one standing of those items you listed.

Wow. You act like Scott Guthrieactually did something to you.

Well, he probably made him waste significant time learning a technology that was going nowhere.

Reminds me of Nokia's words at Qt DevDays when they said they're 100% invested in C++ and Qt. I think one year later they royally screwed their entire developer community and switched everything to .NET with absolutely no way to port your code except by rewriting it.

Luckily Qt survived, in no small part because it was open source. I guess the moral of these stories is to be careful when using languages and frameworks controlled by corporations and to focus instead on open technologies...

Man, I'm not trying to be pedantic here...but Scott Guthrie didn't make him do anything. The level of anger expressed there is strange to say the least.

The lesson there is to keep learning and stop trying to find silver bullets. What did this guy do join a WPF monastery and only practice WPF-fu without somehow becoming a better .net dev in the process?

If you haven't picked up enough web skills in the last decade to be dangerous you must have been hiding somewhere. Time is only wasted if you let it be. I had to do some crazy shit in access years ago, but I'm not angry that the skills I learned building forms in Access 2000 aren't useful anymore.

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