Comment by emodendroket
8 years ago
The biggest frustration, to me, is that WPF was basically left on the vine while they pursued this WinRT stuff.
8 years ago
The biggest frustration, to me, is that WPF was basically left on the vine while they pursued this WinRT stuff.
I think the evolutionary path connecting WPF and "this WinRT stuff" is extremely clear and if you've built WPF you can build UWP. UWP .NET/XAML is great to work with if you know WPF, it's truly a successor to WPF in every way. (It'll be even better soon [as in next month] thanks to .NET Standard 2.0.)
That may be so, but WinRT comes with a bunch of limitations, so there isn't really a no-brainer choice for application development, and also, considering how deeply it's associated with the unpopular Windows Store app and Windows phone, who wants to throw in their lot with it? Frankly it hasn't seemed worth investing that much time into any of them and I pretty much just end up reaching for yet another WinForms MVP app. But WinForms practically works against you in the effort to separate UI from behavioral code so that isn't that satisfying either.
Limitations change as API priorities shift. The platform has grown over time. Some inherent limitations are useful (to be a medium to creativity, to the user's control over their system overriding a developer's narcissism, to the idea that security and reliability are worth engineering for), and yes, unlikely to disappear entirely.
I can't dispute the unpopularity of Windows Phone, but from what I hear the Windows Store is fairly successful in Windows 10. Many consumers use it to install apps, which is a judge of popularity. However, if by popularity you instead mean sentiment, then I get the impression that currently most people are ambivalent about the Store in so far as it is a pragmatic tool that people neither love nor hate, just as most people neither love nor hate their toaster so long as it toasts. (Certainly there are haters, but volume of their voices is not necessarily an indication of their size/number/consumer spending activity per the first definition of a popularity, just a reminder of the passion with which they feel their sentiment.)
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I'm still maintaining a WinForms app, the only problem I've had is dealing with high dpi displays is really messy.
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The problem with UWP is that it requires Win10. This makes it a no-go for vast majority of developers targeting desktop Windows, given that Win7 is still dominant, and will be for a while to come.
Why MS didn't create a UWP emulator or wrapper for Windows 7 is beyond me. No Windows 7 compatibility is the main reason my company isn't bothering with UWP for our desktop software.
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Yeah, and what enterprise have done? It had to switch to legacy crap of JS and HTML(5). Sinofski was an evil moron.
That was probably going to happen anyway because the zero-installation, easy-update, relatively upgrade-safe environment of Web apps is really attractive to businesses.