Comment by WorldMaker
8 years ago
I think .NET Standard 2.0 is about the clearest path you could get forward from WPF.
> I don't understand why they even needed UWP. Why not improve WPF?
The short story: 1) To first-class support more platforms/architectures (ARM). 2) To support C/C++ and other COM developers, bringing everyone COM [WinRT] [1] and Managed (.NET) to the same table. (Microsoft still has a lot of teams invested in C/C++; it shouldn't be a surprise that they couldn't just focus on .NET and leave C/C++ devs behind.)
The full story I think is pretty fascinating, but that's the executive summary.
[1] Crazy aside: the tech still sort of known as WinRT is closer to the original goal of .NET as a COM replacement than .NET became. It's also close enough to COM that I'm still surprised no one's admitted to building a UWP Delphi or VB6 app. (Not that I'd admit to doing so if I built such a beast.)
That's a very charitable explanation that I find hard to accept. I think it's more that MS .Net development is organized in way that it's easy to do new stuff but hard to maintain an effort long time. In other areas they are able to make progress without breaking everything all the time. C# has stayed backwards compatible while still moving forward quickly. SQL server doesn't release a new version every 2 years that breaks old stuff.
Somehow they seem to lack leadership.
Keep in mind that .NET Core is almost the same .NET runtime/framework (little-f) that powers UWP. It's been a huge hurdle across the board, web and desktop alike. I'm sure if the .NET team had had a magic wand to shrink the .NET Framework (cap-f) down to a smaller size and remove all the legacy Win32 code without breaking so much compatibility they would have.
It's easy to say in hindsight that they should have tried for something like what .NET Standard 2.0 is today earlier, but I, at least, can't blame them for attempting to try to clean house and remove terrible dev experiences like AppDomains and DataTable. Those APIs are terrible and should have died.
But again they have no upgrade path. They just produce something new and expect everyone to jump on board. My expectation is that UWP will last 2-3 years and then they will have something else that does the same but in a different way and UWP is in maintenance mode.
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