Comment by zozbot234
6 months ago
> The simplicity and efficiency of Visual Basic UI programming relied on several assumptions that became obsolete in 2000 when LCD and high-DPI displays became widely available. Everything in the VB UI editor was based on a fixed layout. There was a fixed font size, fixed DPI-density display expectation, and fixed button sizes. Every dialog assumed fixed sizes and was non-resizable.
There are visual UI editors that provide for dynamic layouts. (The old Glade editor for GTK+ was one example; modern GTK+4 still does not come with a standard UI editor.) The underlying issue is pointless churn in modern UI frameworks, not the assumption of a fixed-DPI display.
Even Java's Swing, introduced in 1999 (or maybe 98 in beta?), dealt with the problem of dynamic layouts fairly well. Of course, it performed like an absolute dog to begin with, but most of the performance kinks were dealt with during the Java 1.3 era (2000), and by 1.4 in 2002/3 or so, performance was absolutely fine, with most of the rendering quirks of the native look and feels having been dealt with as well.
Moving to C#/WinForms in late 2004 after working with Swing for 4 years felt absolutely jarring by comparison. No concept of layout managers and very limited options for dynamic layout in general (docking was about it, IIRC), really hard to customise components (if it was possible at all - for many it wasn't because they were just thin wrappers around Win32). It was terrible by comparison and I seriously considered quitting the job I was in, even though I liked the company, and finding a role in a Java shop again instead because I hated WinForms so very much.
Swing is obviously ancient history now. Is it still a thing? Do people still use it? Are there still Java desktop apps? I've no idea. But even 20-odd years later Microsoft have never managed to surpass it for desktop app development. WPF is OKish, and certainly addresses a lot of the problems of WinForms, but it's always felt over-complicated and the syntax of XAML has never really been a plus point in my opinion. Silverlight was... a debacle.
And, really, since 2013 I've only paid attention to distributed systems, web, and back end development (all of which have their own problems and complexities) so I've really lost touch with Microsoft's desktop development paradigm.
But I do find myself often yearning for the "simplicity" of desktop app development. Of course, that simplicity comes at a cost: you're trading it for complexity in licensing, distribution, deployment, and support because you have no control over your target environment, and you have to support almost unlimited combinations of machine configuration (which is not necessarily a picnic when you have thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of customers for each product). And, let's be real: nobody misses InstallShield and MSIs.
> But I do find myself often yearning for the "simplicity" of desktop app development.
Yep, isn't it great to use an API that is actually all about UI widgets, rather than having to indirect through a document markup language.
I've been doing development using JavaFX, Swing's successor, for many years. It's got its quirks, and places where the dev team stopped iterating on the API a little too soon; but it works and does some really nice stuff.
Swing is still a thing, at least for all of those using JetBrains products, and still comes wiht the JDK, whereas JavaFX was placed into open source, and I think it only carries forward thanks to Gluon's work.
In what concerns layout managers in .NET, you could do it in Windows Forms via TableLayoutPanel and FlowLayoutPanel.
WPF has always used layout managers from the get go, which is why its drag and drop workflow feels strange to Windows Form devs.
Yeah, but those layout managers came later. I don’t think they were there in the early 2000s.
I’ll say this for Microsoft: they supported WinForms, even adding new features, long after it had ceased to be the new hotness. Whether they still do, I don’t know. The last time I touched WinForms was 2013.
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