Comment by somenameforme
16 days ago
> "(2) Don't use any Microsoft-owned UI toolkit, you'll get burnt"
This is 100% true for all of their techs produced within the past ~20 years, but WPF and Winforms are extremely stable with no real issues.
It's so weird too because most of everything they've done in the past 20 years has basically just been incomplete remixes of WPF. If they just stuck with WPF and extended it onward, something like a UI toolkit equivalent of C#, it would 100% be the gold standard for Windows development today, and perhaps even UI development in general if they open source/standarded it.
Ahhm. At previous $DAYJOB, I inherited a WPF app written in 2012; I stumbled upon several WONTFIX bugs through the years - mostly having to do with shared memory bitmaps, having to manually call GC at times, and a host of other things.
Stable, but many issues. Stay away if you value your sanity and do anything nontrivial.
When they announced UWP I was just starting a new side project and I thought, let's check it out. I was hoping it would basically bring WPF into first class citizen territory. Instead, they made them needlessly incompatible. Like writing for both NeXT and MacOS, but on the same platform. I got discouraged right away and have really never done any significant Windows work since, which turned out to be a great move for my sanity.
WPF and Winforms may be stable, but they're not going to work well on a modern machine with a HiDpi monitor. Same with Win32 controls.
My take: Use Win32 for opening windows and interfacing with the OS. Use a different toolkit for actually drawing inside the windows.
Ideally a toolkit that can paint in sync with window open and resize, otherwise you'll get Electron-style window flickering. And something that supports multiple windows in a lightweight way, since you're going to want popups, menus etc. to extend outside parent window bounds
WPF scales and works perfectly with HiDPI displays, and (from what I've read) WinForms support for HiDPI has improved in recent years.
Glad to hear things are improving here. Still, the UI doesn't look very nice though ;)
the should just have updated wpf with their newer widgets and just continue to improve it and even make it cross platform. (basically what avalonia is doing)