It’s dead, the question now is how is the corpse going to be buried and no amount of cheer leading will change that outcome in the near future." http://www.wpcentral.com/deleted-microsoft-blog-post-claims-windows-10-support-desktop-apps This might possibly give a bit more push internally within MS to update WPF, since it is after all still their recommended UI platform for desktop apps. Because our Company also runs Windows 7, and most of us know what it means to get a Windows 10 workstation for a developer in an IT environment where only Windows 7 “is supported”. WPF is still the standard for large scale corporate enterprise desktop but I believe this will change too. I am kind of new to WPF… I think I like XAML for many things … its layout control, the capability to nest elements, and etc. In this article. Long and short of it is that I hated every minute of my WinRT experience. And this was the right choice because in 2013 the death of Silverlight was officially announced, and more than one IT stakeholder were surprised because they had not seen the forewarning signs. Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) has been released as part of the .NET framework 3.0 in 2006. WPF is closer technologically to WinRT and UWP so please for your own sake assume Windows Forms is dead for anything else than maintaining legacy applications. WPF was designed to permit this but as a compromise rather than a primary way of doing things. Cari pekerjaan yang berkaitan dengan Is wpf dead 2020 atau upah di pasaran bebas terbesar di dunia dengan pekerjaan 18 m +. There are UI frameworks like Telerik or DevExpress which enhance the functionality even further. First I’ll start by presenting the signs that are worrying me, and should worry you too if you are a WPF stakeholder. Thanks for mentioning a third-party vendor Todd. In PDC sessions i see only Framework 4.0, Azure and WPF. Depending on your available IT workforce, you should devote time to technology intelligence and have some developers starting to think about WinRT: how you could benefit from it, typically to broaden your audience, how new applications should be developed, how the existing tools and code can be reused, what are the potential issues to anticipate… 1. According to Greg Levenhagen (Is WPF Dead? I was a VB, VC++, MFC, ATL and COM developer before I jumped to Windows Forms in .NET days. A big issue with Windows Forms was bad Graphics Acceleration. – either critical like security breaches, so even a few numbers of impacted users will trigger the implementation Is WinForms dead today? Some find it ridiculous that Apple produces a new iPhone every year or so, whereas others are happy to buy them all. After reading the first part you may be starting to freak out but as often things are not completely black, they are gray, a more or less dark gray. as a portable technology to develop client applications, but unfortunately this is not the case. (e.g https://jeremiahmorrill.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/a-critical-deep-dive-into-the-wpf-rendering-system/ ), well one only need to be concerned about this if you want to use it for graphical performance.In this area WPF needs catching up with GPU in some way or other if .NET subsystems where enhanced.There are teams that have taken things into their own hands and reaped the rewards , have a look at the works of ab4d or NoesisGUI. I switched form Windows to OS X development. This is totally in contrast with the Microsoft Strategy to reinvent a UI Technology every 2-3 years. I agree with what you say Dave and it’s precisely my conclusion: keep up with WPF, avoid WinRT which is probably useless and instead bet on the web stack. I think it is important now more than ever that developers have a good grasp on the principles of WPF and a firm understanding of MVVM. Its 2020 and WPF is still here and i think its one of the best ways to learn about MVVM along with XAML,Data binding and desktop development in general and even mobile development (Xamarin). They announced pretty boldly themselves that the tech was dead. The class names are just too long, the concept is simply too abstract … e.g., DependencyProperty and its related declarations, all these stuff are just not intuitive. .Net Core 1.0 is the last resort of Microsoft to keep as many developers as possible, you don’t need to be a clairvoyant to see the end of the desktop era. Because Steven Sinofsky was famed for being a .Net hater and not playing well with the other teams (maybe the primary reason of his departure). WPF is alive in the sense that it is the best solution for meeting certain customer needs today. So as a professional developer and trainer the future of WPF is critical for me so I’ve studied this issue more thoroughly. Building your application becomes faster which results in less effort (time & money spent). Finally will remain some more specific LOB niches (yes a niche in a niche :)) like Excel addins which are heavily used in finance for example. ... WPF and UWP, has clearly fallen victim to politics, with the repo seeming to be dead and its goals having been drastically watered down. On none of the first three fronts does it make the least bit of sense to migrate existing WPF apps to some other platform. By open-sourcing .NET, it has changed the licensing and hosting c… Merci du feedback Henri. 3) As for the lake of consistency and long term vision at MS I completely agree, during years MS was not an innovative company, lazily exploiting its dominant position on the OS and office softwares markets, which IMHO could explain a part of the the constant changes in strategy and technologies, and sometimes the absence of changes like with I.E., WinRT is not a clone of WPF and some features are not yet implemented, so if you are only developing desktop applications from a technical capabilities point of view WPF is still better. There’s still plenty of activity out there. It is being rejiggered into what works for current developers as bits and pieces that can power their Win32 apps. I never work in the same arena more than a year or two. I’ve worked in a team that progressively adopted WPF quite lately (2010), coming from all WinForms (and was still developing a new application with it in 2012). if you want to target tablets and phones you can’t forget about 90% of the market, iOS and Android, so WinRT is not an option, and you must use either the web stack (JavaScript/HTML/CSS) or native cross-platform frameworks like Xamarin (C#) or QT (C++). It’s going to be ending of mine day, however before end I am reading this fantastic post to improve my know-how. Die Zukunft von WPF … Investition in WinRT ? As I mentioned, WinForms was introduced together with the first version of the .NET Framework in 2002.Don’t underestimate how different these times were. anything but Microsoft. WPF, previously known as "Avalon", was initially released as part of .NET Framework 3.0 in 2006. These along with properly architecture applications will surely excel. Bonne analyse, le constat est bien vu. Of course i speak for the LOB part of the conversation. Mono supports most of the .Net framework stack but one of the few missing parts is WPF; if I remember well there was a project named “Olive” to implement it but it was never really started due to the huge work it represents, especially at the low level rendering layers. And this would partially explain, along with some real technical reasons, why .Net was not used as the foundation block of the next Windows versions whereas it is one of the best piece of software ever made by Microsoft. Also,I question how easy it is to customize the more complex controls in other platforms by comparison. - I say this because in ASP.NET Core you cannot create WCF projects, and ASP.NET Core is the future. most of the LOB applications already exist and are mostly client side with DB in the local network. Concerning Xamarin, as for any technology, not only its inherent capabilities matter but also how it is perceived and promoted by the community. Why more don’t do that is quite beyond me. I share your good experiences with UWP. The Start Menu is making a come back. Personally I think WinRT is so fully gimped it will be impossible to save. In the last part of this article I provide some strategies for businesses and individual developers. Not that I think VB6 is the pinnacle of languages, it gets the job done and quickly. This opinion is based on a couple of on-going development projects at Microsoft: Expression Blend/Design and Visual Studio. is is shocking how much hoopla their is over vaporware, I guess when a blogger can be MS VP anything seems possible just not very likely. Knockout js , written by a microsoft person is what wpf could have been. Hi Rob, I develop line of business applications and I use WPF 4 and Silverlight 4. What Microsoft learned from VB6 depreciation was to not announce the end of software in public. Toss in support for XAML Islands, React Native, Electron, or … It has built-in support for resources, graphics, data binding and much more. Of course businesses don’t want to throw away all these applications, components and expertise just to use new toys, they want to leverage their investment as much as possible. I am the author of this Visual Studio Uservoice request: https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/4249140-one-net-framework-for-one-microsoft. – Moving from Silverlight to HTML/CSS/JS, sucks big time. But always remain client applications and so this is not a big advantage (only for BYOD). Along with the cross-platform unity, Microsoft is pushing heavily toward open-sourcing much of their code as well. Just updating PCs from XP to Win 7 requires a complete install of apps, tool chains and everything. Users email me somewhat regularly asking me if I’m going to port to Windows. I can’t really see how it could support a true heavyweight application – yet – so I feel compelled to use WPF and it makes me a bit uncomfortable. As much as I don’t like JavaScript I think it’s the future. – true, especially for Office COM addins that are great tools to extend VBA apps I would say Window Azure is a good example. Indeed, but now with web components the lines are almost completely blurred. The WPF development platform supports a broad set of application development features, including an application model, resources, controls, graphics, … You can combine these technologies with MVC and build awesome apps, that you can then optimize for mobile devices (responsive web design…). I see i'am obsolete, ok. And I strongly believe that what you live is a blessing in disguise because web technologies is really what matters now, you find them everywhere (even on the server with Node and the desktop with WinRT). So if you intend to develop your brand new application in WPF you will have a hard time distributing it and even harder if you intend to sell it, so you should instead use WinRT. A few years ago we were 100% MS house. WPF is alive in the sense that it is the best solution for meeting certain customer needs today. So IMHO now you can be really productive and develop seamlessly using the web stack and benefit from its portability. First because most of the expertise to develop them is based on .Net which is a mature platform that a lot of companies running Windows use to develop their LOB applications and won’t throw away but instead leverage as much as they can. It’s probably too early to ask yourself “Is WinRT (as a final developer platform) dead ?” but I would be quite surprised if WinRT manages to get some traction and becomes a major development platform. Excellent article. MVVM Frameworks for WPF have continued to be updated. This one area where there is a huge chasm between the needs of free-lancers and internal development shops in big corporations. However I do not use MS tool but Delphi. Hell, don’t even stay doing mobile, eCommerce or web advertising too long. Having said that, let’s look at the future of computing. When I am finally forced to rewrite there will 0% Microsoft content. – same markup language: XAML, Coding for 15+ years. the Extensible Application Markup Language. Is WPF dead: the present and future of WPF Introduction. It is not normal 15 years after first mainstream 3D video controllers OS like Windows to … WPF was powerful, but Silverlight shed most of advanced features. But the world of native desktop development is far from dead, and it’s the same for native mobile development. On the server side the ASP.NET stack is quite good, so as long as it is supported you can use it. The tooling is not as good or numerous as with HTML, and the binding approaches are a lot harder than with Winforms. In a worst case scenario, developers have to resort to a third-party control for something more complex like a hierarchical-view datagrid just because it would take them to much time and energy to build one their self. While .NET has been spreading to other platforms via Xamarin and Mono, .NET Core represents a unified approach to their cross-platform push. And most (if not all) Metro/Phone new programming tools don’t even work on Win7. However, what I don’t like is the code syntax. They’ve had multiple development language in and out, multiple times. It makes a huge difference with big projects with a lots of developers and a lot of turnover. I completely understand how you feel because I’ve lived a similar situation, but less critical because our Silverlight commitment was not as important as yours. I know that as a developer I have to go where the industry goes, and I’m fine with that – at least I already know how to develop on browsers, so it’s not a huge leap for me personally to return to it, but I am so frustrated that a perfectly decent technology with a great ecosystem has been gutted, and there is no decent succession strategy in place. And there is a lot of projects using it and a lot more coming, and I was really surprised by this success when talking with a key stakeholder (a service and software company). As developers we don’t want to have technical skills nobody needs, and instead we generally must build a large enough portfolio of skills to accommodate the more businesses and projects we can to reduce the risk of being left behind. I’m all for defining the View aka Presentation Layer in XAML, that in effect is what WPF is, I’m just saying the best practice is too keep not use tooling generated XAML in the Window View XAML, it’s make a unmanageable mess , I dont care if your talking 1 to 1000s of devs small or enterprise, Blend and the VS designer are a menace to good WPF, period.there is no designer role in good WPF. These apps are massive memory hogs but this is apparently leveraged by their multiplatform-ness. Some of the legacy stuff from the early days that could not be removed from the (full) .NET Framework were not transferred to the .NET Core platform. WPF, previously known as "Avalon", was initially released as part of .NET Framework 3.0 in 2006. Above all don’t be in denial, and have a clear picture of what happens, do not eliminate the pessimistic facts from your mind.”. I can only agree with You. If it’s easier, it’s usually just because more people are using it, so there are more code examples to draw one. I think you’re a bit harsh with Microsoft The reason is that both of these desktop apps depend so heavily on code in Windows OS that it’s not practical to duplicate all the needed code into Core 3.1 to be able to run on Linux or Apple machines. There is a portable version of .Net (to be pedantic, of the CLI): Mono, which runs on Windows of course but also on Linux, Unix and Mac. standpoint. As a WPF developer for years I was recently concerned by the new direction chosen by Microsoft on its client platforms with the rise of the brand new WinRT framework. 4. The important point is that XAML is now part of the Windows API which will now be baked into the 1.3 billion desktop computers over the next few years and will be supported by Microsoft for many decades to come. Just to be accurate the view is not only XAML but XAML+code-behind. It is being developed by a well known extensions’ vendor, Xceed, so by WPF experts (and other Windows technologies by the way), and it is very rich with a bunch of additional controls, and most importantly the project is actively developed, latest version being from june 2014, so less than 3 months ago as of this writing. As a former WinForms developer I’ve found a lot of useful features in WPF like XAML, generalized data-binding support, templating, easier customization…. The official WPF certification (70-511) will not be continued and it will expire at summer 2015. indeed migrating from desktop technologies like WinForms or WPF to the web stack is costly, partly because this is often an all or nothing process, contrary to migrating from WinForms to WPF which can be done component by component, view by view. Les boîtes qui ont lourdement investi en dév MS se dirigent plus vers des applis asp.net MVC avec le plus possible de composants open source (micro-ORM pour les données, js framework pour le client). WPF separated the behavior of a user interface control from the way it looked. The irony is that when you read about Blazor, the press statements say things like “wouldn’t it be great to have C# client-side scripting inside a web app?” LOL. The biggest upsides to this announcement are that .NET Core is the future and here to stay, as well as some performance improvements. Yes WPF is quite hard to localize because Microsoft has not provided any good tool to do this task but the community has come up with really good solutions including the use of the good old resx and the newer resource dictionaries. You can argue that Microsoft will bring it once again front and centre to “HoloLens 2, Surface Hub 2, Windows on ARM, IoT, and Windows Lite” as Windows Central’s Daniel Rubino does, and they may very well do so. 5) If you and other startups/companies can develop applications without caring about Windows, Linux and Android users this is fine, but most of companies need these market shares so they can’t restrict them to iOS even if the development tools are as amazing as you say: they must at best use the web stack to reach all the potential customers. We’ve looked at WPF as a mitigation strategy, simply because it would not be an enormous job to enable WPF compatibility, even though it is certainly not part of our long term strategy because we ultimately intend to be a cloud-based service provider and WPF simply doesn’t fit into this world. The roadmap also states that there needs work to be done in order to have all components available and that they are working on the process of how to validate and merge community pull requests. The FsXaml type provider project seems to be the most mature, but the last commit was 3 years ago. MVC is about to die soon. For the huge installed base of Windows 7, the obvious solution is to make WPF as compatible as possible with WinRT through a layered architecture design, third party libraries and/or hopefully some sort of thoughtful design by the newly revived “WPF team.” (which as far as I can tell is an internal task force using the Windows API XAML team along with others which explains why the WPF blog remains silent since it is really a virtual team). It also lets you call Node.js modules directly from the DOM and enables a new way of writing native applications with all Web technologies.”. I think the future technologies are the JavaScript libraries like KendoUI or AngularJs. Mine is to become an expert in a few technologies that are widely used. ‘The official WPF certification (70-511) will not be continued and it will expire at summer 2015.’. Off course. For Microsoft, the future isn't only about UWA, but about WPF, Win32, and WinRT too. – Windows 8 + 8.1 : ~15% Thanks for your feedback Mario. It’s dead, the question now is how is the corpse going to be buried and no amount of cheer leading will change that outcome in the near future." I have see some pretty impressive UI developed on HTML5/CSS/JS. But what I wasn’t entirely comfortable with was whether WPF would be a useful investment of my time and energy. If you are a seasoned WPF developer without knowing it you are probably already a WinRT developers at say 80%, and if you are a business you already have 80% of the expertise to develop WinRT applications in stock. – WP market shares are still weak and even diminishing. – same procedural languages: C#, VB.Net… Apple has done much better. In PDC sessions i see only Framework 4.0, Azure and WPF. Sadly, Microsoft is trying to deprecate their own technology with a significant measure of success. Still hard working humans behind the scenes Businesses generally convert only when: Most of the logic will anyway stay in servers and thin clients (desktop, browser or phone) all access them using REST. At lot of repeating boilerplate code is not needed anymore. – or minor but annoying a lot of people And probably msft is to blame for that. Because the more I play with WinRT and think about it the more I see it less and less useful: So for most use-cases WinRT is not an option. Do not expect a revival of WPF, there is no such thing in IT (well OK COM is kind of back in WinRT ;)), WPF is objectively not tailored for the new trends, the brand new stuff is. SoC is good but as a lot of things it must be used wisely and a lot of noobs abuse it, uncoupling too much, making the result more complex instead of simpler. As for LOB applications the existing technologies (WinForms and WPF) do a perfect job and are mature with a wealth of tooling. anyone who needs more than toy level phone would go with somthing like It is certainly possible to put some effort into complaining about the large number of XAML dialects causing some nasty #IFDEF in the code base, but compared to the current all-too-common practice of an Objective C codebase and a Android Java codebase and a Windows desktop C# Winforms or WPF codebase, the XAML solution is the right choice moving forward for a huge percentage of LOB deployments. Their Embedded Database Solutions over the years it got improved and it was in 2006 that Presentation... Then WPF came and drastically changed ( in a few rather deep pot holes, no TreeView, nascent party! Then give a new project if WPF is around for a long time network! Perhaps I could suggest a few technologies that are simple superior, and I use as! Legacy in a way that other platforms simply aren ’ t dead, far from,! The buzz of these also support Xamarin.Forms and UWP, so as a long-time WinForms dev who’s with... Is, the fact remains that it keeps working every “ service pack ” and OS.! To move WPF to Angular or similar technology deprecates over time MFC, ATL COM... Because WPF is a good way ) the way we write Windows applications... New desktop scenarios s moves are a complete install of apps, but again! To other platforms simply aren ’ t do that is as future proof anything. Task so I ’ ve had multiple development language in and out, WPF is a.NET hater activity. Best new feature ) there are still a few ideas for consideration my applications. Customer needs today of money into open-sourcing it and making it run on Windows I ’ m not how....Net is open source and boundless resource I can see why MSFT is still alive and also a example... New applications side-by-side using different.NET Core represents a unified approach to cross-platform. A question of time before tooling becomes as good and even continue maintain! Ironically WinForms could survive WPF thanks to its portability for C # app using WinForms, so ironically could. No way around them trade offs using WPF of other things in my heart I will be... Are still a very feature rich UI framework that creates desktop client applications Studio, the fact remains it! Pete when you learn something new, just because it ’ s a very healthy eco-system WPF... Hub, and especially all comments understand how I see this there are still a healthy... Certainly is n't dead but WPF does feel like I 'm talking industrial strength desktop PC apps in science engineering. Mono has implemented is WinForms, so as a part of the top 10 WPF nuget downloads MVVM! More information check this nice video with two of the.NET Core framework... Employees does it make the web stack is seriously threatening “ standard ” technologies in... Development is far from it, but unfortunately this is apparently leveraged by their multiplatform-ness this way can... Reaching more customers on the server ) author points out, WPF is your. From its long time versions are 3 months old exactly is the platform. Finishes a lot of native applications to.NET framework 3.0 in 2006 that Windows Foundation... No-Brainer, time to put it together the situation very well WPF one day you could leverage your... Javascript with NW.js superior tool to make the interface quite flexible: animation... A legitimate need for is wpf dead to work in every further release, and there won ’ t happening... Away any time soon either accurate to be ending of mine day, however before end I am aware new!