Navigating Win32 App Development with WinUI and WPF | BRK241

[@randypenajimenez3893]

Dont even know why Microsoft abandoned wpf for so much time, invented UWP which i think is the less used technology ever made. Hope they give more and more love to wpf

[@danialhughes830]

Microsoft has abandoned WPF for almost a decade. Why would anyone voluntarily choose a MS UI stack now? AvaloniaUI is a way better choice.

[@Mobin92]

The WPF ecosystem is still much more mature. E.g. try finding any proper component framework for Avalonia... at best you will find small mostly unmantained projects on github. I would say Avalonia is running against WinUi3, but WPF is in a leauge of its own.

[@llothar68]

We would need a lot of tooling support to make it useable for C++. Please we want at least CMake instead of MSBuild and much better documentation, and ways to dynamically compile XAML for plugins and app scripting

[@perdonomai8060]

You should let people know that WinUI 3 is still beta and not much money have been invest to it. Does it even have a designer yet?

[@intbar]

Nope We're still waiting

[@absurdengineering]

I think the designer is a nice-to-have but not essential. It's easy enough to code the UIs iteratively, without XAML at all. Both C# and C++ support hot reload. For even faster iteration, py-win32more and Python are probably the best way to prototype WinUI 3 UIs.

[@AlexanderBurachevsky-fj8vz]

It feels like Microsoft doesn't care about WinUI and WPF)

[@thedevmachine]

So what do you think they are using to create Windows 11 + apps?

[@AlexanderBurachevsky-fj8vz]

@@thedevmachine Electron

[@pushyoch.8252]

​@@AlexanderBurachevsky-fj8vz is it true for Windows Store?

[@ChrisCarlos64]

WPF has been around for a long time. Are you saying they don't update it enough now or something? Just curious what you mean. As for Win UI I feel they are just trying to make Windows development exciting, but who is making native Windows apps anymore? Outside games and hobbyist, who use Win32 still because it is old and familiar. Newer developers aren't jumping on the new things for native apps. My company uses WPF still. No need to jump on the new systems. In fact it only changed from WinForms a few years back. 😂

[@Jckinthbxxx]

@@ChrisCarlos64 That sounds about right to me. I only know one company who uses WPF and has one app which is in development for about 15 years. They are now rewriting some basic functionality for the web (using .NET Blazor). But to me it seems that Microsoft is trying something.