What's New with WinForms in .NET 9? | OD537

WinForms has been making a lot of improvements for our developers. This session will go over some of these improvements in both the runtime and the Visual Studio WinForms designer. You'll see that WinForms is alive and well in .NET!
To learn more, please check out these resources:
* aka.ms/Build24...
* github.com/dot...
* aka.ms/winform...
𝗦𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗿𝘀:
* Klaus Loeffelmann
* Merrie McGaw
𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗜𝗻𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻:
This video is one of many sessions delivered for the Microsoft Build 2024 event. View the full session schedule and learn more about Microsoft Build at build.microsof...
OD537 | English (US) | Developer Tools
#MSBuild

[@jazzweather]

Winforms is the most productive and performant Windows desktop framework available. Hope Microsoft continues to invest in it for the many years to come!!

[@nimce4u]

WinForms forever :) I'm glad it's getting more and more love in .NET 9, as it should!

[@sulmarpl]

WinForms are immortal. They will survive WPF :)

[@bytejourneycodes]

I'm planning to switch to WPF now for more than a decade. I use WinForms to prototype my applications that I plan to create and it's perfect for it, simple, fast, lightweight. I also copy it on my windows tablet which I can then test it as a mobile device or web page. I use it like this for a couple of weeks then only commit to android or web.

[@jd31068]

These are FANTASIC, thank you for your efforts in keeping Winforms relevant.

[@azaanandiworld]

VB is back baby!!!

[@bytejourneycodes]

Good video, I liked the MVVM compatibility and dark mode, I tried to incorporate dark mode in my prior winForms apps but was usually a drag, now it's super easy

[@bcunni2]

The 96/100% designtime mode is not the right way to fix this. This is just a problem of multiplication and division, and deciding if you are going to represent the numbers like they where 100% scaling or at the current DPI scale to the end user. Forcing your users to design on a blurry interface surface is not the best answer, especially since this is literally just a multiplication problem. Solve the problem correctly.

[@yonggheelim1934]

Thanks for showing whats coming up in dotnet 9 wrt Winforms. Winforms is really easy to learn. As an enterprise line of business developer, I am not so concern with animation and graphic display which I think WPF may be more suitable. Would love to see a series of demos on Dependency Injection in Winforms ie pulling logging, creating new forms etc even something that can replace Managed Extensibility Framework

[@S3Kglitches]

Asychronous code can easily be run using async void event handler. You can just call your backend asynchronously and then update the UI in the same method as you would call synchronously. The "async" example is just timer running on a new thread. That's something different than I expected when talking about async on WinForms. That's more like parallel UI threads. Async is about I/O.

[@malisancube01]

Very nice. DataSource needed

[@santiagoc93]

She did a great job explaining all the concepts and new things for winforms. He did a great job as well

[@irql2]

I really hope Winforms gets some sort of Wasm deployment option. That would be sick.

[@OmbasaMukhwami]

Great work

[@GuildOfCalamity]

Add a link to the TaskTamer repo so us devs can experiment with the code base. Why does MS always show off these cool demos and then make the source code impossible to find??

[@bcunni2]

Dark mode looks amazing. I think investigating color inversion lenses over a window is worth investigating as an option as well, in the style of 'NegativeScreen Smart Inversion'. This would solve the trouble with older controls that are difficult to theme, I've been searching for how to do this though and it's not easy.

[@ivgnes]

A Crusader knight is buried with his sword. A MS programmer is buried with his WinForms.

[@lambdaprog]

I literally implemented allnof that dark/light theming by hand after having suffered a long long time from Telerik's sub par performance. My app (SDR#) is now faster than ever with a 80% reduction in memory.

[@shmuelprizant2821]

Hi, where can I get the shown example project's source code?

[@colhountech]

Great Job - Would love to see ability to wrap Win32 calls in an easier way!

[@sealsharp]

Oh that's a historical issue. DllImports can not be auto-generated because the native API s do not have the required information to conclude the right way to setup marshaling. There's a nuget package named vanara... varana? Something like that. It's a collection of stuff from windows dlls wrapped in nice c# functions. And if you don't need the full package, you can still lookup individual functions.

[@carldaniel6510]

Using data binding to a view model for 100% of the connection with the UI is a cool idea, but... my experience has been that when data binding gets complex, for example a master-detail-subdetail view that the model falls apart and things just don't work right. I hope this work has been accompanied by a deep look into all of the existing data binding features to fix bugs!

[@devdb6194]

Please just consider to add reportviewer control within WinForms in .NET 9 .its so important for LOB

[@irql2]

When can we try out dark mode? I just installed vs2022 preview and .net 9 and dont see it yet.

[@Memento2747]

Why don't you work on Reports for Winforms? specifically reportviewer controls which is not currently in Visual studio 2022

[@merriemcgaw4820]

ReportViewer is a SQL Reporting Services owned control. We would need to work with them to move it to .NET. Definitely keep providing this feedback (to us and SQL)!

[@YallDotBiz]

Chapters, chapters, chapters,

[@jazzweather]

Seriously need a much more cooler and sophisticated demo app. Like a Blazing Pizza desktop app, similar to Blazor. Please!

[@djrmarketing598]

Crazy I thought WF was dead 14 years ago when I switched to WPF and here it is still.

[@S3Kglitches]

and WPF got outsourced to India :))

[@roodborstkalf9664]

Excellent presentation, much better then I have grown used to in the last few years. The worst of the woke years seems behind us.

[@jiedyh.c.j8262]

The designer for. NET Core does not respond as quickly as the designer for. NET Framework. Please continue to optimize!

[@Aderic]

What the- I thought Winforms was obsoleted!?

[@astantine85]

A lot of blabbering about third-party control makers. Why shouldn't WinForms support features from the Windows Runtime?

[@volante3005]

Winforms all your life.

[@XoloJay]

Did I hear right? It’s coming to Mac and Linux?

[@jaytandon]

Winforms is a wrapper around Windows apis

[@merriemcgaw4820]

@jaytandon is correct, WinForms is a wrapper around Windows APIs. There are no plans to change that.

[@moayadmyro2091]

.winform Dpi depends on system font and when a new form open with heavy controls unfortunately the app hangen and flickering I stuck with this for a while until I find my own solution another issue if I use low resolution while I am designing the app and the app later run on very high resolution 😢😢 it will not work that from 2017 exp

[@CoderzF1]

i thought yall were discontinuing Visual Basic. Thats what I started coding with back in 2001. When I heard it was going to be done away with, i started learning c#.

[@sealsharp]

In my experience the runtime works fine, but the newer visual editor is still really janky.

[@randallstephens1680]

When will you port Winforms for .NET 8/9 to Linux? No, not Mono and .NET 4.x.

[@moayadmyro2091]

Very good point

[@bytejourneycodes]

I watched this video on Microsoft website itself and horrible experience, stuttering the whole time, then watching it here smooth and no issues. You guys should consider embedding the KZbin video on your site instead.

[@sslsu2777]

I use Net 2.0🤣