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In a surprise move at the Build 2018 conference, Microsoft have announced that three key components of the Windows user interface are now open-sourced. Kevin Gallo, MS VP for the Windows Developer Platform sums it up in a blog entry.
Announcing Open Source of WPF, Windows Forms, and WinUI at Microsoft Connect(); 2018
The newly opened-up components are critical for writing desktop applications and have so far been Windows-only. Based on C# and the .NET framework, especially WPF is generally considered to be reasonably good. Interest from beyond the Windows ecosystem might appear: when will we see ports to the Linux and Mac platforms, and what would it mean to their platform-specific toolkits GTK and Cocoa?
WPF = Windows Presentation Foundation
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Microsoft Open-Sources WPF, WinForms and WinUI
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin
real fast and freak everybody out.
-- Jack Handey, The New Mexican, 1988.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 05 2018, @09:57PM (5 children)
So maybe now we'll see Mono with a usable cross-platform GUI
(Score: 4, Touché) by DannyB on Wednesday December 05 2018, @10:08PM (4 children)
If we did, would it matter?
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Rich on Thursday December 06 2018, @01:07AM (3 children)
Yes, it would.
Despite having submitted the article, I dislike MS with passion. I was in the unfortunate situation of having to help out a customer with a large .NET/WPF project lately while having no real experience with C#, and precisely zero experience with WPF. I was able to deliver production code within two weeks, it survived stringent regulated market validation and shipped. The basics are that tidy.
It appeared to me that everything that originated from within the aura of Hejlsberg borders on perfection (with the single flaw that it has garbage collection latency) - while the later bolt-ons like data/database bindings again show the ugly lack of culture within MS. The promoted MVVM concept exceeds the ribbon in sickness-of-thoughts. The Visual Studio view editor is almost as bad as Glade (compare that to InterfaceBuilder). So, as long as you avoid the "modern" features that only seem to be there to hard-sell braindead MS enterprise "solutions", you get an extremely solid desktop application development platform.
Of all the development platforms, only Qt comes within range. I did quite a bit of development with Qt, and I think it might have a slight performance edge from being native, while .NET/WPF is faster to write and prone to fewer mistakes - but in areas where development time is what matters, that wins. (I might be slightly biased, because QtCreator is sluggish and has broken fonts on my workhorse Mac).
As the GTK people don't get their presence on Windows and especially Mac right (GIMP 2.10 still doesn't respond to some plain button clicks, and did anyone ever write usable documentation for GTK?), developers, especially corporate ones, will flock to WPF instead, the momentum will grow, and eventually turn GTK into a fringe thing. Which may lead to a Qt/KDE resurgence from the purists, and then Amazon will buy Qt and integrate it into their cloud to compete with MS, or so... interesting times.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 06 2018, @03:55AM (2 children)
Check out the repo. MS says they will NOT accept any patches for making WPF cross platform.
Not sure why anyone would bother, but you could fork and port if you wanted to.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Thursday December 06 2018, @10:29AM (1 child)
Heh, I didn't see this.
But with the code out, someone is going to do it. The cat is out of the bag and I wonder how MS will deal with it when it arrives. I always thought the desktop UI was kind of the crown jewels to lock developers to Windows in the end, so the open-sourcing of WPF struck me with surprise. The initial versions of Mono were so throughly developed that I felt they could hardly have been done by a few hippies around Icaza (read: MS helped out massively), but they were sorely lacking key components, namely a debugger, and desktop UI, which would have been no-brainers to do for a team with that throughput - if general development enabling would have been the goal.
I'm not going to be the someone, though. At the moment, I'm pulling Carbon-dependencies out of a MacApp 3.1 lookalike to make it cross-platform, but that's another story, going on since 25 years, with a million lines of validated application code behind it, which is why I would do such a seemingly futile exercise in the first place.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday December 06 2018, @02:25PM
Microsoft's
strategytragedy of locking people into the Windows GUI or APIs no longer works because developers have found many other green(er) pastures.To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.