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posted by takyon on Wednesday December 05 2018, @09:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the underworld-refrigeration dept.

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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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday December 05 2018, @10:06PM (2 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday December 05 2018, @10:06PM (#770306) Journal

    First Microsoft had Java envy. So they got Java on their platform. Then in brazenly flagrant violation of the clear contract they signed, they started poisoning Microsoft Java by adding poisonous extra features in the standard APIs. Result: developers would build a Java product on Windows and then too late discover that it was not portable to other platforms.

    But it's cross platform Microsoft protests: It runs on Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, and XP!

    Sun Microsystems sued and won $1.2 Billion.

    C# / .NET were the response. A new "Java" without Java.

    There came a point where market share made me wonder to choose Java or .NET in the late 2000s. But I went with Java on a major new project. It just seemed right. Everything was open source. And there was an embarrassing amount of open source riches in its ecosystem. In .NET land, there was nothing but vendors with their hands held out for money.

    WinForms (if I'm thinking of the correct one) was always a bad idea. But it was quick and ugly for low-skilled programmers wanting on the web. It took Microsoft a long time to get the MVC architecture. Meanwhile, Java had to respond to WinForms and the abortion (IMO) known as JSF was the result.

    Now modern .NET applications don't (as far as I know) use WinForms. So NOW they want to give it away. And SQL Server. And lots of other goodies.

    Problem is, in my view, only projects already built using this tech would be interested in the open source as a possible avenue to run their server applications on Linux -- which also means Docker and Kubernetes. All of which Microsoft cannot replicate on Windows. And with Azure, I'm sure Microsoft has already seen just how few server applications actually use Windows, let alone .NET.

    If you look at job sites, or sites ranking language popularity by questions asked, source code posted, etc, it is clear today which way the winds are blowing. And it's not toward Redmond.

    Windows Phone and tablets late the the game, a copy of what has already captured the market.
    Surface Tablets, Win 10 S, RT, etc again a copy of what has already captured the market.

    I can understand why they do this. Back in the 1990s, they could arrive very late, build a product, even an inferior one, and it would become the dominant standard. Welcome to the 21st century and the dominance of open source -- and Linux.

    Trying to out-build the rest of the development world with your own internal staff is like trying to hold back the tide with your hands. IMO Docker and Kubernetes are evidence of that. Is there even a Windows server workload big enough to warrant something like Kubernetes? maybe?

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday December 06 2018, @04:36AM (1 child)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday December 06 2018, @04:36AM (#770487) Journal

    Now modern .NET applications don't (as far as I know) use WinForms. So NOW they want to give it away. And SQL Server. And lots of other goodies.

    Not that I don't like your rant, but Microsoft seems to be opening up WPF (i.e. the modern one) not the WinForms.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday December 06 2018, @02:35PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday December 06 2018, @02:35PM (#770649) Journal

      I expressed some doubt, because by "WinForms" I was not sure if this meant the one where you wrote an HTML-like page, and it did a postback, or if it meant something based on XAML and WPF. (eg, something using Expression Blend, or whatever it is called now) I did have a good look at this back in 2007. Along with Silverlight. I was duly impressed with the technology -- but it was still Microsoft. And I have a strong reluctance to make a major commitment to something Microsoft might just abandon as they had done with Visual Basic and Visual FoxPro developers. And later Windows Phone 6 developers. Then Windows Phone 7 developers. And eventually, finally, Windows Phone 8 developers. Microsoft has a habit of forcing developers to use some new technology at their whim, and then later when the winds change, they don't care about the investments developers have made.

      I have found Java to be very stable, and upward compatible over more than a decade now. And I had dabbled with it for a few years longer than that. When Sun Microsystems made Java open source before they imploded, I knew I had made the right decision.

      Back in the day, the UCSD p-System became abandoned. If I had the source code to it, I would have made my own 32-bit version (back when I had plenty of youth and energy). I could have done the same with VFP for some of our products that used it. But I didn't have the source code to it. Today I have the source code to my entire development stack, including the development tools and the Java runtime. It's a nice place to be.

      The no 3rd party royalties or licensing is just icing on the cake.

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.