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Microsoft Open-Sources WPF, WinForms and WinUI

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

Rich writes:

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

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 06 2018, @03:55AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 06 2018, @03:55AM (#770471)

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by Rich on Thursday December 06 2018, @10:29AM (1 child)

    by Rich (945) on Thursday December 06 2018, @10:29AM (#770589) Journal

    MS says they will NOT accept any patches for making WPF cross platform.

    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

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday December 06 2018, @02:25PM (#770648) Journal

      Microsoft's strategy tragedy of locking people into the Windows GUI or APIs no longer works because developers have found many other green(er) pastures.

      --
      The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.