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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) 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.

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  • (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.

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