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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

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  • (Score: 2) by aiwarrior on Thursday December 06 2018, @08:25AM (3 children)

    by aiwarrior (1812) on Thursday December 06 2018, @08:25AM (#770556) Journal

    Have you ever used GTK?
    Have you ever seen the sheer amount of crazy boiler plate that Glib and GTK requires. It is not pretty. I would say that it is the ugliest framework i ever worked with. And believe me i have done a lot
    If only they would accept the para-object oriented model of the linux kernel C it would be a better world. Hell just use C++ and stop pretending. But no...GTK exists and it is a cancer that makes open source eco system almost impenetrable because gnome is the default WM and GTK is the default framework of gnome. Do not even get me started on the javascript shit of gnome shell stuff.

    /Rant over, i am smiling after writing this comment. Bad mouthing sometimes feels good :)

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  • (Score: 2) by jb on Thursday December 06 2018, @11:18AM

    by jb (338) on Thursday December 06 2018, @11:18AM (#770599)

    Have you ever seen the sheer amount of crazy boiler plate that Glib and GTK requires

    Hey, I never said that GTK was pretty -- only that it is, quite obviously, not platform-specific.

    Portability & usability are mostly orthogonal.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 06 2018, @02:38PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 06 2018, @02:38PM (#770651)

    Have you ever seen the sheer amount of crazy boiler plate that Glib and GTK requires. It is not pretty. I would say that it is the ugliest framework i ever worked with. And believe me i have done a lot

    GTK+ is a bit special in the GUI toolkit world because it is one of very few toolkits with a C API. Like if you want to write a modern GUI widgety application in C[*] it's pretty much your only choice, because basically nobody sane writes GUI toolkit bindings for C. You can't compare writing a GTK+ application in C with, say, a Qt application in C because you can't write a Qt application in C.

    If you want to compare it with other toolkits you should be compare bindings for the different toolkits in the same language. For example, you can compare C++ bindings of GTK+ (gtkmm) with a native C++ toolkit like Qt. Or compare python bindings for both toolkits (e.g,., PyGOobect versus PyQt). Basically all the GTK+ boilerplate goes away when you use any language other than C.

    [*] one might want to write such an application because they are a masochist.

    • (Score: 2) by aiwarrior on Friday December 07 2018, @08:25AM

      by aiwarrior (1812) on Friday December 07 2018, @08:25AM (#771077) Journal

      > If you want to write a modern GUI widgety application in C
      This is the point. Nobody wants to write a gui application in C. If they want C*ish* and baremetal go with C++ and write C there. No performance impact. For all the flaws of C++ you can really mostly take what you want from the language and it's not wrong.

      gtkmm is very nice until you do anything serious, at which point you will find: Missing documentation, missing implementation. This is terrible because the risk of starting a project in such an enviroment makes the whole platform useless even for toy stuff. Yep i failed in toy stuff with gtkmm and stuck with pure C GTK. For PyGObject i do not know but i dread, absolutely dread GTK interfaces(Gdk, Cairo, Gstreamer) incompleteness.

      I think the point of the other poster, where Compatibility is orthogonal to Usability, is a bit more to the point except it has been proven wrong and the weights should not 50-50. What about QT? What about now the .NET

      It is true that C is the only language where you can have easy management of ABI for other languages to hook into. But the keyword is easy. Designing/implementing bindings is supposed to be something very few users do. So, if it was harder to do in favor for easiness to use normal usage i think this would be an acceptable trade off.

      Thanks for the argument anon :)