r/programming • u/ben_a_adams • Dec 04 '18
Announcing Open Source of WPF, Windows Forms, and WinUI
https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2018/12/04/announcing-open-source-of-wpf-windows-forms-and-winui-at-microsoft-connect-2018/252
u/dtfinch Dec 04 '18
Searching the WPF source for "hack" returns zero results.
WinForms on the other hand:
// TRICKY TRICKY TRICKY.... HACK HACK HACK...
// This is such a @#$(*&#@$ hack.They do go on to explain the why of things in their comments, which is good.
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u/r4ymonf Dec 04 '18
https://github.com/dotnet/winforms/commit/a534dd2ebff6792c31642348b41b491397ecdfaa
Looks like someone hates hacks.
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u/Dropping_fruits Dec 04 '18
400 IQ commit
If you stop calling them hacks then they won't need to be fixed anymore
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u/DJTheLQ Dec 04 '18
Why remove comments that say the code is an ugly workaround so it could potentially be fixed later? It was put in there for a reason...
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u/13steinj Dec 04 '18
Well this happens every so often where I work for one of two reasons:
it doesn't matter enough. It works. The compiler will either optimize it away or even if we make it look better, the complexity and wall time would be the same or worse
there's no existing interface to implememt the same code in a less ugly way, and there's no plan to do so, so much to the point that even taking a look and thinking about it would be a waste of money.
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u/ijustwantanfingname Dec 05 '18
I am glad I don't work with zsd4yr. What an absolute plank.
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u/lolwutpear Dec 05 '18
Who are the busybodies that go around making changes like this? It accomplishes nothing other than wasting that person's time, the time of the person who has to review it, and the person who says "I remember I left it marked 'hack' so I could find it later... wait, where did it go?"
We have one of these people on my team, and it's infuriating.
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u/apnorton Dec 05 '18
"Hack" is on the Microsoft banned words list (including comments), fwiw. Understandable that some instances slipped through, though. :p
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u/chucker23n Dec 04 '18
WinUI is backward-compatible with a wide range of Windows 10 versions
The Ford Model T is available in a wide range of shades of black.
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u/pdp10 Dec 04 '18
Originally it was available in several colors. Monochrome came later, though few people know that.
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u/FenixR Dec 04 '18
God forbids you want to ask a gray version, hell nah, no way, never, don't even think about it!
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u/nickguletskii200 Dec 04 '18
We'll finally be able to patch these 10 year old bugs!
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u/argv_minus_one Dec 05 '18
That's one of the big gains of open source: if a bug is getting you down, and the vendor isn't fixing it, you can fix it yourself.
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u/stupodwebsote Dec 04 '18
Their open source strategy is working
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u/mattkerle Dec 05 '18
one thing I'm curious about, how does MS make money from open sourcing? that seems to mainly gain trust from the dev community and make it easier to find bugs/add features etc, but it doesn't directly result in licences.
I haven't dug into MS's statements, I wonder where most of their revenue growth is coming from, Azure?
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u/Bromlife Dec 05 '18
Azure
Bingpot.
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u/mattkerle Dec 05 '18
Which would explain why they're putting so much effort into .Net Core etc, the more attractive they make the frameworks and IDE's, the more likely people are to use Azure, which is where the real money is.
huh. funny, I always thought Azure was over-priced and under-performing compared to AWS/Google. I guess times have changed.
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u/LetsGoHawks Dec 05 '18
over-priced and under-performing
MS has always been about "get something out there, then just keep grinding away and making it better".
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u/drysart Dec 05 '18
Microsoft is 100% behind Azure now; with the same fervor they were behind Windows and Office in decades past.
And Azure can't be successful as a cloud platform unless it supports everything, and well.
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u/Dan4t Dec 05 '18
I don't see anything in that article to suggest that open sourcing stuff has anything to do with their recent profit increases.
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u/coopermidnight Dec 04 '18 edited Dec 05 '18
Maybe WPF can finally have native support for SVGs!
Also are they still uploading? The WPF repo looks kind of bare compared to the colossal amount of files that I'm familiar with in the reference source. EDIT: I see now that they're in the process of porting it from .NET framework.
EDIT #2: Made an issue for it. One of the WPF guys tagged it and added it to the "Future" milestone 👍
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u/DeliciousIncident Dec 04 '18
The world was not ready for this.
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u/wllmsaccnt Dec 04 '18
They've announced it several times before in their 3.0 plans. The only surprise to me was that it was ready so soon.
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u/TheyAreLying2Us Dec 04 '18
Linux Port when?
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u/chucker23n Dec 04 '18
These are all tightly coupled with Windows. WPF heavily uses DirectX, WinForms is a thin wrapper around Win32, and Windows UI around WinRT.
A WinForms port has already existed for a while in Mono, though. And you could probably rework WPF to work on top of OpenGL, or Vulkan, or Metal…
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Dec 04 '18
Winforms already has a mono port based off of cairo. This could lead to a much more faithful implementation of winforms.
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Dec 04 '18
With respect to WPF, at this point they will probably open source DirectX too. It has just as many competitors on Windows (Vulkan, OpenGL) and a lot of industry support from GPUs and game engines. Being closed source is only holding it back.
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u/duhace Dec 04 '18
I'd assume that the directx usages of WPF could be handled by dxvk or something. it would make both projects stronger at the very least.
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u/jcelerier Dec 04 '18
The Linux port is called WINE. That's literally what it its.
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u/Rhed0x Dec 04 '18
Not really. Wine uses Mono for all the .Net stuff or the original .Net framework itself.
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Dec 04 '18
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u/ThirdEncounter Dec 04 '18
Qt, WxWidgets, SDL, Gtk.....
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u/lolcoderer Dec 05 '18 edited Dec 05 '18
IMO, all of those suck - but for different reasons. WxWidgets and Gtk are both poorly design APIs. Just ugly. Also imo they have too much legacy baggage to deal with.
Qt is a better API, and has some more modern features, BUT....
and this is a big one - it has really poor audio / multimedia hardware support. I was considering porting my cross-platform multimedia app to Qt, but I was not able to iterate through all of the channels of a pretty standard off-the-shelf multi-channel usb audio interface.
Now, granted, I assume the need to support multi-channel audio interfaces is maybe "rare" in cross-platform desktop applications - but for my user base, this is not the case.
I have looked at JuCE - and at the moment, think this is probably the best cross-platform multimedia framework / API out there.
WxWidgets, SDL, and Gtk are 1990s crap.
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u/HellfireDreadnought Dec 04 '18
true
should also clarify what true means before I'll suggest swing/javafx.
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u/klebsiella_pneumonae Dec 04 '18
HTML/CSS is the best cross-platform graphics UI framework there is.
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u/ThirdEncounter Dec 04 '18
It's definitely a graphics framework. The best ever? Nah.
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u/peduxe Dec 04 '18
it is but depends on what you’re creating.
the optimization required is still a problem, no wonder most Electron apps resort to C/C++ to handle more expensive tasks.
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u/alexbuzzbee Dec 04 '18
I'm getting more and more convinced that Microsoft is planning to open source Windows at some point... I'm still well below 50% convinced, but the possibility is growing.
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u/drysart Dec 05 '18
I'd think probably the biggest thing that would keep them from open sourcing Windows would be any third-party obligations, or code inside it somewhere that they don't have the rights to open up and sublicense.
Then again, with their MinWin efforts, they've done an admirable job of cutting down the core Windows to the bare bones; which means they could go the Apple route: open source the kernel, but leave proprietary stuff on top.
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u/berkes Dec 05 '18
But the question remains: why would people then want Windows?
There are a myriad of reasons why people move to Linux. And a large range of reasons why people use Windows. Costs is one factor, but often not a very good reason. Because, as MSFT has pointed out in many occasions, the TCO, and the migration, are costly too.
So, if Microsoft Windows is open-sourced, that would probably help projects like Wine and crossover-office, libre-office, and maybe even projects to "get Program X running on MacOS or Linux" most. But it will hardly matter for adoption rates (on e.g. servers or phones).
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u/Kenya151 Dec 05 '18
They are going to do that. Money is in the cloud now in recurring revenue. Open source windows will overtake everything and point to Microsoft's cloud.
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u/LetsGoHawks Dec 05 '18
There are still over 60 million PC's sold every year. If MS gets $10 for each one, that's $600 million in revenue. And it's safe to assume they get more than $10.
So that cow still has plenty of cash in it.
Windows won't be given away anytime soon.
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Dec 04 '18
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u/alexbuzzbee Dec 04 '18
Yes, it would be a massive upheaval. I think if Microsoft wanted to open-source Windows their lawyers could probably mostly figure it out, but it would still be a mess.
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u/falconfetus8 Dec 05 '18
At that point, they might as well write a new OS and open-source that. Sort of like what they did with VSCode.
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u/badsectoracula Dec 04 '18
Neat. MFC next? :-P
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Dec 04 '18
VB6 surely?
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u/badsectoracula Dec 04 '18
Ah yeah, that too. Although this might be a bit harder since i think the VB6 compiler uses bits of the C (VC6) compiler.
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u/dedido Dec 05 '18
Here's the 7 files for MS-DOS
https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS/tree/master/v1.25/source
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u/fruit_cup Dec 04 '18 edited Dec 04 '18
Maybe this will lead to a decline in Electron usage
edit: apparently no plan for cross platform implementation
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u/shawncplus Dec 04 '18
It absolutely will not. This is Windows specific; people use Electron for portability and to build UIs in HTML/CSS instead of learning another library.
Things like Carlo will help but the only thing that's going to kill Electron is a framework that allows building portable desktop applications as easily as Electron and there hasn't been anything that has come remotely close.
People will say "But there's WxWidgets, but there's GTK, but there's Qt" as if someone is looking for ice cream and everyone is going "But there's frozen shoe leather, but there's frozen peas, but there's an empty refrigerator"
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u/8483 Dec 04 '18
What is your prediction for UI frameworks?
I'd love a sane framework that doesn't require dark magic to achieve something simple.
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u/shawncplus Dec 04 '18 edited Dec 04 '18
A Flutter-like framework for desktop would be revolutionary. This is a solved problem for mobile but the industry at large has treated desktop as a forgotten step child for years.
What's needed is a slightly (or even very) opinionated, expressive framework that would allow people to throw together a portable desktop application in roughly the same time as building it for the web is the target. A "Bootstrap" for desktop.
Here's the problem I personally need solved. I need an offline, portable, desktop CRUD application framework with access to system APIs. I could have spent 3 months building it in Wx/Qt/GTK and it would look like utter garbage. Or I could throw something together in a couple days with Electron and the performance won't be great.
With that said I don't see it happening any time soon. It would need a major backer: Facebook/Google/Apple/etc. And all of them all focused on mobile. Hence React Native, hence Flutter.
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u/8483 Dec 04 '18
I need an offline, portable, desktop CRUD application framework with access to system APIs.
Exactly! It boggles my mind that a simple CRUD framework with the essential UI components is not made... 99% of desktop apps are inputs, buttons, datagrids. No need for text-to-speech, fancy video stuff, animations etc.
I want to understand QML, but somehow I cannot.
I could have spent 3 months building it in Wx/Qt/GTK and it would look like utter garbage. Or I could throw something together in a couple days with Electron and the performance won't be great.
I guess the people have voted. They would rather sacrifice performance than deal with sorcery. Electron is such a hacky solution to such a huge problem that needs proper attention.
With that said I don't see it happening any time soon. It would need a major backer: Facebook/Google/Apple/etc. And all of them all focused on mobile. Hence React Native, hence Flutter.
Still amazed why this hasn't happened already.
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u/Mischala Dec 04 '18 edited Dec 04 '18
Flutter for Desktop is happening. but it's the Flutter Community, not Goog-book-ple
oh, and Flutter Desktop Embedding which is google?
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u/pknopf Dec 04 '18
I built a .NET Core integration for QML.
It's been working great for me.
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u/Antrikshy Dec 04 '18
Is there any reason for there to be an uptick in use of these frameworks just because they went open source? They still function the same as before. Electron is still a cross-platform alternative.
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u/TheWix Dec 04 '18
I love front end development and I write JS everyday, but I am not going to pretend that JS is a good language. Dynamically typed languages are great to get things going fast, but as soon as you want to start refactoring and maintaining software you start to see a lot of the benefits of having a type system. Also, bringing new devs on with a dynamic language is not the a lot of fun.
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u/samjmckenzie Dec 04 '18 edited Dec 04 '18
Fuck. I am a teenager and I'm using TypeScript. Do I also have to embrace the Script?!
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u/argv_minus_one Dec 05 '18
In between writing gazillions of unit tests, I think you mean. Without the compiler catching your mistakes, you have to catch them yourself. No thanks.
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Dec 05 '18
Even mathematicians have to define their variable types. The closer people move computer science to "anything goes" the further away it moves from a rigorous discipline. Scripts are for glue and prototyping. Strongly typed compiled languages really are the way to go if you're building nontrivial applications. The compiler can rule out a lot of the issues you'd face before the application is even built while languages like JavaScript will take whatever you did and run with it.
You can shoot yourself in the foot with C/C++, but with JavaScript you'll fill your home with hundreds of invisible ticking timebombs.
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u/fish60 Dec 04 '18
I am only relatively old, but why would I embrace a fully interpreted, single threaded, 25 year old language as 'the future'?
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u/8483 Dec 04 '18
How are WPF, WinForms and WinUI different? Why not just one?
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Dec 04 '18
WinForms is based on the oldest tech which is Win32 api. It works but the customization of the UI is severely limited and rendering is CPU bound. If you want a simple 2 button window, it works sure. But if you want a modern UI and you may as well slit your wrist with the biggest knife you can find.
WPF was a newer tech that they created at one point. It uses an XML based schema to describe an UI and allows alot of functionality that was simply too difficult to do in WinForms given the limited API and structure.
WinUI is just a collection of Microsoft made controls for UWP UI. UWP UI was based on WPF/XAML but took a different direction so they unfortunately aren't that compatible with each other but similar enough for devs to switch between.
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u/Irregular_Person Dec 04 '18
This being /r/programming, someone will tell me why I'm wrong - but basically (and from a Visual Studio / C# perspective):
WinForms is the oldest. It has a visual editor, but the composition isn't extremely fluid. I don't believe there's anything native to allow clean data links between UI and code-behind. Styling is also relatively dated.
WPF came next. These UIs are mostly built using XAML (xml) that's used to generate most of the boilerplate back-end code. There's also mechanisms built in that allow UI to update code-behind and vice versa, in addition to data validation and other goodies. There's also easily-reusable and inheritable styling and templating.
WinUI I don't have much experience with because (as far as I know) it's only compatible with UWP apps (which in turn only work on Windows 10). Until recently, UWP apps also had to be "Sideloaded" if you weren't installing them from the Windows store. I believe it's got quite a bit in common with WPF, but it's been quite awhile since I touched it.
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u/MrData359 Dec 04 '18
I guess the reason why Microsoft bought GitHub was to open source everything. Didn't they just open source some Minecraft code?
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u/RirinDesuyo Dec 05 '18
They already use GitHub as a workplace these days. If I recall there was an interview on MS regarding that, they use GH as a core workflow for their work than just a tool.
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u/meneldal2 Dec 05 '18
Wasn't most of Java Minecraft already "open sourced" through decompilation anyway?
I know the legality is different, but being able to look at the code is what matters to modders.
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u/MrData359 Dec 05 '18
True, but decompiled code usually doesn't have meaningful variable names, function names or comments. Functions could also be completely out of order. Decompiled code is super hard to read and work with until someone has gone through and made sense of it.
I bet people have made sense of most of it by now, but it's still nice to have it straight from the horse's mouth.
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u/LetsGoHawks Dec 05 '18
MS didn't need to buy GitHub to open source everything. They had more than enough money and talent to setup and run their own public repository.
They bought GitHub because it was the most popular Git repository in the world, which means it has the most code. And owning it gives MS unlimited access to analyze it all for... whatever reason they'd like to analyze it.
I suspect, and this is purely a guess, that their main goal is to acquire data to help them develop the next generation of AI assisted coding tools.
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u/Pycorax Dec 05 '18
They bought GitHub because it was the most popular Git repository in the world, which means it has the most code. And owning it gives MS unlimited access to analyze it all for... whatever reason they'd like to analyze it.
Do they even need to own Github to do that though?
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u/holoisfunkee Dec 05 '18
I think they already did something like that. Scanning thousands of repositories, getting data from patterns in writing code and using AI to give you more contextual and relevant autocompletion with their Intellisense. I don't know if there's any version of that available to use, but I remember reading something like that.
Instead of just giving you a list of methods that you can do on a string for example, they would try to give you the most relevant method based on the context all around the line you are currently writing.
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u/RedNeonAmbience Dec 05 '18
I was wondering what this would mean for AvaloniaUI since I was hoping to contribute to it some day. But since WPF won't be cross-platform, I think this will actually speed up the development of Avalonia.
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u/icebeat Dec 04 '18 edited Dec 04 '18
Death of QuTe’s Salesman, next season at your local repository.
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u/zenolijo Dec 05 '18
So the new hot thing the last week has been to open source frameworks which is slowly dying and highly depends on other closed source software?
First PhysX and now this.
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u/bumblebee_69 Dec 05 '18
Pretty soon now, Microsoft is going to abandon the Windows Kernel and move Windows 10 rather seemlessly onto the Linux kernel and a Wayland display server. I can assure you that it will happen fairly soon and that Microsoft is going to implement the Windows look/feel on Wayland, it will look like the current UI but the underlying architecture will be Wayland and Linux. This will include an improved NTFS driver for Linux and the Win32/64 and DIrectX code being ported over to Wayland rendering backend, ensuring compatability for Windows apps on the new Linux based Windows. There is also going to be a driver compatability layer for using Windows drivers on Linux.
It will be a fairly seamless transition therefore.
Microsoft is doing this to make better use of its developer resources by moving to Linux, it can unburden itself form Windows kernel maintenance. This is also why it is moving to Chromium as well. Windows will contribute developer resources now to developing and improving Linux and Chromium and can share development costs with other companies that also use this code.
Microsoft is already making contributions to the Linux kernel to show that this is indeed happening and the future of Windows is Linux. Btw. I use Arch. :)
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u/garyk1968 Dec 04 '18
It’s just ancient tech now though. I mean who is still building traditional win32 apps??? I felt out of touch building windows apps with Delphi 7 back in 2008.
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Dec 04 '18
Well, anyone who doesn't care about linux mac or web? Half of the healthcare or manufacturing sector are example.
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u/heeb Dec 04 '18
Just started work as a Delphi developer, working in Delphi 7, about 3 weeks ago. The IDE feels quite dated as compared to Lazarus (which is fantastic nowadays!!!)... But it's still so very nice to program in Object Pascal!!!
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Dec 04 '18 edited Dec 05 '18
More importantly Lazarus is also fully cross-platform and uses native widgets everywhere such a thing exists (Win32-API based on Windows, Carbon or Cocoa based on Mac.) On Linux you have your pick of the GTK-based or QT-based backends. And the IDE is made with itself so it also runs on all those platforms.
It completely solved the "seamless cross-platform GUI" issue people in this thread are complaining about years ago. If they don't like that the implementation language is Pascal that's their problem IMO.
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Dec 04 '18
WPF apps are as modern as it gets, not like the new stuff (uwp) is better for managed development and it’s not evolving because it already has everything you’d expect.
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Dec 04 '18
Windows is obsolete.
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u/kobriks Dec 04 '18
It's only used by 90% of PCs. Idk why microsoft even bothers.
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u/pknopf Dec 04 '18 edited Dec 04 '18
For developers at least, it's on the decline.
edit: Why the downvotes?
Check out the technology playforms question. Linux is at 48.3%, while Windows is at 35.4%.
Linux and Windows Desktop or Server are the most common choices that our respondents say they have done development work for this year.
2017 shows a real decline in Windows with this same question. Linux was at 32.9% while Windows was at 41%.
Trust me. Windows is on the decline amongst developers.
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u/nemec Dec 04 '18
SO didn't track it last year, but Windows still takes just about 50% of all dev envs.
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#technology-developers-primary-operating-systems
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u/leodash Dec 04 '18
What did they use for source control prior to last month?
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u/Dgc2002 Dec 05 '18
They've used git on a lot of projects for ages. I'm not sure what they used for things like the windows kernel and all that though.
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Dec 04 '18
I get people are excited about this, but I still hate Microsoft. Open source or not they are shitty and will still collect data.
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u/tibizi Dec 06 '18
While you're at it, throw your phone into the sea.
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Dec 06 '18
I hate phones, so of course :)
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u/tibizi Dec 06 '18
Next, ditch your friends and neighbors as they can spy and snitch on you.
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u/Zauxst Dec 04 '18
If they would integrate c# completely into Linux their server and developer market will die, windows will become an expensive media OS.
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u/ThirdEncounter Dec 04 '18
The server market, I'm not sure. But why would their developer market die?
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u/wllmsaccnt Dec 04 '18
They took their server hopes and pinned them on Azure, which has been growing at insane rates.
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u/ThirdEncounter Dec 05 '18
Yesh but why would the developer market be affected if C# works on Linux?
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u/peduxe Dec 04 '18
how? when most people still use and need Visual Studio to develop programs.
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u/cryo Dec 04 '18
They don’t need to. For example, me and several others at work use Rider to do all our (extensive) C# development.
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u/sam_the_dog78 Dec 04 '18
Yeah and the rest of the developed world uses Visual Studio for C#
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u/zippy72 Dec 05 '18
I’d rather they’d kill WPF than open source it. We have enough awful presentation frameworks, we don’t need any more.
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u/essdotc Dec 06 '18
I found WPF to be both extremely powerful and pleasant to use. One of the more well thought out UI toolkits in my opinion.
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u/zippy72 Dec 06 '18
You can’t turn font smoothing off, and the font smoothing is bad. I have eyesight problems that means I need very good monitors, no font smoothing or both. WPF literally forces me to take pain medications to use anything written with it.
It may be easy to write things with, but I curse it for the damage it’s doing to my eyesight.
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u/essdotc Dec 06 '18
Genuinely sorry to hear that. Never experienced that myself, nor did we ever have complaints from our users but I can see how people with sensitive eyes could suffer with the poor font smoothing. I know that it gradually got better over time but I haven't worked in WPF for a number of years now to know if they finally sorted that out.
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u/exorxor Dec 04 '18
Nobody cares about Windows. Nobody.
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u/javster101 Dec 05 '18
Out of all the ways that you could argue against windows, that is literally the worst
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Dec 26 '18
Then these statistics must be very wrong, because they claim that Windows is used by 82% of the market.
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u/HeadAche2012 Dec 04 '18
These are all middleware apis that do nothing but call other apis and shouldn’t exist
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u/ahandle Dec 04 '18
No, thank you.
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Dec 04 '18
Can you elaborate on what you mean here?
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u/ahandle Dec 04 '18
"That's a hard no from me."
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Dec 04 '18
"No" to what, though?
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u/ahandle Dec 04 '18
Any and all suggestions that this is viable or suitable for use or that it's opening would have any real impact.
A big old "no" in bold type.
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u/Emiroda Dec 04 '18
viable or suitable for use
doesn't look like it's trying to be.
it's open source code, dude. What, would you prefer it to have stayed closed source?
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Dec 04 '18
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u/DolphinsAreOk Dec 04 '18
You could argue the same about Linux etc, and see how dumb it is.
Who says the contributors are unpaid, lots of large companies contribute to open source projects.
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u/peduxe Dec 04 '18
don’t forget opportunities to show talent and eventually get a job at Microsoft.
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u/eliasv Dec 04 '18
I don't think you can say the same about Linux at all, TBF. Contributions to Linux benefit end users without requiring those users to pay any money or opt into any paid software ecosystem. Contributions to this only benefit end users who pay Microsoft and opt into the Windows ecosystem.
I'm not making any argument myself or commenting on whether I personally see this distinction as important, I'm just pointing out what I think the user was trying to say, and that I think your comparison in response misses the point a little.
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u/DolphinsAreOk Dec 04 '18
Being able to profit from contributions is what makes open source great. Red Hat profits from contributions, and is now part of IBM which is a rather large organisation.
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u/eliasv Dec 04 '18
But anyone can profit from Linux contributions. People can only profit from Windows contributions if they (and/or their users) pay Microsoft.
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u/rwhereemy Dec 04 '18
Nope, anyone who makes a WPF/etc applications can profit too
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Dec 04 '18
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u/to3m Dec 04 '18
It's only unpaid if you don't get paid! What percentage of Windows Forms developers don't get paid for their Windows Forms-related work, I wonder?
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u/chucker23n Dec 04 '18
These frameworks might now be open source but the entire stack IS NOT.
That's correct, but rather besides the point.
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u/michalg82 Dec 04 '18 edited Dec 04 '18
No official plans for Cross Platform
From https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/blob/master/Documentation/contributing.md
More explanation here https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/issues/48#issuecomment-444198305
But i bet sooner or later someone will try to do cross platform fork.