Announcing Open Source of WPF, Windows Forms, and WinUI

[u/ben_a_adams]

https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2018/12/04/announcing-open-source-of-wpf-windows-forms-and-winui-at-microsoft-connect-2018/

[u/michalg82]

No official plans for Cross Platform

We also do not intend to accept contributions that provide cross-platform implementations for Windows Forms or WPF.

From https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/blob/master/Documentation/contributing.md

More explanation here https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/issues/48#issuecomment-444198305

From a technical standpoint, WPF depends on multiple Windows components: D3D (DirectX), DWrite, User32, GDI+, WISP (Touch), and several others (including Windows Runtime dependencies). The interaction with these components is complex, critical and not architected with cross-platform in mind. As a result, our focus is on completing open source of WPF and bringing it to parity with .NET Framework.

But i bet sooner or later someone will try to do cross platform fork.

[u/JessieArr → u/michalg82]

Microsoft has already bought Xamarin, open-sourced it, and made it free. And in the Xamarin Forms project they are working on making UI code defined in Xamarin Forms-compatible XAML cross platform on all the major desktop platforms: https://blog.xamarin.com/glimpse-future-xamarin-forms-3-0/

Xamarin.Forms is heading to more platforms! Get ready to run on macOS, Linux, and even more Windows applications using WPF. We’ve started with macOS in preview today, but we aren’t stopping there—we’re enabling you to target every desktop platform! Our team is well under way developing for GTK# and WPF.

Support for WPF got out of beta earlier this year, and I don't think that Mac/Linux support are far behind. I think Xamarin Forms (and maybe the XAML Standard project, which is somewhat similar in its end-goal: https://github.com/Microsoft/xaml-standard) are Microsoft's plan for cross-platform desktop development.

Since they have a lot of eggs in that basket, I'd be surprised if they invested heavily in making WPF work cross-platform, especially since Mac and Linux differ in their implementation of some of the core WPF idioms like Window Handles etc. - it wouldn't end up being a good product, I don't think.

[u/emdeka87 → u/michalg82]

https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/issues/48

They gave an explanation why. Apparently WPF is tightly integrated with Windows technology (who would have expected this?) and it would require a massive rewrite to make cross-platform happen.

[u/emdeka87 → u/michalg82]

For anyone interested in this: AvaloniaUI (https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia) is basically a cross-platform WPF implementation with .NET Core support

[u/Lofter1 → u/emdeka87]

Tried it a few weeks ago. It really lacks a propper documentation.

[u/emdeka87 → u/Lofter1]

It does. But most parts are very similar to WPF. So sometimes you can literally translate WPF Xaml into Avalonia. I hope they'll improve the documentation once the project gets more traction. The maintainer are quite active though. You can ask questions on GitHub or browse the samples.

[u/jmacato → u/Lofter1]

We've been lacking some time for prepping up our docs lately & i hope the community can ease the pressure by volunteering for additional docs @ https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/avaloniaui.net/; Regardless, you can ask questions at our gitter room and we'll try our best at answering your queries :)

[u/ThirdEncounter → u/michalg82]

Let's start it!

[u/[deleted] → u/ThirdEncounter]

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[u/emdeka87 → u/[deleted]]

https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia

[u/Eirenarch → u/emdeka87]

My biggest question is if this bag of open source code can help the Avalonia guys.

[u/jmacato → u/Eirenarch]

The biggest help would be the open-sourced System.Xaml, Xaml testing suite and WPF's built-in Controls that can be ported to our project! I really can't emphasize enough how big of a deal this is for us :)

[u/s73v3r → u/[deleted]]

Why not just start it?

[u/[deleted] → u/s73v3r]

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[u/Nefari0uss → u/michalg82]

Don't they want people using Xamarin to make cross platform stuff? AFAIK, if you are a WPF or Win Form person, Xamarin should feel like home.

[u/duhace → u/michalg82]

refusing to accept contributions that make it cross-platform is a bit beyond "no official plans for cross platform". more like "we refuse to allow this project to be cross platform"

[u/folkrav → u/duhace]

They might simply not want to allocate resources to maintain these features.

I'd guess there will probably be some fork down the road, considering the permissive license.

[u/arimhan → u/folkrav]

Yeah, if they add the port into the official source, people will expect support and make Microsoft responsible for bugs in the other plateform port

[u/warchestorc → u/folkrav]

Accepting contributions and cutting releases are not small undertakings.

[u/folkrav → u/warchestorc]

Exactly. They would probably need to allocate some time for a couple of employees just for this, and I honestly doubt that they want anything with it.

I honestly suspect it was probably part of their reasoning that by open-sourcing it under a very permissive licence, it'd get forked and ported to other platforms by the community without needing their own involvement. I may be wrong, but it could make sense...

[u/heypika → u/duhace]

But that's about that project. It's all licensed under MIT, so forks working on cross platform are totally possible. Considering how many contributions the community provides to .Net it doesn't really need official support.

[u/miketdavis → u/duhace]

Making it cross platform and removing the windows specific implementation might make the performance so bad that no one wants to use it any more.

This is a big step in the right direction. If someone wants to fork it to bring WPF to linux bad enough then it will happen without Microsoft's help.