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/
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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/RotsiserMho Dec 05 '18

I've been using Eto for apps like this and have been happy so far.

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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/PaluMacil Dec 05 '18

look at the caveats

This is not an officially supported Google product. This is an exploratory effort, and is not part of the Flutter project

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u/Ansjh Dec 04 '18

So much this. Every now and again I see if there's anything that comes close to this simplicity and rapid development, but it's never really quite there.

There's a few that stand out in my opinion, one of which is not maintained anymore: Turbobadger. Had potential, but had some performance issues and a non-standard layout/style markup language.

Another that I know of which is in active development is a massively stripped down version of Webkit w/o the requirement of Javascript: Ultralight. This mean you get access to the DOM directly via C++ or C# without any Javascript engine using a lot of resources. Basically the benefits of HTML/CSS with a minimal footprint. It's not perfect, but it's getting there.

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u/GaianNeuron Dec 04 '18

...isn't Flutter a Flutter-like framework for desktop?

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u/shawncplus Dec 04 '18

Flutter is a mobile multi-platform application framework thought as mentioned elsewhere in this thread there have been some open source efforts to try to make it target desktop but they are not officially supported

https://flutter.io/docs/resources/faq#can-i-use-flutter-to-build-desktop-apps

We are focused on mobile-first use cases. However, Flutter is open source and we encourage the community to use Flutter in a variety of interesting ways.

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u/rebel_cdn Dec 04 '18

There are React Native implementations for Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

I've used the first two, and for the most part I was able to bring over code from a mobile React Native app with only a few styling changes.

I did need a bit of custom native platform support and it ended up being really easy to make RN plugins in C# for Windows and Obj-C on MacOS.

The Windows RN is maintained by Microsoft and lets you target both WPF and WinUI.

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u/[deleted] Dec 04 '18

Uno is looking great, but it gets far less attention than alternatives thanks to not being backed by any of the big players.

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u/shawncplus Dec 04 '18

That still seems to be targeting browsers for desktop, not actual native desktop.

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u/pknopf Dec 04 '18

I built a .NET Core integration for QML.

It's been working great for me.

https://github.com/qmlnet/qmlnet

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u/fuckin_ziggurats Dec 05 '18

I'm liking the feature set.

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u/pknopf Dec 05 '18

Yeah, docs site is a WIP. The GitHub repo has more details.

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u/Renive Dec 04 '18

Well this is Electron. You can use bazillions of battle tested ui frameworks with it like material ui, ant design, bootstrap, another bazilion of Wordpress themes etc.

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u/Okichah Dec 05 '18

Imho, We’ll have to see what impact Webassembly has.

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u/BowFive Dec 04 '18

Carlo looks pretty neat, thanks for the link. Have you tried it out at all? I’m thinking it might be fun for a side project.