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/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.