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WPF Future?

Hi,

Can somebody please clarifiy the future of WPF.

Is WPF going away or going to be merged into something else. I actually don't want to loose the WPF design UI which I like. Which prompted me to ask.

Plus if anybody can add this. I have never understood why they have not made a designer like it for the other platforms like MAUI. Am I mistaken here or is coming. Or is it hot-reload forever?

Please feel free to correct me.

Thanks,

Ward.

Dustin Saunders

WPF has a limited life span from what I recall in the latest .NET Conference-- the roadmap (or lack thereof) speaks to it well. https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/blob/main/roadmap.md

The future path for Windows-UI dev is going to be WinUI 3 (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/) and WebView2 (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/).

But part of the reason the designers are going away is due to the way responsive design is generally built, with responsive elements the concept is around placement in 'the grid' with relative spacing and dynamic design based on scale (think CSS and a web app that supports mobile where when your resize the top navigation menu collapses into a hamburger menu). So truly, hot reload is a better way to test those designs as you can make a change then play with the results live-- and that includes the components within the main application itself.

Once you get a workflow around hot reload though, it's a rather nice way to work on UI elements in my opinion.

You might be interested in checking out the steam
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPyTZ-HGdn4&ab_channel=dotNET
And the dotNet channel
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvtT19MZW8dq5Wwfu6B0oxw

whorsfall

ASKER

Hi Dustin,

Thanks for your answer. I am starting to go through it and learning about things.

However to set my expectation - and the reason I ask this just in case I have either missed it. Or as I am assuming it is not possible.

Is there any designer at all beyond hot reload? Plus I am also noticing that there is even no toolbar objects to click on to at least help with the initial syntax and place in the XAML.

I am asking these questions as how best to learn this as it seems such a hard slog way of doing it
(and primitive). Sure the WPF designer has its issues but it was a good starting point to make the foundations easier in the original layout to show the less experienced how to start off. Feels quite primitive like editing HTML by hand.

So any further tips / and feedback greatly appreciated.

Do people then just learn it by rote and practice? (As you can read between the lines I am trying to make it easier).

Thanks again for the great assistance,

Ward

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Dustin Saunders

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whorsfall

ASKER

Dustin,

Awsome great help i will.

Thanks,

Ward