Six years of WPF whats changed Prior to working full time on Octopus Deploy, I spent a year building a risk system using WPF, for traders at an investment bank. Before that I worked as a consultant and trainer, mostly with a focus on WPF. Ive lived and breathed the technology for the last six years, and in this post Im going to share some thoughts about the past and future of WPF and the XAML ites. Six years ago, I wrote an article about validation in WPF on Code Project. I also wrote a custom error provider that supported IData. Themes For Wpf Applications Samples' title='Themes For Wpf Applications Samples' />Error. Info, since, would you believe, WPF in version 3. IData. Error. Info. Later, I worked on a bunch of open source projects around WPF like Bindable LINQ the original Reactive Programming for WPF, back before Rx was invented and Magellan ASP. NET style MVC for WPF. I was even in the MVVM hyping, Code Project link sharing club known as the WPF Disciples for a while. As I look back at WPF, I see a technology that had some good fundamentals, but has been really let down by poor implementation and, more importantly, by a lack of investment. Im glad those days are behind me. Back in 2. 00. 6, heres what the markup for a pretty basic Window looked like taken from an app I worked on in 2. Window x ClassPaul. Themes For Wpf Applications' title='Themes For Wpf Applications' />Stovell. Trial. Balance. User. Interface. Main. Window. Paul. Stovell. Trial. Balance. User. Interface. Silverlight. 47,486 likes 38 talking about this. Welcome to the Silverlight Facebook fan page Find out more about Silverlight at. Paul. Stovell. Trial. Balance. User. Interface. Providers. xmlns systemclr namespace System assemblymscorlib. TitleTrial. Balance. Window. StateMaximized. IconStatic. Resource ImageApplication. Icon. BackgroundStatic. Resource BrushDefault. Material Design In XAML Toolkit. Welcome the one of the most comphrensive and easy to use Material Design UI libraries across any platform. With. MSDN Magazine Issues and Downloads. Read the magazine online, download a formatted digital version of each issue, or grab sample code and apps. UIControlSuite. NET is the collection of our powerful. NET components for WinForms, WPF, Silverlight Windows Phone platforms that help quickly build stunning GUI. Learn about an implementation of a simple approach that will allow you to include support for TIFF files in your applications with a few library calls. Welcome, my name is Paul Stovell. I live in Brisbane and work on Octopus Deploy, an automated deployment tool for. NET applications. Prior to founding Octopus Deploy. Powerful search capability officially introduced, providing endusers with an easy to use UI for finding items in the datagrids cells. Users can search forwards or. Window. Background. Fdtd Simulation Software on this page. Omd Messages Mp3. Namethis. I mean, look at all that ceremonyClass XML namespace imports Why couldnt any of that stuff be declared in one place, or inferred by convention Fortunately, its now 2. Heres what that code would look like if I did it today lt Window x ClassPaul. Stovell. Trial. Balance. User. Interface. Main. Window. xmlnshttp schemas. Paul. Stovell. Trial. Balance. User. Interface. Paul. Stovell. Trial. Balance. User. Interface. Providers. xmlns systemclr namespace System assemblymscorlib. TitleTrial. Balance. Window. StateMaximized. IconStatic. Resource ImageApplication. Icon. BackgroundStatic. Resource BrushDefault. Window. Background. Tutorial Belajar Bahasa Arab Pdf File there. Namethis. Spot the difference Of course not, it was a trick question, nothing has changed since 2. In contrast, heres what a web page looked like in ASP. NET in 2. 00. 6 also taken from a project in 2. Page LanguageC Master. Page. FileTrial. Balance. Master Auto. Event. Wireuptrue Enable. View. Statefalse Code. BehindBuilds. aspx. InheritsPaul. Stovell. Trial. Balance. Main. Website. Builds TitleDownloads Trial. Balance. lt asp Content IDContent. Content. Place. Holder. IDMain. Content. Placeholder runatserver. Place. Holder runatserver Visiblefalse IDdownload. Area. Placeholder. Downloadlt h. 1. What would that markup look like todaymodel Builds. View. Model. section Main. Downloadlt h. 1. I originally became a WPF developer because I didnt like ASP. NET Web Forms and models like View State. But now, when I look back at the journey ASP. NET has taken, it has made huge changes. From the Web Forms model to the MVC model, from ASPX syntax to Razor, theres been some real innovation in the ASP. NET camp in that time. There have been some real innovators in the ASP. NET camp in that time. Heres a list of things ASP. NET has done in six years that WPF hasnt Created a new, human friendly markup language Razor. Razor makes writing markup fun. XAML has never been fun. In fact before Re. Sharper introduced the Import namespace support for XAML, it was downright torture. Embraced design patterns. You cant claim MVVM here for WPF WPF supports data binding, but the core of WPF doesnt actually contain a single feature that helps with MVVM its all layered on top through Blend Behaviors and third party frameworks. ASP. NET has an entire stack built on top of MVC. Embraced the pit of success. You can actually build a maintainable application using ASP. NET MVC using the default project template. In contrast, without third party frameworks, the default WPF project template is the path to misery. Embraced extensibility. Nearly everything in ASP. NET MVC has an interface or abstract class that you can extend to change how the framework works. Theres a beautiful pipeline that you can plug into. Id swear the WPF team never even heard of an interface, and the only abstract classes have internal constructors. Embraced open source. ASP. NET MVC bundles j. Query and JSON. NET, and its designed to work with a ton of open source tools. WPF, despite the litany of MVVM frameworks, and despite it being impossible to develop maintainable WPF applications without one, still hasnt embraced any of them. Become open source. ASP. NET MVC was open source since early on, but now the entire ASP. NET stack is open source, and accepts contributions. WPF isnt, and frankly, you wouldnt want to look at the WPF code anyway its hideous. On top of all of this, youve got the innovation thats happening on the web stack itself. Dont like CSS Try Less or Saa. S. Dont like Java. Script Try Coffee. Script or Dart. Theres a rich ecosystem of innovation happening in the web space at the moment, innovation that has never been present in WPF since 2. Apples and oranges and all that. Im not contrasting ASP. NET and WPF in an attempt to say ASP. NET is better, that would be ridiculous, since they clearly serve very different purpose. Im simply trying to show how one has come so far in six years, while the other has barely changed at all. I think its all down to a lack of investment. Whats disappointing is that WPF started out quite positively during its time. Concepts like dependency properties, styles, templates, and the focus on data binding felt quite revolutionary when Avalon was announced. Sadly, these good ideas, when put into practice, didnt have great implementations. Dependency properties are terribly verbose, and could have done with some decent language support. Styles and templates were also verbose, and far more limited than CSS when WPF shipped I imagined there would be a thousand websites offering high quality WPF themes, just like there are for HTML themes but there arent, because it is hard. Data binding in WPF generally Just Works, except when it doesnt. Implementing INotify. Property. Changed still takes way too much code. Data context is a great concept, except it totally breaks when dealing with items like Context. Menus. ICommand was built to serve two masters the WPF team who favored routed commands, and the Blend team who favored the command pattern, and ended up being a bad implementation for both. XAMLAnd then theres the failure that is XAML. XAML is so verbose its hard to imagine that humans were ever supposed to write it. And thats because they werent In the land of lollipops and rainbows, designers were supposed to use Blend and developers were going to use the VS designer, and no one would even look at XAML. Yet, its 2. 01. 2, and even as Blend has improved most people are still hand writing XAML. This will not change in VS 2. The biggest failing in XAML wasnt that the tooling was bad though its that the language was never modified to cope with bad tooling. And unlike HTML, XAML isnt semantic. Its not interpreted.