> Microsoft's UI story is a non-starter until they get back to the point that a user can:
Why do you care about this stuff? I don't understand. Surely most developers can build a simple app with a few buttons easily in whichever framework they're using. This stuff doesn't really matter for I'd dare to say 90% of developers. What matters is how hard it is to build and maintain complicated stuff. And there WPF blew WinForms (and VB6) out of the water.
Not sure why you think how difficult it is to put a couple buttons on a page and make them do something would have any effect on the success of a UI framework. That's literally not even a consideration when we make decisions on what to use for a project.
If WPF ran on other platforms, we would use it for everything. We use Avalonia instead, and it's pretty great.
But there are 2 basic types of multiplatform UI frameworks - the ones that wrap native controls and look like most other apps on the platform, and the ones that do their own rendering and look the same on every platform. Avalonia is in the second group, so if the former is a hard requirement then it is not a good choice.
> What matters is how hard it is to build and maintain complicated stuff.
What matters is how hard it is to deliver a product to the end users. As I gave in my personal user story, yeah, I had to eventually pay the piper and refactor significantly to make sure things were maintainable. But it was a good lesson learned, and I've met many other developers over the years who got hooked on C# in a similar way.
> And there WPF blew WinForms (and VB6) out of the water.
WPF would be fine for this scenario. If we could do things like this at a WPF level of designer I'd be happy. It's got a little more of a cognitive load to get started but long term is easier to reason about long term and from a conceptual standpoint is more transferable to other contexts (i.e. Web MVVM Frameworks.)
I haven't looked at Avalonia in it's current state (last time I gave it a peek, it was still in a 'almost-ready' status) but if they really are able to do multiplatform as I see they say now then perhaps that's what I'm saying is needed. (Which may be more of a statement on the state of Real OSS Awareness in the .NET community.)
Definitely will give it a go, since I know it's supposed to be a replacement for WPF so I'm hoping(?) that the existing tooling out there is usable
Why do you care about this stuff? I don't understand. Surely most developers can build a simple app with a few buttons easily in whichever framework they're using. This stuff doesn't really matter for I'd dare to say 90% of developers. What matters is how hard it is to build and maintain complicated stuff. And there WPF blew WinForms (and VB6) out of the water.
Not sure why you think how difficult it is to put a couple buttons on a page and make them do something would have any effect on the success of a UI framework. That's literally not even a consideration when we make decisions on what to use for a project.
If WPF ran on other platforms, we would use it for everything. We use Avalonia instead, and it's pretty great.
But there are 2 basic types of multiplatform UI frameworks - the ones that wrap native controls and look like most other apps on the platform, and the ones that do their own rendering and look the same on every platform. Avalonia is in the second group, so if the former is a hard requirement then it is not a good choice.