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WPF Begins its Long Goodbye
It was supposed to replace Windows Forms. Now it will be lucky to live as long.
Windows Presentation Foundation, or WPF, has a special place in my heart. In the distant past, when there was nothing I liked better than a nicely put-together desktop application, WPF was ahead of its time. It had forward-thinking features like reflowable layouts and vector-based rendering. It adopted modern ideas like UI markup and declarative animation. It could even render 3D scenes! I was also personally invested, because WPF was a big part of how I became a Microsoft MVP.
And then, just a few years later, everything fell apart.
But before I go any further into the history of WPF, let’s rewind to introduce the latest controversy around the aging framework.
The Outsourcing Controversy
For years, Microsoft has stuck to the official party line, claiming that WPF is a living, viable technology that continues to get their care and attention. And at the same time, developers routinely raise the alarm that WPF is being ignored. New releases of .NET bring almost no WPF news. Pull requests linger without responses. I could go on, but this graphic tells the story of shrinking developer satisfaction better than anything else:
