Oct 01, 2019  Let's take a step back in a new mini-series that I like to call Xamarin.Forms 101. In each episode we will walk through a basic building block of Xamarin.Forms to help you build awesome cross. This course introduces Xamarin.Forms, and provides an overview of the app development workflow in Visual Studio. Follow along to build your first app, and review the project structure, layout system, basic controls, and different app styles you can create with Xamarin.Forms.

We are so excited to launch our brand new Xamarin Developers YouTube channel!

Others might also be interested in Dean Chalk’s recent post:“Microsoft And The UWP For Enterprise Delusion”And see the first, sympathetic comment at the end which is from Tim Sneath. Tim was at Microsoft for 15 years and worked on WPF and Silverlight.

He recently left Microsoft to go to Google where he is part of the group working on the mobile, web-based Flutter SDK/platform.I’m personally still struck by the wide embrace of, and success of web technology at Microsoft itself (in addition to the embrace by the MS Windows enterprise customer base).If Microsoft itself chose Electron (built on JavaScript and NodeJS) for the highly regarded Visual-Studio-Code Editor/proto-IDE, it makes me question my continued investment in any of WPF, UWP or Xamarin skills. Tim:In my spare time I now run an open source project,.

This brings chemistry handling to Word documents. It is arguably the most complicated add-in that has ever been produce for Word. Because it’s running on the desktop version, we use WPF for rendering chemical structures.

It’s blazingly fast, powerful and makes some otherwise horrible jobs quite easy.So, we in the Chem4Word more than a little wary of Microsoft’s push towards UWP. I personally hate the ‘new; way of architecting fullscreen apps, and I don’t like theOffice 365 versions of Office.

I also gather than UWP hase a very much stripped down graphics framework. No DrawingVisuals, for instance.What is your experience? “Why would you not always use WPF rather than Windows Forms? The main issue is that the time you save on figuring out scaling is more than consumed by the time you spend on design.”you could not be more wrong, I can’t stand people who talk sh!t about thing they have zero clue about, WPF is the choice of real pros, UWP for slurp de jour fools, Forms for the greybeards, end of story.“even in 2018 I can think of reasons why you might use any of the above frameworks” maybe your more of a blogger or a CRUD bum, take a look at Autocad, a grand a seat/year, top pros use WPF whos paying anything for UWP apps? Of non vertical LOB in forms, delusional blowfication, typical b ig m outh blogger.

From the technical perspective you are totally right.The.net framework is a solid base, beyond the shiny component layer, to build your application framework for special demands that can be addressed in an excellent fashion based on a profound architecture invented by you.Sadly you lost the floating point speed of C/C.People who can afford such an architecture can afford writhing everything in C/C almost from scratch, simply because using WPF starts to pay at this point. The power of WPF lies beyond the shiny world of the components found in the Visual Studio or provided by third-party vendors.On the other hand a simpler solution to all this is the RDP protocol;).A customer who needs such software needs a supplier who is in the position and trustworthy enough to handle million dollar project volumes. Sorry, not even close.net floating point speed, ROFLdid sinofsky and his tawtsquad try to undermine WPF, yep,did it work, only on the dabblers wannabes, just take a look at all the high paying WPF jobs all over the world, the try to get a position in “compiler and designing programming languages and math totally independent from the technology.”,and for F sake RDP, ever hear of WCF?, I send transcode 4k video in.Net and send it over WCF in real with a few lines of code, andkilled WPF’s reputation?only with the ignorant, and speaking ofignorant, never mind don’t want to get discourteous again.

After 25 years of using MS products, I’m very wary of any tech that is not yet fully established. Too many products have been mothballed over the years and the amount of time developers have to spend troubleshooting a technical issues with the entire MS stack seems staggering to me as the years pass. With all the various assemblies, versions, platforms, and applications now in the mix it is just damn daunting at times to find the perfect compliment of those items to deliver to a company that couldn’t care less about the tech, but is all over us about the functionality. Genius party beyond subtitles.

We just can’t afford to give so much time to maintaining and troubleshooting the myriad of exceptions thrown in today’s applications. Of course, I’m working in a large enterprise with a network topology consisting of no less than 700 servers, with Win 7 and Win 10 clients across 6 states. Basically, I’m about to retire and that’s my light at the end of the tunnel. Every year or so I pick up UWP and every year after an hour or two I put it back down.

I understand why they did some things but there are a mountain of things that should be easy that are difficult or are impossible. In every programming language I’ve used from now to the dawn of 1985 I’ve been able to open a file and read it’s contents with a few lines of code.Ask a new UWP programmer to open a CSV file at “C:Temptest.csv” (without a picker dialog) and then watch their brain explode while they have to dig through a mountain of documentation only to learn it’s next to impossible. “But it’s SECURITY!!!”.

Ya, I get it, but this is a metaphor for why UWP hasn’t taken off. As a component maker, I’d say WPF and UWP are a nightmare and it takes MS afterthoughts/hacks to draw anything with performance. That’s may more complex and even then the performance is not near Winforms, VCL, ActiveX. WPF is not real windows (it’s a runtime on top of Windows) with no windows handles and WPF event bubbling is another bottleneck. Real Windows architecture is always the best for real Windows development, meaning Winforms, ActiveXs, MFC, VCLs, etc. But the choice does depend on the needs of the app, but if it all possible, target Winforms for the most productive and future proof solution.

Too many choose WPF or UWP simply due to dis-information. For a real world example, download our canned demo that includes MFC, Winforms, and WPF variations of the same demo.