That's true, but it seems like WinForms is basically a dead end at this point, not much maintenance work is put into it and you have to jump through some serious hoops to make basic stuff like DPI scaling work even last I checked. Completely agree though, the 3rd party component story is very good on .NET, but the applications you're producing don't exactly have a modern look and feel unless you're investing serious UI design effort in them on top of things.
WPF (and whatever they've taken to calling the UWP version of it now) is a little more modern, and it's what I was initially leaning towards, but also doesn't seem to be moving much and it feels like the future is very unclear, while even MS themselves have started putting out Electron apps. It really doesn't breed confidence.
Coming off of an extremely disappointing Build - I don’t think any news even made it to HN this year, and not a peep about desktop - I agree that the future is unclear.
WinUI is the future, but they’ve admitted it will be years before it reaches the maturity of UWP, which is embarrassingly bad even 5 years on.
WPF, in my opinion, is the best choice for “native” windows apps. The actual best choice is Electron, as most teams doing new work at MS have noticed.
WPF, for native, hits the sweet spot of supporting newer technology (high DPI), having decent performance, and being well implemented; it has been solid for at least 10 years now. Also easy to style and theme, similar in concept to web, but just more annoying.
After being burned with their C++/WinRT reboot without tooling matching C++/CX after 4 years in the works, and the whole situation as you describe, I have decided to eat my UWP hat and just focus on WPF/Win32 in what concerns Windows desktop applications.
The migration wizard for .NET apps was a CLI script, really? In the land of "Developers, Developers,.." and GUI wizards.
Maybe if enough of us keep doubling down on Forms/WPF/Win32 and ignore the whole WinUI/Reunion reboot, they finally understand want we really want for desktop Windows.
I was too busy this week to watch any of the Build stuff, but it is surprising how it's basically just been crickets. I can't remember a year with less buzz about anything that Microsoft has queued up...
I dunno. Yeah it was declared dead, but still works great. We have an app some engineer developed to make his job easier that has probably 50 distinct charts in it. Each one is a SQL query that hits a database for a user selected time slot. It's used by over 100 staff now for analysis and building reports. Works great and is easy to support. I don't think we'd gain anything by making it an electron app. I've been pretty disappointed with those kinds of bloated apps, and I'm not sure if they'll ultimately last as long either.
Myself, I'd just build some command line script that hit up a database and pipe data to build a GNUPlot script and just generate a PDF report. That seems to be the best way to hook into a well maintained GUI project. It isn't sexy, but it's dead simple, should last forever, and be very simple to port to a different OS or language in a single afternoon.
WPF (and whatever they've taken to calling the UWP version of it now) is a little more modern, and it's what I was initially leaning towards, but also doesn't seem to be moving much and it feels like the future is very unclear, while even MS themselves have started putting out Electron apps. It really doesn't breed confidence.