Announcing Open Source of WPF, Windows Forms, and WinUI

https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2018/12/04/announcing-open-source-of-wpf-windows-forms-and-winui-at-microsoft-connect-2018/

by TiredOfLife • 8 years ago

874 375 8 years ago

blogs.windows.com

ocdtrekkie4• 8 years ago

Very excited to see WinForms and WPF especially hit open source. WinForms is still IMHO the hands-down most convenient way to quickly assemble a GUI for an app, and while Microsoft hasn't given it much love over the years, it's huge userbase will hopefully take advantage of the ability to iterate on it via GitHub.

jack_pp3• 8 years ago

I'm not entirely sure we're referring to the same WinForms but I distinctly remember loving C# in 2009 or so, just when WPF was coming out. But I refused to use WPF for my apps because back then you'd have to force the user to install the latest .net which I thought was too much of a bother.

So I tried using the old GUI framework and boy was it a nightmare to customize anything. I remember having to override the default Button class and add like 50 lines of code just so I could get a custom background. This and the fact that C# back then couldn't do high scalability servers were what forced me to learn C++ and in my opinion QT is a much easier library to use than the old WinForms was.

ocdtrekkie4• 8 years ago

WinForms' key is the quick drag and drop and edit properties type designer. It's not really intended for you to restyle it entirely (though you can). In that it was 'the style' of apps of the day, you could simply put whatever elements you needed on a form, and then double click on them to put some code behind them.

Since WinForms' existing styling was the style of applications of the day, there was little reason to heavily restyle it. Honestly, if someone ran with the new open source WinForms and introduced a Windows 10 style that I could build with the same incredibly easy editor as the existing WinForms, I'd be set.

blattimwind• 8 years ago

I remember having to override the default Button class and add like 50 lines of code just so I could get a custom background.

That's mostly because you're not supposed to be doing that sort of thing in the first place. Customizing widgets = inconsistent look and feel. Custom widgets = Inconsistent LAF, inconsistent interaction, no accessibility etc.

The idea of Win32 UI, WinForms etc. is that you have a look and feel dictated by the system, not by individual app developers, with the ultimate goal being not just a consistent look and feel of the whole system (including applications) but consistently applied patterns of interaction. This in turn makes computers easier to use.

Of course, modern UI frameworks, whether in the browser (JS) or outside the browser (QML, UWP, JS, ...) run completely counter to that.

mrsteveman1• 8 years ago

But I refused to use WPF for my apps because back then you'd have to force the user to install the latest .net which I thought was too much of a bother.

That always puzzled me, even though I've seen some of Microsoft's reasoning and blog posts about it.

Microsoft has repeatedly stressed that you can't assume any particular version of Windows comes with a specific version of .NET preinstalled (or VC++ runtime, for that matter).

Windows already bundles various things, and the major .NET frameworks seem like the thing to bundle and preinstall, and they actually do[0], just not consistently or universally.

And, Windows Update can already update the .NET frameworks, in fact I recall that some new major .NET versions were treated as "recommended" installs by WU in the past and were automatically installed on systems that didn't already have them, but they aren't doing that consistently and universally either.

[0] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/astebner/2007/03/14/mailbag...

muterad_murilax• 8 years ago

Hopefully we'll now see fixes for some of the more well-known bugs in WinForms that Microsoft have ignorerad for a decade or so...

badsectoracula3• 8 years ago

WinForms is still IMHO the hands-down most convenient way to quickly assemble a GUI for an app

I think Lazarus[0] is easier, especially when it comes to automatic layout stuff, but WinForms is very close. They're somewhat related as both are descendants of the classic Visual Basic RAD approach and Lazarus is basically an open source and cross platform clone of Delphi while WinForms implements a very VCL-like (VCL is Delphi's framework) API - which is natural since both Delphi and WinForms were designed by the same person :-P.

[0] http://www.lazarus-ide.org/

int_19h6• 8 years ago

How does Lazarus handle layout?

epoch_100• 8 years ago

While unlikely, I hope one day that the entire Windows operating system will be made open source — I'm not sure how Microsoft would make the revenue work out, but I bet it could be done. And the world would be better for it.

kevinSuttle2• 8 years ago

Can you imagine how much work and exploit patching could have been avoided in the last 30 years?

ethbro2• 8 years ago

Can you imagine how much effort and legacy code retention has gone into Microsoft maintaining backwards compatibility in their OSes?

kypro• 8 years ago

Surely there is some incentive to do this for home licences?

Then they could charge for a subscription to the "pro" features and take a cut from apps on the Windows store.

bunderbunder3• 8 years ago

I could imagine some sort of scheme where home versions are free to download, but the right to redistribute is not included in that license. So OEMs still have to pay for an OEM version, and the server version still costs money.

But that would only work if it's legally possible to open source even that much of it in the first place, which may not be the case.

djsumdog• 8 years ago

I still hope enough people hack on ReactOS that one day it will catch up and can run most Win10 drivers, basic apps and eventually games.

lostgame• 8 years ago

Isn’t that also dependent on WINE development?

hiccuphippo2• 8 years ago

I think that would depend on if Microsoft decides to keep working on Win10 instead of coming up with a new version.

ocdtrekkie4• 8 years ago

Because of legacy code issues, you're likely to just see the new parts of Windows get open sourced. When things get rewritten or ported or what-have-you (such as reimplementing these frameworks for .NET Core), it'll likely be open source. See how nothing from IE has been open sourced, but several components of Edge have been.

It's likely most of the nuts and bolts of Windows can be open sourced without threatening their business model, as competing OSes are pretty architecturally incompatible, and there will always be some closed source parts of Windows. Bear in mind, Microsoft is working heavily on shifting their revenue to being services-based as well.

arethuza• 8 years ago

IE might have lingering traces of Mosaic in it - MS licensed Mosaic from Spyglass as the basis for the original IE although more recent versions have dropped any explicit mention of that licensing deal.

craftyguy• 8 years ago

I would rather see microsoft contribute to existing projects rather than throw code over the wall.

ggregoire• 8 years ago

I'm not sure how Microsoft would make the revenue work out

Isn’t Windows 10 already more or less free? You can download it on their site, install it, skip the activation and that’s it. There is a message “Activate Windows” at the bottom right of the screen but it doesn’t matter for most people I guess.

whichfawkes• 8 years ago

Free is not open source.

okl• 8 years ago

Free as in beer does not equal open source.

happycube• 8 years ago

IMO it's more or less Shareware at this point.

chrisseaton3• 8 years ago

I think it's probably unlikely not because of any opinions of Microsoft, but because Windows is vast and contains large volumes of code they've licensed to use in closed source code, but not bought the ability to re-licence as open source.

amatwl3• 8 years ago

This is true. A quick example would ZIP Folders in Windows - it uses third-party code Microsoft licensed (who knows if the company is still around today since it dates back to the early 2000s).

source: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180515-00/?p=...

jasode• 8 years ago

, but because Windows is vast and contains large volumes of code they've licensed to use in closed source code, but not bought the ability to re-licence as open source.

Yes, that's also the reason Raymond Chen gave when people asked Microsoft to open source the Pinball game that was removed from Windows Vista: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=...

In the comments, a reader traced the chain of ownership and apparently Electronic Arts now owns the Pinball source code: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=...

jplayer012• 8 years ago

An interesting point of view is given in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc (Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos). There are some sections that briefly touch on how Solaris was open-sourced, and how incredibly difficult and time intensive it was to do because of how much code there was that belonged to other people/companies that had to be rewritten or just excised if possible. And despite all the effort they put in, it still didn't work out 100% of the way they wanted it to (thus the existence of illumos).

woodrowbarlow• 8 years ago

prediction: _if_ this happens, it will happen in such a way that you cannot meaningfully run a modified version of the Windows codebase as your OS. (i.e., they'll make it so all software must be installed through the app store and only on signed builds of the OS.)

oblio2• 8 years ago

Why would they? Any kind of paying customer would want the "official" distro, anyway.

And it's not like Microsoft is Red Hat vs Oracle, they can bury anyone making a "hostile" distro.

JustSomeNobody• 8 years ago

I'd rather them just push for a Linux based "Windows".

bitwize2• 8 years ago

Why would they trade the much more sophisticated NT kernel for something as primitive as Linux?

tozeur• 8 years ago

Even if Windows is open sourced (which would be pretty cool just to peak in there), there’s no way on Earth you’d be able to compile it. I heard a full build takes over 18 hours on insane hardware, talkin 64+ cores.

mikestew• 8 years ago

It's going on fifteen years since I had anything to do with the Windows build, but that sounds...excessive. You could certainly take the afternoon off, though.

dagw• 8 years ago

I heard a full build takes over 18 hours on insane hardware, talkin 64+ cores.

A machine like that can be had for only 2-4$ hour on your favorite cloud computing platform.

And hopefully the code is sanely enough structured that you don't have to do a complete rebuild too often.

jononor• 8 years ago

How long do you think it takes to compile a full Linux desktop distribution like Debian or Arch Linux? Small communities manage to do this regularly. Maybe not so nice on an individual laptop, but there are ways.

maxxxxx4• 8 years ago

I don't see that as a problem. A lot of people and orgs can afford that.

monocasa3• 8 years ago

So what, like $5 on AWS?

GordonS2• 8 years ago

I compiled GCC from source recently - it took several hours on an 8-core Xeon with 64GB of RAM.

Lots of projects take a long time to build, so it's not a show-stopper by any means. I imagine you could also mix precompiled parts with parts you compiled from source too.

krylon5• 8 years ago

I vaguely remember Mark Russinovich giving a talk or something a couple of years ago (when they open sourced .Net Core, I think, but don't quote me), and somebody asked when they would open source Windows, and his reply roughly that they had no specific plans, but that it was "definitely possible": https://venturebeat.com/2015/04/03/microsofts-mark-russinovi...

I agree it is unlikely, or at least would require a huge amount of work. Then again, Sun did it with Solaris, so who knows what the future holds?

If somebody had told me ten years ago that Microsoft would open source their .Net runtime, port SQL Server to Linux, replace their proprietary browser engine with Chromium, I would have asked that person to give me some of whatever they were smoking. ;-)

beefhash• 8 years ago

I agree it is unlikely, or at least would require a huge amount of work. Then again, Sun did it with Solaris, so who knows what the future holds?

Shoutouts to Oracle re-closing Solaris. That was an incredibly pointless move.

derefr6• 8 years ago

If they had first told you that in the amazing future of 2018, quality Operating Systems were a commodity that you can’t even give away, and Microsoft was now making all its money by being a B2B hosted-infrastructure (“cloud”) provider, would the other assertions become easier to swallow?

netcan• 8 years ago

I think chasing down all the rights holders would be harder than the revenue stuff.

Ultimately, they'll still be able to sell windows like redhat, and it's the stuff that runs on Windows which is more important anyway.

anticensor3• 8 years ago

You can drop all non-Microsoft parts and it will still be an usable OS.

zdragnar2• 8 years ago

Gross, no thank you. The trialware / bloatware that has come standard on windows from manufacturers was bad enough. Can you imagine how bad Lenovo Windows or Dell Windows would be? The Android landscape is bad enough.

At first, I was thinking that it would only be bad for the non-technical folk (i.e. other 99%) who wouldn't know how to re-install a better windows. But then, I remembered that even MS is having a hell of a time rolling out updates without breaking machines. All the different branded flavors of windows would just make getting windows updates that much harder or terrifying, I think.

curt15• 8 years ago

Can you imagine how bad Lenovo Windows or Dell Windows would be?

Why not just reserve the trademark Windows to Microsoft? If other OEMs want to muck up their own builds they would have to brand it their own and risk their own reputation.

GordonS2• 8 years ago

I might have known someone would try to spin an OSS Windows in a negative way :/

If it was open source, it wouldn't be long before there were hundreds of forks that removed the telemetry, advertising etc. That's by far a net win.

parvenu74• 8 years ago

How MSFT would make revenue from an open source operating system: the same as Cononical and Red Hat do from an open source operating system.

monocasa3• 8 years ago

Or just Azure and switching to more IBM model: "you rent the hardwrae we own, so as long as you're up to date with your payments we couldn't care less what you run on it."

fesoliveira• 8 years ago

I don't think open sourcing the entire OS is possible due to reasons raised by other posts, but maybe they could open source the kernel. This is the central part of Windows and what is actually important. Maybe they could even open source DirectX or some other proprietary library that became a standard over the years, like WPF, who knows.

justwalt• 8 years ago

How likely would open sourcing DirectX be? My understanding is that DirectX is a big reason that game developers prefer not to support other platforms. Wouldn’t that let competing platforms have a better chance?

That would be a change I’d love to see. But I think a better change would be for newer games not using DirectX and choosing Vulkan instead.

mr_toad2• 8 years ago

I'm not sure how Microsoft would make the revenue work out

They could give away desktop licenses, even in the enterprise, and still rake in the cash from Active Directory and Exchange server licensing.

They probably make more from CALS than Windows desktop now.

ksec• 8 years ago

Quite possible, once Microsoft has ported all the important bits to ARM64. There will be the second coming of Windows Smartphones.

hprotagonist• 8 years ago

I expect that WPF and WinForms are still windows-only, correct?

merriemcgaw• 8 years ago

That is correct, they will still be Windows-only technologies.

bialpio2• 8 years ago

WPF apps are supposed to work on .NET Core and .NET Core is multiplatform so I'd say it's not windows-only - am I missing something here?

merb2• 8 years ago

except that maybe some user now can make a pr for linux

daniel-levin• 8 years ago

The code has been accessible for a while now, albeit still licensed as proprietary. I went through it a few weeks ago. The Winforms code depends heavily on GDI APIs, which AFAIK are windows only and closed source

miguelrochefort6• 8 years ago

Many projects are porting variants of them to other platforms: Avalonia, Eto, Uno, Xamarin.Forms, etc.

Now that it's open source, the process should be even easier.

qwerty4561273• 8 years ago

WinForms is not windows-only, it has been implemented in Mono pretty long ago already. The major reason almost nobody develops WinForms apps on Linux is there is no visual WinForms designer (which is so good and intuitive in VisualStudio and that's a major WinForms strength) on Linux and given you are forced to code it manually other GUI toolkits can be more flexible, more powerful and look better. In fact I have developed some WinForms apps in VisualStudio on Windows specifically intending them to run on every of the 3 major OSes without modification.

floatboth9• 8 years ago

Another major reason is that Mono's implementation of WinForms is:

- quite buggy

- quite ugly

- does not support Wayland

- does not support accessibility

- is literally WinForms. It's a 90s era GUI toolkit.

jammygit• 8 years ago

Hypothetically, if 10 developers decided to make a WPF fork/patch that would work on linux, would it be a worthwhile project?

corysama• 8 years ago

A lot of people really like WPF. I'd be surprised if that did not happen.

kevindqc• 8 years ago

Would have to wait until like mid-2019, as they didn't open-source everything yet :( Currently only has System.Xaml

https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/blob/master/roadmap.md

naikrovek8• 8 years ago

As Microsoft release them, yes.

maxxxxx4• 8 years ago

It seems they want to get out of WPF and others. UWP probably won't get open sourced.

contextfree3• 8 years ago

WinUI is the standard controls library for UWP

miguelrochefort6• 8 years ago

I'm not sure what WinUI is. It only seems to contain extra UWP controls. None of the primitive ones.

miguelrochefort6• 8 years ago

I'm afraid UWP isn't open source.

In the meantime, Uno is the closest thing we have:

https://github.com/nventive/Uno

vitorgrs• 8 years ago

They can't open-source UWP because it's basically a Windows thing.

It's based on WinRT, which is based on COM.

miguelrochefort6• 8 years ago

They could still open source it.

It would be mich easier to port it if the source code was available.

maxxxxx4• 8 years ago

You can open source Windows only code. Why not? WPF won't be cross platform either when open sourced.

amatwl3• 8 years ago

UWP is WinRT (Windows Runtime). And, you're right, it's COM, but The Good Parts™.

piotrkubisa• 8 years ago

This year does not end surprising me. I have quite positive experience with development in WPF, but I noticed except the SourceTree I can't find any application which looks nice. Do you know any neat-looking application which uses WPF?

mike123456• 8 years ago

Visual Studio is written in WPF.

kojoru• 8 years ago

See also Scott Hanselman's (emotional!) post on this: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/AnnouncingWPFWinFormsAndWinUI...

contras1970• 8 years ago

That means your (or my!) WPF/WinForms/WinUI apps can all use the same controls if you like, using XAML Islands. I could take the now 10 year old BabySmash WPF app and add support for pens, improved touch, or whatever makes me happy!

that's not interesting. the interesting question is: will there be a SQL Server Management Studio for GNU/Linux?

yakz• 8 years ago

There is Azure Data Studio for GNU/Linux.

kev946• 8 years ago

Does this mean that WPF apps can be build on Linux and run on Windows?

nwsm• 8 years ago

No. It means anyone can now try to port it.

moomin• 8 years ago

This strikes me as ten years too late.

duaoebg• 8 years ago

It's never too late to do the right thing.

copperx5• 8 years ago

It can be. It's useless to apologize to someone who's dead.

protomyth• 8 years ago

in Microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml - Data/Telemetry

This project collects usage data and sends it to Microsoft to help improve our products and services. Read Microsoft's privacy statement to learn more.

For more information on telemetry implementation see the developer guide.

https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-US/privacystatement

https://github.com/Microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/blob/master/d...

Looks really easy to disable, but probably something some folks need to be aware of. Love the license and effort Microsoft put into this.

kgwxd6• 8 years ago

It would be nice if we could all agree on a global environment variable to opt-out of all telemetry so we wouldn't have to keep track of the thousands of places to turn it off.

ahoka• 8 years ago

How about opt-in? Privacy should be the default.

dddddaviddddd• 8 years ago

I imagine this would look a lot like the IPv4 security flag or the do not track header in practice.

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt

wang_li2• 8 years ago

If we make the developer, the developer's manager, and the entire org chart from there up to the CEO personally and criminally liable for any leaks and improper use of data, there would be zero need to opt out as they could not then externalize the costs of their shitty practices.

setquk2• 8 years ago

They'd fuck it up if it existed. They shipped Debian packages that the environment variable didn't work on.

Opt out telemetry is NOT an option. Opt in is. I've been fighting this position since they added it to .Net Core and will continue to do so.

anticensor3• 8 years ago

In other words, how we find out color of your computer.

Kiro• 8 years ago

Am I the only one who always accepts these kind of "help improve the product" things? I want to help improve the product.

cptskippy• 8 years ago

So you're why all my products suck!

I do the same.

etatoby• 8 years ago

I also usually accept those requests. I don't see what all the fuss is about.

floatboth9• 8 years ago

Same. I run Firefox Nightly with everything under "Nightly Data Collection and Use" checked.

calcifer• 8 years ago

Same. I have all telemetry and Shield studies enabled in Firefox.

airstrike• 8 years ago

I generally figure there are enough people like you that they don't need my data as well, so I opt out, if nothing else to spare my computer a bit of resources

herpderperator2• 8 years ago

Looks like enabling telemetry was one of the first things they did: https://github.com/dotnet/winforms/pull/6

jefe_• 8 years ago

Hope Apple is listening, it would nice if I could develop iOS apps without owning, leasing, or remotely connecting to a Mac.

garmaine2• 8 years ago

You can, with a bit of leg work. There are ways of building iOS apps on Linux.

Cort3z• 8 years ago

How?

e12e• 8 years ago

Not while being compliant with Apple licenses? And you're beholden to Apple for a developer ID and permission to distribute applications, which they can revoke on a whim?

nine_k• 8 years ago

Apple is in the business of selling hardware and accompanying it with software and cloud services.

They have zero interest of Mac software running elsewhere. They do have an interest for other software to be runnable under macOS / iOS without a major porting effort, but not a very great interest, I suppose.

wpdev_63• 8 years ago

You can run osx within vmware: https://github.com/DrDonk/unlocker

copperx5• 8 years ago

... with no GPU acceleration, which makes using macOS painful even on a powerful machine.

svick3• 8 years ago

Where do I get a macOS license that allows me to run it in VMWare?

msie• 8 years ago

That's as bad as saying how it would be nice to develop for Windows without owning a PC.

boramalper• 8 years ago

Wouldn't it be better to license them under Apache instead of MIT considering that --presumably-- Microsoft might have some patented stuff in there?

ajross• 8 years ago

Apache has a clear patent grant, but it's also transitive. Folks redistributing a modified library have to grant their own patents. Some customer might care about the distinction.

Also MS's lawyers may not be 100% clear about whether these libraries already include patented technology from other patent holders that MS may have licensed years ago.

MIT punts on the whole issue, so may seem "safer" to a lawyer when used with a giant existing code base. Apache is clearly the right choice for new development (for those who don't like GPLv3, anyway -- let's not get into that argument).

hiccuphippo2• 8 years ago

The crossplatform issue already opened, discussed and closed: https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/issues/48

poizan42• 8 years ago

A more realistic approach for a cross-platform WPF might be to start with Mono's Moonlight (as Silverlight and WPF have a lot in common) - this could now be speed up by using parts of WPF.

However in 10 years no one has cared enough to start a project to do this, so I'm not too optimistic.

sorenjan• 8 years ago

Couldn't this be a good competitor for Electron or React native? Write code in whatever language you want that compiles to .Net, make the UI in XAML, don't run the application on Chrome and Node. Sounds like a good candidate for cross platform development.

int_19h6• 8 years ago

https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia

miguelrochefort6• 8 years ago

https://github.com/nventive/Uno

gigatexal4• 8 years ago

Wow. What’s next? Windows itself? What if the next iteration of Windows was based on Intel’s Clear Linux?

orionblastar• 8 years ago

There were rumors of a Winux project at Microsoft that put the Windows GUI on top of Xenix. I don't think it was true. But the idea of moving the OS to a Unix OS goes back to MacOSX. Microsoft could do worse than putting Windows on top of Linux.

pknopf2• 8 years ago

Microsoft could do worse than putting Windows on top of Linux.

Start a new OS, along side Windows, based on Linux/Unix.

Make it as stable as Windows for the every-day user, because let's be realistic, even Ubuntu can't manage it.

Ship all new laptops/PCs with this new OS.

Continue supporting Windows/Server for the enterprise.

That would be so awesome.

mr_overalls4• 8 years ago

I hated to see this advice to contributors:

"We will typically not accept contributions that implement support for an OS-specific technolology on another operating system. . . We also do not intend to accept contributions that provide cross-platform implementations for Windows Forms or WPF."

https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/blob/master/Documentation/cont...

Microsoft seems to be actually refusing to accept contributions that could make WPF cross-platform - it's a bit beyond "no official plans for cross platform".

drewg123• 8 years ago

Its not that much different than the Linux kernel in that respect. Eg, you cannot submit a driver w/ifdefs and compat shims for other OSes.

bunderbunder3• 8 years ago

Theoretically you can still get WPF running on another OS, but you'd have to do it the same way that WSL gets an Ubuntu userland running on Linux: You introduce a compatibility layer that it runs on top of.

I think I'd prefer that approach, anyway - I'd guess it's cleaner and ultimately more maintainable than introducing a whole bunch of conditional logic for handling all the cross-platform issues into an already complicated piece of software.

mr_overalls4• 8 years ago

But this isn't a kernel - it's a framework with explicit goals of being cross-platform.

Someone12342• 8 years ago

In that Git repository.

Nobody should be submitting pull requests for cross-platform support into WPF's main Windows repository. Instead they should branch WPF, make a platform specific version (e.g. WPF-Linux, WPF-MacOS, etc), and submit pull requests upstream that are platform agnostic (e.g. bug fixes).

topbanana• 8 years ago

That's not the approach they've taken for other cross-platform work. Doesn't sound very efficient either.

minxomat• 8 years ago

At which point it's easier just to use Eto.

lozenge• 8 years ago

How are they supposed to evaluate such contributions? They would need to set it up in their CI, know details about those platforms, etc. What if the first contributor uses X11 apis and then somebody else wants to use Wayland, another wants to use (whatever hardware accelerated graphics API)... are they to reject everybody who wasn't first?

tracker12• 8 years ago

I would suggest that any initial support for cross platform efforts be centered around WINE myself. Likely the least friction. Not that I care.

azurezyq• 8 years ago

Open source doesn't mean open development and liability & commitments. They are different things.

I actually think MS did a great job by saying that. The purpose is to literally make the source public but they don't have resources to make a long commitment. Then it's better to not say it clearly and later got accused as not well performing.

rococode• 8 years ago

Right, by releasing the code they're saying "here's some nice code, do what you want with it", but not "oh and we're increasing our investment into this product by expanding the team" which is what adding non-Windows support to their official repository would entail.

runfaster2000• 8 years ago

Partially true ..

Open source doesn't mean open development and liability & commitments.

Right. We are stating up-front what we intend to achieve. We will sart with making WPF on .NET Core have parity with .NET Framework and then expand from there. We'll stick to Windows as the OS for the project.

The purpose is to literally make the source public but they don't have resources to make a long commitment.

We are not saying that. We intend to continue working on WPF. In fact, we are talking about moving some of Microsoft's 1st-party apps to WPF on .NET Core, just like how we're moving 1st-party web sites/services to ASP.NET Core and .NET Core. Same playbook.

oh-kumudo• 8 years ago

Exactly. I think MS is a doing a gesture job to showcase their code, but they are not open sourcing the roadmap to the community, which is fine by me actually.

partiallypro• 8 years ago

If you want to do that, then fork it. Microsoft isn't stopping you from doing that.

polskibus2• 8 years ago

What a pity. It would be cool to target canvas with winforms somehow, and just use that through wasm.

jenscow3• 8 years ago

Thank you, Microsoft.

Keep it contained in Windows! WPF apps are shoddy.

migueldeicaza• 8 years ago

Neither Windows.Forms or WPF can easily be made portable, the code is really a thin layer on top of existing Windows services.

I know, because I did this before with Mono, and the changes would be highly disruptive to the codebase.

Drdrdrq• 8 years ago

Which is probably the reason they open-sourced it... Not much difference anyway.

tracker12• 8 years ago

Would it be relatively easy to shim to use Wine (where available)?

wvenable• 8 years ago

If someone wanted to attempt it, it would make much more sense as a fork rather than part of the mainline.

zoobab• 8 years ago

Use Python QT, it is portable. No need to invest time and effort in non-portable GUIs.

And their whole .Net is full of patents.

chrisseaton3• 8 years ago

Open source doesn't mean they have to accept any old feature you want to add to their project.

Who's going to pay to buy the new CI machines they need to run someone's macOS backend that they contribute for example?

Be reasonable.

BonesJustice• 8 years ago

Supporting cross-platform WPF (or WinForms) at this point would be a terrible idea for Microsoft.

These frameworks have been around for many years, and many (if not most) of the applications built on those frameworks make heavy use of third-party control libraries. Those libraries, whether open source or propriety, often include at least some win32-specific interop code that has also been around for many years. Most of those libraries are now in “maintenance only” mode, if they’re even being maintained at all. Realistically, most Windows GUI applications built on .NET will never run on any platform other than Windows, even if the core UI frameworks become cross-platform.

As soon as Microsoft says, “WPF is cross-platform now”, they’d get flooded with bug reports that aren’t even related to their code.

tamrix• 8 years ago

Wow, someone who makes sense for once. I love and embrace open source but I'm sure as glue that the developers who want cross platform winforms and wpf will never use it.

RickSanchez2600• 8 years ago

Can't you just fork the project and make your own cross platform WPF and Windows Forms? Name it something else and don't give the code to Microsoft?

white-flame• 8 years ago

It's MIT licensed. Who cares about the rules on their repo when you can just fork it?

antaviana• 8 years ago

I guess that this very clear positioning from Microsoft means that there is still room for someone to come up with a XAML UI kit for .NET Core, and name it it CPF (Core Presentation Foundation) instead of WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation).

I understand that the open source WPF can be freely used as a reference from where to borrow a few things.

meuk• 8 years ago

If they gave people the illusion that they could make WPF cross-platform it would mean a lot of wasted time for both Microsoft and the contributors. So it's probably better to remove that illusion right away.

People can always fork and work on it, Microsoft is just sending the message that they won't do any work to incorporate any of it. Open-sourcing something is not an obligation to keep maintaining something.

Novashi• 8 years ago

I don't even know what the appeal of WinForms/WPF is these days. They don't really offer UI controls or a user experience that's better than well-done websites or electron apps.

ackidacki• 8 years ago

Fork it, what's the big deal? What would you do if someone rejects your PR anyway?

212• 8 years ago

WPF is dead. Microsoft is rewriting some of it's apps which used to be native in Electron - OneDrive, Visual Studio Installer,...

empyrical• 8 years ago

This is a pretty minor thing, but with the open sourcing of WinUI, I wonder if there's enough open-sourced that people could try and figure out how to support Dark Mode themes in non-UWP applications?

c-smile2• 8 years ago

You mean something like this: https://sciter.com/sciter-4-2-support-of-acrylic-theming/ ? (Note, that is not a UWP application)

As of automatic detection check my question on SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51334674/how-to-detect-w...

captainmuon• 8 years ago

The developers of EarTrumpet figured it out, see https://github.com/File-New-Project/EarTrumpet . Their solution is based on WPF and quite complex, however there are APIs to get the current mode, and all the modern UI colors.

I myself implemented the modern black menu style for a tray icon, so that the menu looks like the native tray icons. It's "just" a matter of owner drawing everything. Unfortunately, there is no secret "make my app dark" api in WinForms / WPF.

quickthrower22• 8 years ago

So does this mean WPF is alive? Is it sane to develop something new in WPF again?

DaiPlusPlus• 8 years ago

Depends if you subscribe to the idea that open-sourcing something is equivalent to putting it out to pasture.

MS’ problem is that Visual Studio is the only “real” software they produce that uses WPF - which also happens to be a flagship product. They need WPF to stay up-to-date but they can’t afford to invest their own FTE resources into it either when other products are more important as far as the C-levels are concerned.

I’m curious what this means for UWP XAML - as it has its origins in WPF. Can Microsoft use open contributed WPF code in UWP?

WorldMaker3• 8 years ago

OneNote was a flagship WPF software as well. OneNote has announced it's all in on UWP moving forward.

WinUI included in the announcement above is the UWP XAML controls and their "XAML Islands" wrappers, so Microsoft is directly taking UWP open source contributions now, too.

svick3• 8 years ago

Can Microsoft use open contributed WPF code in UWP?

They can, because the open source version of WPF is MIT-licensed.

markmark• 8 years ago

I've done a bunch of WPF in my time, but I struggle to see what I'd use it for now. For line-of-business type apps I'd do it on the web, and for anything that had to be desktop I'd need to be really, really sure that it didn't need to be cross platform.

quickthrower22• 8 years ago

Yes I like WPF's model, but it's not worth investing my mental energy into something that is self-obsoleting. Although you can make a career out of WPF, there is a lot of stuff that needs to be maintained, and trading companies around where I live seem to favour it. Probably because they use it to make internal software, they can dictate everyone uses Windows, and they need to build stuff fast but it also needs that native performance, flexibility and power you don't get with HTML.

alimbada• 8 years ago

No one wants desktop apps anymore. Everyone wants web apps. Except for legacy software WPF is dead unfortunately.

chris_wot• 8 years ago

I wonder how hard it would be to write a WPF to Gtk+ adaptor?

josteink• 8 years ago

WPF is really, really declarative, extensible and composable in a way I haven’t seen in any other desktop UI framework. And certainly not in Gtk.

I’m not going to say it can’t be done, but I will venture a guess that it’s going to be difficult and probably a lot of effort.

More effort than simply forking and porting to be X11/Wayland native? Not sure, but I wouldn’t dare to exclude the possibility.

tonyedgecombe2• 8 years ago

WPF is built on DirectX, you would probably want to port it to something like Skia.

WorldMaker3• 8 years ago

It's not exactly WPF, but there are folks that have worked on supporting Xamarin.Forms / XAML Standard on Gtk+: https://github.com/jsuarezruiz/forms-gtk-progress

c-smile2• 8 years ago

Seems like "to Open Source" is another form of saying "to sunset the project" ...

revskill5• 8 years ago

It's wrong in general case. Look at Zeit team with their OSS stuffs.

gaze• 8 years ago

If, as people here have suggested, that WPF is dead, I now wonder if desktop apps in general are being killed. I liked qt widgets quite a lot but I think that's mostly in maintenance mode. How do these companies expect the end user to interact with the next version of excel, autocad, solidworks, photoshop, etc?

mr_toad2• 8 years ago

Either using a browser, or if wild speculation is to be believed, using a MS fork of Electron (much like VS code).

yknx4• 8 years ago

I'm guessing this will be a blessing for Wine

revskill5• 8 years ago

Now i understand why MS bought Github. They need to collaborate on their own stuff in a private way by owning it.

MarvelousWololo• 8 years ago

Could vou elaborate on that please?

revskill5• 8 years ago

Do you think if MS didn't buy Github, do they dare to put their own stuffs on Github (even Enterprise, let go of OSS) ?

copperx5• 8 years ago

I don't get what you're trying to say.

cududa• 8 years ago

It’s a joke

laurent123456• 8 years ago

Why would a company the size of MS host their private repos on GitHub? And open source is open so they don't need to own GitHub for that.

revskill5• 8 years ago

Because their private repos are at MS size.

kelvin0• 8 years ago

Real question: why is WPF worth contributing to, if it can't be made cross-platform?

I've used WPF for about a day, and I never went back to using it. Not 'hating' on it, I just want to understand WPF and the incentives to open source it (I get it for .NET though).

gulbanana• 8 years ago

many people use windows, and therefore it is useful even if it is not cross-platform

gU9x3u8XmQNG• 8 years ago

I'm not sure if it's applicable, however;

I'd be interested in any association that can be made against previous versions of such libraries, and the newly released open source libraries. Are the 'releases' between the old closed source and that of the newly open source significantly different?

If so, and either way; I'd be interested in knowing what kind of changes were applied in direct action of the source being released. Was it just cleaning/linting of the code? Were there features that were otherwise inappropriate (security? quality?) that needed attention before release.

Things like alignment with child dependency license agreements, or overall quality (in code, testing, and deployment) are things I find extremely interesting. Was there some interesting 'inappropriate' language in the source from developers long gone. Could this have effectively been the opposite spectrum of what happened with event-stream https://github.com/dominictarr/event-stream/issues/116

I'm not explicitly saying it's any of my business. I can imagine a multitude of reasons that this history would never be provided. But... as above.. I can consider reasons, perhaps; it should..?

I don't mean to discourage release. I really appreciate it. Just some thoughts..

Edit: Minor readability

caioariede• 8 years ago

This commit is so funny: https://github.com/dotnet/winforms/commit/a534dd2ebff6792c31...

combatentropy• 8 years ago

When lawyers gain access to your source code.

userbinator• 8 years ago

Open-sourcing pieces of .NET code --- which is "open source enough" with a decompiler, after all... they didn't bother to obfuscate it and the ExtremelyVerboseButMostlyQuiteUsefullyDescriptive names still remain in the binaries --- seems almost a natural consequence of how the platform works.

But as a long-time Windows programmer, I would liked to see parts of Win32 open-sourced, because it's the far more interesting (and efficient) part of what makes Windows... Windows.

ryacko• 8 years ago

ReactOS and WINE both need people to examine the guts of Windows in clean room dissassembly.

Const-me2• 8 years ago

are ready for your contributions on GitHub: WPF

Currently, the linked WPF repository is almost empty. Very little code, and not a single .cpp file. WPF's native layer is huge, wpfgfx_v0400.dll, PresentationNative_v0400.dll, etc., lots of complexity between .NET and Direct3D 9.0c.

cjohansson• 8 years ago

I think Microsoft is aggressively trying to attract developers to use their products and this is yet another action in that direction. I think it’s a good move but I’m far from a conversion. My next OS will be a GNU/Linux

herpderperator2• 8 years ago

It's nice that they removed all the hacks: https://github.com/dotnet/winforms/pull/144/files#diff-2d4df...

It reminds me of when the Windows 2000 source code was leaked and it showed how vulgar a lot of the comments were.

breezejl• 8 years ago

Why is this important?

tonyedgecombe2• 8 years ago

Because lots of WinForms and WPF developers have been frustrated at the lack of activity on these frameworks. It holds out the promise that even if Microsoft can't be bothered to maintain them then perhaps the community will.

Personally I think it's too little and too late, Desktop development has had its day.

taoeaten87• 8 years ago

nice job!

pts_• 8 years ago

Sounds like news for Hololens dev since desktop dev is all but dead.

polskibus2• 8 years ago

I hope they open source WCF the same way.

aargh_aargh• 8 years ago

I hope this means Paint.NET can now be ported to Linux. Pinta just doesn't cut it as a substitute.

IIRC, while Paint.NET was under the MIT license at that time, porting to Mono was not possible because of the lack of WinForms. Not sure where I read that, maybe here: http://www.osnews.com/story/22843/Introducing_Pinta_a_Gtk_Cl...

ygra2• 8 years ago

First of all, just being open-source doesn't make Windows Forms or WPF cross-platform and in fact, that's specifically not the goal or focus here.

Secondly, Paint.NET includes quite a bit of non-WinForms/WPF code by now, talking directly to DirectWrite and Direct2D in places and probably other things as well. It's very much a Windows-only application and porting it would require rewriting a lot of important core code of the application.

rogihee• 8 years ago

Well, let's hope they open source Silverlight next so I can finally upgrade to Visual Studio 2017 when maintaining my apps (that are still in daily use by happy customers).

Announcing Open Source of WPF, Windows Forms, and WinUI

Related Stories