My question - what happened to microsoft in this space?
The get up and go speed of the super old windows forms approach was fantastic.
Now I'm supposed to use - XAML? UWP? WPF? Do these have great windows form designer still?
I'm talking speed between download and go with an GUI, a button, a text box (maybe data bound) etc.
This will age me, but for all the decades of "improvements" this tooling has, every time I've tried to do the little widget apps thing I used to be able to do trivially I end up wondering in the woods.
I'm pretty excited to see where the new .NET MAUI [1] goes. It's still in development, but it seems like it could be a great contender for fully cross-platform native UIs.
Paired with F# the proposed Elm-like model-view-update style would be the dream.
You can do the "WinForms approach" with WPF/XAML still, but once you got the ideas and concepts behind MVVN, observables, bindings, converters, collection controls and so on, there is absolutely no turning back and you start to miss that stuff on WinForms.
The get up and go speed of the super old windows forms approach was fantastic.
Now I'm supposed to use - XAML? UWP? WPF? Do these have great windows form designer still?
I'm talking speed between download and go with an GUI, a button, a text box (maybe data bound) etc.
This will age me, but for all the decades of "improvements" this tooling has, every time I've tried to do the little widget apps thing I used to be able to do trivially I end up wondering in the woods.