Roadmap for WPF .NET 11

[h3xds1nz]

@dotnet/wpf-developers could you possibly share with the community the likely roadmap for the next version of .NET?

Most repos have outlined the targets for upcoming .NET version. I've understood the team is smaller than ever and soon enough you're all gonna be replaced by (Co)pilot but until then, it would be good to know if I should just close my PRs or not.

Thanks!

[franchyd]

There hasn’t been a non-bot commit in over 4 months. I imagine Microsoft has deprioritized WPF and there is no one assigned to work on it right now.

[kronic]

It's worth waiting a couple of years and they will merge 1 or 2 pr.

[rampaa]

I believe the community, particularly the contributors, deserves a transparent answer on this matter instead of this ongoing radio silence. @dipeshmsft, @pchaurasia14, @singhashish-wpf, @Kuldeep-MS, @himgoyalmicro

[h3xds1nz]

The fact is, over half the people you've tagged are no longer on the github team as of recent 2-4 months, some at Microsoft even.

Hence why I've mentioned that the team got smaller than ever. You may also see that #10983 didn't have any outcome.

[rampaa]

I apologize to anyone who is no longer affiliated with Microsoft or WPF for tagging them unnecessarily. Because GitHub does not highlight or underscore the @dotnet/wpf-developers tag, I wasn’t sure if current WPF developers were receiving notifications properly, so I tagged them individually. I tried to only tag individuals whose profiles still showed a Microsoft/WPF affiliation or who had recently interacted with the WPF repository, but I guess I was still off the mark.

[franchyd]

@harshit7962 @pranav-gupta-msft Do you know anything about the state of WPF development?

[lindexi]

I sent the internal MVP email three days ago, but I haven't received any reply yet.

[MikeKatsoulakis]

I may be wrong but the Senior EM of WPF, just joined AWS.
I guess we won't see much progress until someone fills that position ?!

[deanchalk]

The person you are referring to is Pankaj Chaurasia who has now moved to AWS. The new head of the WPF team is Pranav Gupta @pranav-gupta-msft

[ScarletKuro]

It’s always been disappointing that WPF doesn’t get as much attention as WinForms. WinForms keeps getting interesting updates, working on trimming support, performance, planning something like IHostBuilder for WinForms. Meanwhile, WPF doesn’t have a stable team from MSFT supporting it.
Right now, there isn’t much reason to expect major changes for WPF, except if:

1. Once the WinForms team finishes their improvements, they might start working on WPF? (doubt).
2. MSFT realizes that WPF is still one of the best ways to build desktop applications and fills the team positions.
3. MSFT gives the community merge access to the repo (unlikely).

There’s a lot of talent in the community, and if the repo received more love, I wouldn’t be surprised to see optimizations, a rewrite of DirectWriteForwarder in C#, or even Vulkan support. The potential is huge, but for now, it is what it is.

[Symbai]

WinForms still benefits from long-standing maintainers who are familiar with the codebase. WPF, on the other hand, has seen its maintainers replaced multiple times. New maintainers neither have sufficient time nor the incentive to deeply understand the existing code. As a result, they often cannot judge whether a change is beneficial or harmful and can only react when the build fails. This effectively leads to almost no meaningful PR reviews, and existing problems remain unaddressed.

Microsoft should either replace the current maintainers with people who are genuinely interested in WPF, or grant trusted community members the ability to review and approve PRs. The current approach is ineffective. After all these years since WPF was open-sourced, I’ve reached the point where I no longer care. I moved to Avalonia. It is not without flaws, but it supports AOT, follows a WPF-like model, and most importantly is actively evolving. With the current team, WPF is effectively dead. It’s frustrating to see capable contributors trying to help without being empowered. Letting the community take over would have been a far better outcome than the current state of the WPF team.

What frustrates me most is the sheer stagnation: people are standing by, watching, while paid maintainers do almost nothing and the project continues to decay year after year. That said, I wish you all a happy new year.

[AndreyPolovodov]

I'm sooooo agree with every point

[deanchalk]

I've been a WPF developer full time since it was in beta around 2005. I'm deeply disappointed that Microsoft have effectively abandoned this wonderful desktop software development platform, that has been used to build a vast number of incredible desktop applications. I would happily spend the rest of my career as part of an open-source community of WPF maintainers keeping this great technology alive and useful. All MS have to do is entrust it to the people who genuinely care.

[DisillusionedDeveloper]

I started with .NET with v1.1, embracing Windows Forms as GUI Framework which was easy to grasp with a little knowledge of the rather closely underlying Win32-API. Along came WPF which I - probably like many fellow devs - at first wrongfully approached with my WinForms mentality: Connecting my code behind by utilizing event handlers (well, it worked :) ).

Then I started to dig deeper, familiarizing myself with bindings, commands, the dependency property system, the 'lookless controls' paradigm and all the other good stuff ... and I was blown away! This was so far ahead, thought through and bustling with good concepts (at times a bit overengineered maybe) that I made it my GUI framework of choice in the coming years.

Then came the Silverlight aka 'WPF anywhere' tragedy, closely tied to the Windows Phone fiasco, Microsoft's infamous 'Our focus has shifted' line, and - along with Microsoft's absurd 'Everything is full screen and Javascript now' strategy (anyone remember WinJS?) - WPF sadly also started its demise. Being pushed to the side over and over again by the next shiny tech buzz nonsense, euphemistically (and rather cynically) referred to as allegedly being feature complete and stable thus with no need for intensive development. There was more action/passion in complementary projects like Prism (only after being handed to the community) and MahApps than in WPF itself.

What could have become of WPF if Microsoft at least once had stuck and committed to one of its GUI Frameworks and had improved/evolved it continuously instead of laying it to rest on the rotting 'maintenance mode' death bed? It's such a wasted potential, and it's almost comically ironic that the successful Avalonia project is marketing itself as 'the spiritual successor to WPF', almost as if these guys 'miraculously' knew that WPF was quite popular and many .NET devs would love to see it thrive.

[wstaelens]

having async bindings similar to blazor :get and :set where the set would be an async method would be so great.