No one in Windows development community cares about WinUI, other than those with sunken costs that bought into the WinRT/UWP dream and now are stuck with a dead technology.
Too many burned bridges since Windows 8 came out.
If anything, this is Microsoft confirmation that they are unwilling to fix all the broken issues, and hoping the community will somehow still care.
Very true. We just developed a brand new LOB desktop app and settled on sticking with WPF. WinUI has been dead for years imo.
On a side note, I still love WPF after working in it for 10 years. Maybe it's just familiarity, and it's a little verbose at times, but man it's a great framework when you know that you're doing.
We also settled on WPF for a new LOB Desktop application, this validates the decision. If you combine WPF with the CommunityToolkit MVVM, it’s a very nice framework to develop with.
DevExpress supported WinUI for a little while but decided to abandon support.
One of the biggest problems with WinUI compared to WPF is that DependencyProroperty is implemented as native code, so for .NET developers, there is a huge performance penalty getting or setting any property on control.
Honestly at this point who would seriously use any Microsoft UI framework? They've abandoned 100% of their previous UI frameworks unfinished when they get distracted by a new, shinier framework.
Why use a busted incomplete framework missing basic features when there's entire ecosystems of open source cross-platform frameworks being actively maintained and which actually have all the features you need?
Really this is just another UWP destined to be forgotten and scorned.
WPF uses DirectX 9, in any case it is good enough for many businesses use cases.
UWP never had feature parity with neither Forms nor WPF, so already it has a hard sell to businesses.
Microsoft marketing always cool about cool experiences and design, without the actual meat in features.
That is why there were API reboots between Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10.
Then comes along Project Reunion, which is supposed to properly unify Win32 and UWP execution models, instead a few months in, they do yet another reboot, that to this day is a shadow of UWP features, endless bugs, and a team that everyone thought was also part of the layoffs, has they were radio silence for months.
Forms is still my go-to for quick one-off and disposable programs. But maily because it's simple and I have a big library of controls and extensions I've built over years to make Forms more complete.
I've also tried WPF, but it's missing very basic controls that I just don't feel like recreating.
Too many burned bridges since Windows 8 came out.
If anything, this is Microsoft confirmation that they are unwilling to fix all the broken issues, and hoping the community will somehow still care.