The Dotnet Doctor 14. 12. 2020 08: 07 Clock Holger Schwichtenberg – 2 Comments

Surprisingly, Microsoft is not simply offering the old Windows Forms in the new .NET world, but is actively working on the Further development. What does this mean for .NET developers?

Windows Forms is the original desktop interface library in .NET, which is included in. NET Framework 1.0 in the year 2020 and 2005 in .NET 2.0 experienced a big boost in extensions.

13 Years of standstill With the introduction in the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) in the year 2006 Windows Forms got sidelined and was, apart from minor improvements, especially in the area of ​​high-DPI support and accessibility (see development of .NET 4.5 to 4.8) no longer developed.

Windows Forms (just like WPF) was not included in .NET Core 1.0 to 2.2. For .NET Core 3.0 (released in September 2019) Microsoft then has WPF and Windows Forms in the new .NET world adopted (but not platform-neutral, only on Windows). Therefore, both GUI frameworks are also included in .NET 5.0 (and its future successors .NET 6.0, 7.0, etc.). A useful designer for Windows Forms in .NET Core / .NET 5.0 projects is also in Visual Studio 2019 v 16. 8 of November 2020 still in the preview stage. You may have to use the crutch to design the interfaces in a classic .NET framework project and to link the result to the new project.

New features since .NET Core 3.0 Surprisingly, Microsoft doesn’t just offer the old Windows Forms in the new .NET world , but is actively working on further development: In .NET Core 3.0 only a small improvement appeared that the high-DPI setting can not only be set via configuration file, but also in the program code via API. In .NET 5.0, however, several noteworthy improvements for Windows Forms are built directly:

new control element: TaskDialog (a much more flexible variant of a messagebox). The ListView control now offers a collapsible group. FileDialog can have several states in an application through ClientGuid. significant performance improvements when rendering some controls. Improvements for UI automation. It should be mentioned that the improvements to the controls did not come from Microsoft developers themselves, but were pull requests from the user community that Microsoft included in the official release.

It is also important not to hide the fact that some smaller features are missing in the .NET Core and .NET 5 implementation of Windows Forms and in November 2019 was another big setback when Microsoft expanded some older Windows Forms controls in .NET Core 3.1 that were included in .NET Core 3.0.

What does Microsoft want to tell us? For a lot en years there have been discussions in the .NET user community on the subject of Windows Forms versus WPF. Some software providers have switched their interfaces to the graphically more powerful WPF (at MAXIMAGO we have been creating .NET applications exclusively with WPF for years, since our requirements for the user experience with Windows Forms are much more complex to implement), but other software providers are doing this supposedly simpler Windows Forms remained – and there are quite a few companies. Third-party vendors have been delivering new controls for Windows Forms for years, thereby keeping the old GUI framework alive. Microsoft has also recognized the continuing demand for Windows Forms and is therefore offering this group of customers incentives to switch to the modern .NET 5.0 world.

For WPF, .NET Core 3.0 / 3.1 and .NET 5.0 no significant improvements except for a few bug fixes. Does that mean Microsoft is recommending that developers work with Windows Forms again? No certainly not. I see it this way: Windows Forms has a lot of catching up to do because it is a very old architecture and lay idle for many years.

“State of the art” in the GUI frameworks before WinUI3 from the Microsoft perspective (Image: Microsoft) Future WinUI3? From Microsoft’s point of view, the GUI framework of the future is neither Windows Forms nor WPF, but the Windows UI Library 3 (WinUI3). The GUI library WinUI 3.0 is the successor to the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) with WinUI2, which is available in Windows 10 introduced a new name for the “Modern Apps”. While UWP is based solely on the WinRT API and therefore cannot use all functions of the operating system and all local resources, a WinUI-3-based application can optionally use WinRT and / or Win 32 use. This means that you have all the options of the Windows operating system at your disposal.

Whether WinUI3 will be better accepted by customers than UWP will be seen when WinUI3 appears (originally announced for 2020, now for 2021). Because one thing is already clear today: Switching from WPF to WinUI3 means some effort – but it is significantly less than the effort to switch from Windows Forms to WPF or WinUI3, because WinUI3 also uses XAML as the GUI description language like WPF, but it does there are some differences.