ocdtrekkie 2018-12-04 16:53 UTC link

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.

epoch_100 2018-12-04 16:58 UTC link

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.

hprotagonist 2018-12-04 16:58 UTC link

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

kojoru 2018-12-04 17:21 UTC link

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

protomyth 2018-12-04 17:29 UTC link

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.

jefe_ 2018-12-04 17:33 UTC link

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

boramalper 2018-12-04 18:07 UTC link

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

hiccuphippo 2018-12-04 18:26 UTC link

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

gigatexal 2018-12-04 18:39 UTC link

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

mr_overalls 2018-12-04 18:59 UTC link

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".

quickthrower2 2018-12-04 19:49 UTC link

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

c-smile 2018-12-04 20:53 UTC link

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

gaze 2018-12-04 21:48 UTC link

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?

revskill 2018-12-04 22:44 UTC link

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

kelvin0 2018-12-04 23:19 UTC link

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).

gU9x3u8XmQNG 2018-12-05 01:47 UTC link

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 2018-12-05 01:56 UTC link

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

cjohansson 2018-12-05 04:49 UTC link

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

herpderperator 2018-12-05 05:26 UTC link

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.

aargh_aargh 2018-12-05 09:04 UTC link

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...

jack_pp 2018-12-04 16:59 UTC link

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.

merriemcgaw 2018-12-04 16:59 UTC link

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

merb 2018-12-04 17:01 UTC link

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

djsumdog 2018-12-04 17:03 UTC link

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.

ocdtrekkie 2018-12-04 17:08 UTC link

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.

miguelrochefort 2018-12-04 17:11 UTC link

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.

chrisseaton 2018-12-04 17:12 UTC link

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.

krylon 2018-12-04 17:40 UTC link

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. ;-)

garmaine 2018-12-04 17:44 UTC link

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

muterad_murilax 2018-12-04 17:46 UTC link

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...

qwerty456127 2018-12-04 17:57 UTC link

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.

kgwxd 2018-12-04 17:58 UTC link

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.

jammygit 2018-12-04 17:58 UTC link

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

anticensor 2018-12-04 18:20 UTC link

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

Kiro 2018-12-04 18:28 UTC link

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

badsectoracula 2018-12-04 18:31 UTC link

> 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/

nine_k 2018-12-04 18:45 UTC link

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.

ajross 2018-12-04 18:46 UTC link

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).

fesoliveira 2018-12-04 18:50 UTC link

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.

poizan42 2018-12-04 18:51 UTC link

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.

Someone1234 2018-12-04 19:10 UTC link

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).

lozenge 2018-12-04 19:10 UTC link

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?

azurezyq 2018-12-04 19:18 UTC link

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.

DaiPlusPlus 2018-12-04 19:57 UTC link

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?

markmark 2018-12-04 20:35 UTC link

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.

migueldeicaza 2018-12-04 21:57 UTC link

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.

MarvelousWololo 2018-12-04 22:54 UTC link

Could vou elaborate on that please?

wpdev_63 2018-12-04 22:59 UTC link

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

copperx 2018-12-04 23:25 UTC link

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

BonesJustice 2018-12-04 23:30 UTC link

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.

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