My daily work is building LOB applications for enterprises and creating Azure-based backends. Since 2006 I’ve used mostly WPF for building powerful and data-rich desktop applications. Last year I’ve published a 9 hours course at Pluralsight that is called Building an enterprise application with WPF, MVVM and Entity Framework Code First. It starts from File->New Project in Visual Studio and ends with a full-blown application.

Reasons why customers today use WPF instead of UWP for new projects

As you might know, the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) is the newer beast. It’s an evolution of the Windows Store Apps that were introduced with Windows 8. UWP has some really great features like x:Bind and more. But in the past customers and I have chosen WPF over UWP for enterprise apps, mainly because of these reasons:

1. WPF supports input validation with INotifyDataErrorInfo and Data Annotations
2. WPF comes with built-in Controls like DataGrid and Menu that are/were missing in UWP
3. WPF’s UI density is made for desktop. UWP elements are huge by default. I noticed that when I built the Visual Studio Shell with UWP
4. Deployment with WPF and ClickOnce is so simple.
5. Customers are using Windows 7, UWP runs only on Windows 10

But this week things changed a bit, because

Microsoft really ROCKED UWP! at BUILD

While the last point with Windows 7 mentioned in the list above will always be an argument for WPF – UWP won’t come to Windows 7 – Microsoft works on the others. And this week at Microsoft’s Build conference, Daniel Jacobson and Ryan Demopoulos really rocked it.

From my 10+ years WPF Line-of-Business (LOB) application building experience, I can tell you that Daniel and Ryan address every – really EVERY!!! important point in their session for building a LOB app with UWP

Watch their session above, it’s a must if you want to build enterprise desktop applications for Windows. It starts from Windows Template Studio – a fantastic Visual Studio Extension for UWP by Clint Rutkas and the community – and goes across UI Density, Input Validation, DataGrid, Menu to Deployment and more. That means this session addresses all the WPF reasons from my list above – except Windows 7 of course.

You find the sample app used in the video here on GitHub.

Beside all these great news, check also out the blog post on .NET Core 3.0. Another great news about WPF, WinForms and UWP, which will all run on .NET Core 3.0, which is amazing!

Let me just quote the end of that .NET Core 3.0 blog post:

“It is an exciting time to be a .NET developer”

Thanks,
Thomas