Visual Studio 2026 still ships the form designer Alan Cooper drew in 1987
29 points
3 hours ago
| 3 comments
| evilgeniuslabs.ca
| HN
n8cpdx
1 hour ago
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Very clearly AI written, but more seriously, I think the take is off base.

Winforms is still popular enough, but I think it did get seriously displaced by WPF. And WPF is modern enough to handle things like dark mode and High DPI relatively well. Visual Studio and other professional software in its class tends to use it (if using windows-native tech at all).

Maybe smaller business apps are still using winforms, but the XAML designer is also good so even if you want to just drag and drop controls WPF is the better choice IMO.

> Worse at the thing it most needed to be good at, which was surviving Microsoft's own framework churn. WPF's stack has no equivalent of Win32's thirty-year compatibility guarantee, because no such guarantee was ever offered. WinForms inherited Win32's compatibility guarantee for free.

I don’t get this. Ancient WPF software is just as compatible as it ever was and it’s getting on to 20 years old.

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PacificSpecific
1 hour ago
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Yeah I still write WPF Software today and it's as stable as it's ever been. Kind of nice to have a UI framework frozen in time tbh.

Maui on the other hand.. I don't get why it exists. It's like the worst of both worlds between desktop and mobile. My understanding is it's rebranded Xamarin which would explain some stuff...

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no-name-here
2 hours ago
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- No screenshot of said form designer?

- Page is not responsive and requires zooming out or scrolling horizontally to view full text width on mobile

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girvo
26 minutes ago
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Not to mention it being very obviously written by AI.
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teruakohatu
1 hour ago
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There is oddly a configuration panel on the web page that lets you turn off many effects and make it readable.
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esperent
1 hour ago
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> make it readable

It does not

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oblio
1 hour ago
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> Page is not responsive

Just like WinForms :-p

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esperent
1 hour ago
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I'm all for funky site designs but I need to be able to actually read it. Can't zoom text on mobile - when I zoom, the whole page zooms so by the time I can read the text comfortably I can only see half a line.
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