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So when purchasing Visual Studio subscription in order to write software for windows, you expect nothing to work out of the box? I'd love to see you tackle a WPF monolith within a regulated environment where no 3rd party libs are allowed.

It's 2021, we're expected to deliver amazing, feature rich software in very little time, without buying 3rd party libraries.

Meanwhile, there's Microsoft, using the funds from our subscriptions and building stuff like Xamarin Forms and abandoning it half-way through. I wish they'd spend less time fooling around, and more time improving the tools that have become bread and butter.

2 comments

> stuff like Xamarin Forms and abandoning it half-way through

Eh? I've worked on projects using Xamarin Forms, and they turned out just fine.

Yes, it would be nice if there were a few more controls in the main Xamarin Forms library, but I don't see a problem with the community picking up some of the slack (which they have).

"I've worked on projects using Xamarin Forms, and they turned out just fine."

Same here, but it is my experience with Xamarin that has led me to conclude that it's the wrong choice almost 100% of the time. Sure, it can be made to work but at the end of the day you're coercing C# to do something it was not designed to do. For mobile I am convinced that PWA/hybrid mobile is the correct choice 95% of the time with the remaining 5% being platform native apps written in Android Studio with Kotline or Java (or Xcode with Swift or Obj-C). Anything else is just an exercise in sticking non-round pegs into a round hole.

> at the end of the day you're coercing C# to do something it was not designed to do

Hmm, not sure I can agree with this statement, as I don't see what would make C# itself unsuitable here.

> For mobile I am convinced that PWA/hybrid mobile is the correct choice 95% of the time

But this I fully agree with :)

While the Xamarin Forms projects I've worked on turned out well, I feel like the whole experience of developing, experimenting, building, debugging and testing would all have been so much easier with a PWA. A PWA would also make it much easier to build what your UI designer really wants, instead of having to compromise all the time with what is readily available - having CSS at your fingertips makes all the difference.

> So when purchasing Visual Studio subscription in order to write software for windows, you expect nothing to work out of the box?

If you mean I expect to compose my own complex controls out of less complex building blocks, then yes that's what I want and expect.

> Meanwhile, there's Microsoft, using the funds from our subscriptions and building stuff like Xamarin Forms and abandoning it half-way through

I agree WPF and others have been backbenched for 10 years. Microsoft panicked and needed a strategy for cloud and mobile, while they weren't exactly being threatened on desktop. So from a business perspective it made perfect sense: leave desktop for 10 years. Now they are slowly coming back to it with .NET 5 which is nice, but it wasn't very pleasant to be a Windows desktop dev between 2010 and 2020.