Microsoft Launches Visual Studio 2019 Preview 1 For Windows and Mac; Open-Sources WPF, Forms and WinUI (venturebeat.com) 72
An anonymous reader writes: At its Microsoft Connect(); 2018 virtual event today, Microsoft announced the initial public preview of Visual Studio 2019 -- you can download it now for Windows and Mac. Separately, .NET Core 2.2 has hit general availability and .NET Core 3.0 Preview 1 is also available today.
At the event today, Microsoft also made some open-source announcements, as is now common at the company's developer shindigs. Microsoft open-sourced three popular Windows UX frameworks on GitHub: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Forms, and Windows UI XAML Library (WinUI). Additionally, Microsoft announced the expansion of the .NET Foundation's membership model.
At the event today, Microsoft also made some open-source announcements, as is now common at the company's developer shindigs. Microsoft open-sourced three popular Windows UX frameworks on GitHub: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Forms, and Windows UI XAML Library (WinUI). Additionally, Microsoft announced the expansion of the .NET Foundation's membership model.
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The market of people who use windows does not, apparently, include the market of people who might potentially develop for Windows and send the first market application software.
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Re: Let's party like it's 1999! (Score:2)
It was parodying the attitude to Microsoft around here fuckwit
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And you probably don't know what the word telemetry means.
Telemetry is what precedes a telemefail.
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There is no Telemetry. There is only Telemedo.
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Mixed feelings (Score:5, Interesting)
WPF is actually great, probably the best GUI framework I've come across so far. I'd love to see cross platform support - being able to create say a .NET app with WPF UI that can run under Windows and Mono would be fantastic.
On the other hand can we please slow down with the Visual Studio updates. Do we really need a new version every two years?
Re:Mixed feelings (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand can we please slow down with the Visual Studio updates. Do we really need a new version every two years?
Pro-tip .. you don't have to upgrade to a new version of VS when it comes out, unless .. gasp .. you want to use the new features or fixes
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Problem is everyone else does and then you have trouble opening their projects... And they do the usual thing of abandoning the old one so if you want bug fixes you better upgrade.
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Problem is everyone else does and then you have trouble opening their projects...
These days sensible projects use systems like CMake so that you only need to upgrade your compiler if the project has a requirement for it. Granted not every project does but it's a more sane solution to the update issue.
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Of course you could use the GUI to stage some changes to the project file, but before checking it in, you should remove all the VS specific cruft and slim it down to pure
On the other hand, if you're still programming in C and C++ (I write Linux kernel modules in VS) you're screwed. I th
We're 4 years back on VS versions since 2012 (Score:1)
We've upgraded to the next version of Visual Studio when the version after that has been out for a few months.
We get the benefits of the latest VS by:
- Build a VM with the latest VS and static analysis tools
- Put our source code on the VM
- Build with VS, fix compile errors
- Run the full static analysis tool suite, fix most things found
- Save source code
- Put source code on out existting dev environment, excluding project files, solution files, etc.
- Build source with the version of VS we use today (not the
Re: Mixed feelings (Score:2)
They better. Xcode is so far behind VS it is amazing
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#1 Microsoft has had no direction and avoided any statement of direction on WPF / desktop UI for the last 8 years. MS wanted everyone to build store apps which didn't fly for corporations
#2 Microsoft in a friendly has packed a suitcase and is heading to the door to leave WPF / Winforms / WinUI with sending back to the GitHub repository a 'thinking of you card' every Christmas and Easter.
#3 Microsoft is remaking itself into a company which sells an Office suite, Windows server operating systems, Windows des
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2) Winforms had to go. It was a thin and almost useless replacement for Visual Basic 6. You would never consider writing a new applicatio
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I love all the updates to Visual Studio. With VS2017 I reported problems with CMake and all have been fixed in updates. The software I work on is now much simpler to build on Windows than it was before. Almost all the issues I reported where new feature requests.
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No, JavaFX crushes WPF.
Notes and caveats (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of people around here don't keep up with Microsoft technology, so here's a few notes and caveats:
1. The Windows and Mac versions of Visual Studio 2019 are completely separate products built from different code bases. They share compilers and .NET Core stuff, and a lot of work is going into making the editors feel the same. But you can't actually use Visual Studio for Mac to work on classic Win32 / .NET Framework applications.
2. Windows Forms and WPF are also Windows-only technology, and that isn't changing even though they'll work with .NET Core 3. There are way too many hooks and dependencies on Windows-specific technology (e.g. DirectX, text rendering, themes, handles) for these to be made into cross-platform applications without major rearchitecting work. In other words, don't wait up for them to produce a competitor to Qt....
3. The source code for Windows Forms and WPF have actually been available as "reference source" for more than a decade, so there are no real surprises to be discovered here.
4. All three libraries are being hosted on Github and are licensed under MIT. These aren't mirrors -- the teams at Microsoft will actually be doing their everyday work in the open on Github. Unfortunately, the full commit history didn't come along for the ride.
5. One of the nice little improvements here is the ability to package your own version of Windows Forms with your app, instead of relying on whatever is installed with the system. .NET Core doesn't (currently) support static linking so it'll still have to exist as a DLL file beside the EXE.
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5. One of the nice little improvements here is the ability to package your own version of Windows Forms with your app, instead of relying on whatever is installed with the system. .NET Core doesn't (currently) support static linking so it'll still have to exist as a DLL file beside the EXE.
I'm curious about why you would want to do this. Windows Forms has been around for such a long time I would have thought that the technology would be considered a stable standard by now. Or is the intention to package it up for non-windows platforms?
1. The Windows and Mac versions of Visual Studio 2019 are completely separate products built from different code bases. They share compilers and .NET Core stuff, and a lot of work is going into making the editors feel the same. But you can't actually use Visual Studio for Mac to work on classic Win32 / .NET Framework applications.
Doe this mean that I can now build an C#/Xamarin iOS/Android/MS app on OS X using VS for OS X, instead of writing in Windows and still requiring an OS X box for submission?
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I'm really hoping to see Mac support for UWP some day.
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"M$ going bankrupt and ceasing to exist and taking all their crap software with it"
Going bankrupt?
MS continues to transition away from its legacy products that are basically purchased and installed on clients' computers. They are moving towards cloud-based products and services such as its Azure platform and Office 365. They have become the biggest contributor of open source for the past two years. And they are still generating handsome profits.
They are also merging their proprietary products with Open Sou
Re: Notes and caveats (Score:2)
They are bigger than Apple again
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It doesn't matter: I will never accept M$ into the open source party.
Thankfully that's not your decision to make.
For decades M$ has attempted to kill off open source in all forms. And now that open source is where the cool kids are and all the progress and excitement is _now_ M$ wants to be all chummy.
You mean decades ago, when it was run and staffed by different people they tried to obsolete some open source projects.
Remember "embrace, extend, extinguish"? I sure do.
And do you remember how that panned out? Obviously not, look at Java today - TBH back when MS was trying to kill it it was garbage, today it is the dominant language on the most widely used personal computing operating system in the world: Android. Do you really not remember how shitty Java was? How much of a failure the WORA concept was?
But leaving the bad blood aside for a moment: why would we care about M$'s super-special non-standards-compliant non-posix crap that doesn't interoperate with anything or run nicely on anything besides Windows?
What's th
What window system under POSIX? (Score:2)
What's the POSIX-compliant, standards-compliant version of WPF, WinUI and Windows Forms?
That depends. Does Single UNIX Spec/POSIX even specify a window system layer? Last I checked, X Window System was a separate standard from POSIX.
If by "POSIX" you mean "POSIX plus X", all that takes is someone to write X backends for WPF and Windows Forms. I seem to remember the Mono project has done something like this.
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X is also pretty much on the way out too... so we'd have to make allowances for Wayland instead right? And holy baby jesus.... Wayland is 5 years from being borderline usable each day.
As for the POSIX compliant version of WPF, WinUI and Windows.Forms. I'm pretty sure he doesn't really know what POSIX means. Though it's really cute when he uses it wrong over and over again.
Mono.NET supports Windows.Forms and has a WPF like system and WinUI is certainly on it's way to
Re: Notes and caveats (Score:2)
Go and jack off in your terminal then
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2. Windows Forms and WPF are also Windows-only technology, and that isn't changing even though they'll work with .NET Core 3. There are way too many hooks and dependencies on Windows-specific technology (e.g. DirectX, text rendering, themes, handles) for these to be made into cross-platform applications without major rearchitecting work. In other words, don't wait up for them to produce a competitor to Qt....
Wouldn't WINE potentially have all the missing bits? With .NET Core and WinForms/WPF under the MIT license, WINE under LGPL it should be possible to build non-Windows versions of both OSS and proprietary apps on the Microsoft stack with very little hassle. Granted, the WINE reimplementations might have bugs or limitations but when you have an open source running on top it should be a lot easier to do a side-by-side comparison with Windows and confirm that at least for the way WinForms/WPF uses these librari
WPF?! (Score:1)
>WPF is now OpenSource
Looking forward to a Linux/OpenGL port.
Always wanted Moonlight to eventually become a WPF replacement...
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I wouldn't be surprised if it is a wrapper around a bunch of Win32 API calls.
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I liked using WinForms when I did C# programming. I also liked C# as a language. It was leagues ahead of the crap they had before. But still, like you said, it was not something easy to port to other platforms. I still do most of my programming in C or C++ however.
I have looked at Rust but the syntax seems to get more obnoxious with each release and to be honest, I do not feel like writing code for a language that is in a perpetual state of flux.
How is ISO/IEC 29500 "closed"? (Score:2)
Let us know when they finally trash their repugnant, solidly closed, proprietary MOOXML format
In what way is the file format family known as Office Open XML [wikipedia.org] "solidly closed" and "proprietary"? It's documented as ISO/IEC 29500. Is that international standard subject to patent encumbrances that block royalty-free distribution of implementations, like the MPEG codecs? Or to encumbrances that block open collaboration on works in progress, like the Java platform?
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Isn't that the spec that's 6,000+ pages of gems like, "blah blah blah: Display this the way Office 98 did; blah blah blah: Display it the way Office 2K did;..." because Microsoft could not or would not definitively describe the behaviour of their own products [fsfe.org]?
Compatibility elements in OOXML are defined now (Score:2)
Isn't that the spec that's 6,000+ pages of gems like, "blah blah blah: Display this the way Office 98 did; blah blah blah: Display it the way Office 2K did;..."
It was. It no longer is.
ISO/IEC 29500 is indeed several thousand pages, and older drafts indeed deferred to the opaque behavior of other proprietary software when describing compatibility elements:
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You need to study up some.
ISO standardization is not an openness seal of approval - it says absolutely nothing about the openness of the item being standardized. There's documentation on this from ISO if you bother to look.
Sure, "strict" MOOXML is slightly more open than non-strict . . . but nobody uses it, and Microsoft sets non-strict as the default format in its Office programs. Why?
MOOXML governance processes are closed.
MOOXML last I checked was protected by a revocable patent promise not worth the pa
Does this work with Python? (Score:2)
Does this work with Python?
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Yes, IronPython. That's the great thing about .NET, it's built around things like the CLR and CTS which means anything running on it can be used by any language running on it of which IronPython is perhaps one of the single biggest success stories.
NET core spies on users (Score:1)
NET core spies on people and is in violation of GDPR laws in EU. It collect personal information about your PC such is your MAC address.
There is a bug report where people attempted to persuade the devs (MS) to make it "opt in" so it is disabled by default. However, dev basically told them that they are not going to stop spying on people:
https://github.com/dotnet/cli/issues/3093
This is the main reason why we cannot use NET in our organization. It is really too bad as it could be rather useful.
On the other hand (Score:2)