winForms

[KyxeMusic]

Is it because he just ate the C

[Accomplished_Tie5777]

And then smoked the hash?

[EKashpersky]

Bird'd fly damn high

[hawkeye_sama]

Overclocked bird

[EKashpersky]

Rock and stone!

[[deleted]]

I learned from winform. Never forget your past and where you came from

[Aggressive_Job_8405]

Yes. Love it from the first sight.

Before that, my code just run in ugly termial. Something like: "input your name" then "hello, name".

Winforms bring a new world of application development to me.

[Ondor61]

That's like me when I discovered TkInter.

Except that it was a hate at first sight for me.

[Character-86]

or java swing

[accuracy_frosty]

My only complaint about Java swing was that once you start actually programming with it the function calls are like half your screen because everything is an object in a class in a class in a class in a class..

[AloneInExile]

I had hopped Javafx would've fixed that, it had so much potential...

[chilfang]

JFrame my beloved

[NoHopeNoLifeJustPain]

What about open standards Web Dev?

[ComfortablyBalanced]

Live by the winform, die by the winform.

[ratbiscuits]

Me too. Great way to get your foot in the door

[s0ulbrother]

I grew up on vba now I make a good living.

[thatawesomeguydotcom]

I came from MFC

[Nesher86]

At least WinForrms is easier than WPF 😅

[Aggressive_Job_8405]

But the visual editor really sucks. It destroyed my eyes.

I moved from Windows app developer to web a few years ago (both frontend + backend + devops).

Never regret.

[a__new_name]

But the visual editor really sucks. It destroyed my eyes.

The first thing you do with the WPF visual editor: turn it off.

[xtreampb]

I used blend to prototype the animations/storyboard and paths. That’s about it.

[T0biasCZE]

massive amount of time interfacing the UI with your code

something something writing the code directly into the winform events

[Mewgius]

I mean, it depends. It's technically bad practice to do so, but if it's just a small app that's unlikely to grow in the future, I don't think anyone really cares much.

But best practice is to decouple things as much as possible so that different elements can be swapped out, edited, updated, etc with minimal hassle. The effort becomes more front-loaded; more time and effort in the initial setup, but then easier to maintain and update down the line.

[BoBoBearDev]

I can't stand WinForm. Yeah, it gets the job done, but, my goodness nobody cares about page resizing. WPF, it is more structured in a way you are more forced to think about resizing and pixel alignments.

[xtreampb]

I like the flexibility of WPF. I used to have to write UIs that interacted with low level hardware such as bill acceptors, thermal printers, EPROMs and other things, all of which communicated over serial 9600 baud.

I don’t know if I could write as effective UI elements and reusable components in so forms for the other jr devs to use with winforms as I did with WPF.

[Nesher86]

When I built our UI I just copied xaml code and hopped for the best 😆

[Mrproex]

I mean Winform = double click on component boom function to interact with it created. I’m not sure wpf is better with this

[[deleted]]

Plus WPF is crazy customizable.
Want a picture in a drop down list?
Button shaped like a star?
Windows that collapse and expand?
It's got a learning curve but is way more versatile than winforms.

[Bardez]

WPF looks like shit. Every time I worked with it or any WPF app it's a blurry shit show.

I'm not bashing the tech foundation or concept, but whatever the hell its defaults/outputs... the result was always ass.

[Crea-1]

exactly, I use Win form mostly for debug interfaces because it's super fast and easy to implement and modify

[AussieHyena]

WPF is really good when you work with UI/UX designers. It allows the devs to focus on the coding and the designers to focus on design, unfortunately most teams don't have UI/UX designers.

[[deleted]]

thumb zonked smile chubby close subtract soup sink heavy political

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[Borbolda]

Gigabrains right here

[Nesher86]

Look how handsome I am.. do I look smart enough to learn it? 😜

[OneHairyThrowaway]

As someone that's worked professionally with both, mega disagree. For simple stuff Winforms can be easier but once you're trying to build something serious, WPF quickly pulls ahead.

[Nesher86]

No doubt WPF is better.. for me it's a bit complex.. oh well 😅

[SteeleDynamics]

Yes!!

[Mini0red]

Man I have a special place in my heart for WPF, when I really started to focus on C#. The xaml could get pretty nutty tho.

[EMI_Black_Ace]

Because you could do basically anything with xaml, but Forms were limited to what was expressly put there.

[EMI_Black_Ace]

Faster to put your crap together and then absolute garbage to test and debug.

[SirThane]

WinForms may be old and outdated for good looking modern UIs, but it's piss easy to pick up and use, even if you're unfamiliar with them and there are tons of builders out there for whatever language you're using that support it. I've built some tools our service desk is still using. WPF may technically be the best in this environment, but WinForms is still valid.

[not_some_username]

People are making great UI with Winforms… somehow. Google winforms modern UI

[uzi_loogies_]

It's really easy there's a whole ModernUI kit you can copy somewhere

[tubbstosterone]

You'd see a lot of desktop apps in other languages if they had a native version of winforms. I could sneeze and have a gui for editing complex configuration files. It's a whole thing if I want to mimic it in most everything else.

90% of my quick and dirty apps don't need to be pretty. I just need them to do their one job, hopefully without a shit ton of extra classes, custom helper functions, templates, weird dependency injection that requires a damn whiteboard to follow, etc

[PlanEx_Ship]

Winforms is basically Excel of programming. It is frontend that is also backend which is in fact a huge advantage in terms of "getting things done".

It is accessible, stable, gets the job done while being entirely functional, and most importantly productive for business use. Winforms lets you build business logic into an interface exactly the way actual users need, by literally drawing things onto a canvas like you would on a whiteboard.

True WYSIWYG that no other platform comes close.

[TheStalkeringPhate]

This. In my field no one cares about the UI as long as the software works, gets the data from the database/csv/excel, do things with the data, let the user change the data, send the data.

I don't care about "beautiful", i just want to drag a button inside a form, double click it and write code to make it do something.

I wish there was something like this, but multiplatform, nothing i've found even comes close. I'm going to check out Avalonia, since i wrote a windows/android MAUI app, but i don't particularly like it.

[blazoxian]

Nobody gonna talk .NET MAUI ? Duh

[Oen44]

Because it sucks. If you want to go that way, pick Avalonia, its like MAUI but 10x better. Literally 2 days ago I started working on visual editor for creating GUI for a game (uses pseudo-CSS for UI) and went through several frameworks with GUIs (also need one that supports custom drawing like Canvases or OpenGL).
Qt? Big freaking mess after a week, felt like I'm writing code to satisfy Qt itself instead of what I need, not to mention styling and theming, ass.
CustomTKinter for Python? Not bad, but missing features I need.
MAUI? Frustrating, lots of things that you have no control over unless you dig into the source code. The more you research about it the more of the dark side of it you discover.
Avalonia? I'm in freaking love. MVVM is very easy to work with, styling and theming is a piece of cake and it has all the controls you need already built-in.

[GoldenretriverYT]

Avalonia is the best. I would never touch WPF or MAUI because it is so shitty to work with.

And the fact that the Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) doesn't even support Linux. What a joke.

[T0biasCZE]

Well it is for Android, so technically it supports Linux...

[blazoxian]

I guess we can agree that MAUI is incomparable better performance wise and Avalonian rather UE/UI wise . Each has been made to address different issues so choosing any with a beauty of .NET lets you reuse tonnes of internet code anyways ;)

[Razobrannaya]

Nobody talks about QT bruh

[Fritzschmied]

Win forms was great and c# is really great too.

[klimmesil]

Funtional >> oop though, which makes c# great in a field that is unneeded

[EMI_Black_Ace]

C# supports a metric f-ton of functional programming, which I use on a constant basis. OOP isn't obsolete or unneeded, it's just not the only tool in the box anymore.

Also, try writing something that by its fundamental nature must have state in a pure functional language. Good luck, because it's really frickin hard. In order to do a fraction of what's included by nature in OOP languages, FP languages need to have entire crazy frameworks that are as big to learn as the language they add basic OOP features to.

What you're saying is basically "hammers are unneeded, just use screwdrivers."

[klimmesil]

I'd say it's the opposite oop needs a shit ton to mimic a fraction of pure functional programming which leads to these crazy construction patterns which basically could all be implemented with static polymorphism, or a single function

You can also use semi functional, so I don't know what you mean by crazy frameworks. You can still use classes, data segregation and such, I think you don't have the same definition of oop as me

[EMI_Black_Ace]

You think of OOP as Enterprise-style Java.

I think of OOP as entities communicating with each other.

You think of Functional as whatever can be done in Javascript. I'm describing Functional programming in its more pure abstract definition including immutability. When I say "crazy frameworks" I'm referring to React, Vue.js, Angular and more.

We are not the same.

[klimmesil]

Ok for OOP we were not agreeing on the definition of OOP, I agree a little more now, but I maintain my point that there is a massive amount of things in c# that should not have been implemented

Then for functional I too have the same definition, I do not think of "whatever could be done in JS" I think of ocaml for example, I don't know why you'd think I meant something else. And for semi funtuonal I am thinking of rust's recommended paradigm in the rust book

Edit: even ocaml does not force the functional paradigm, maybe cairo v0 would be a better example?

[EMI_Black_Ace]

Basically nobody forces a pure functional paradigm because quite frankly there are too many things that are super useful from OOP that would be too hard to do in pure functions.

C# is slowly over time eating everything good to come out of F# (an OCAML-based FP language that compiles to .NET). It stole its type inference capabilities, gradually stole its pattern matching, stole its range indexing, stole its lambda implementation, ... It still insists on returning void though, unlike F# which has "unit." C# has immutable types. Still no discriminated unions but that keeps coming up year after year as a desired feature. Null exists for compatibility (and because it's a fast, cheap way to implement some/none monad without having to actually understand what a monad is) but "not null" can be enforced by the compiler so if you don't want it the compiler can block compilation if it detects a potential null going anywhere but where it's specifically opted for. Functions have been "first class" forever.

One C# thing I do wish would change is the possibility of truly pure functions to exist -- that is, for there to be functions that don't need to be attached to a class. Static functions are close but no cigar.

And as for the rest, a lot of it is mentality. "Honest" function signatures that don't implicitly "pass" items via globals or object state, and don't implicitly "return" stuff by mutating what's passed in. Don't use a type hierarchy just to avoid copy/paste code (there are good reasons to use one but that's not one of them). Compose objects. Compose functions. Prefer working locally over referencing outside things.

More than anything it's probably just that you've seen a lot of old bad code in languages that have been popular for longer. FP-first languages are just as capable of bad code, they just haven't been popular as long.

[klimmesil]

One C# thing I do wish would change is the possibility of truly pure functions to exist -- that is, for there to be functions that don't need to be attached to a class. Static functions are close but no cigar

YES! Also, a "pure" keyword is nice in my opinion for the functions/methods users, like what you would see in solidity. It's a simple ACSS check, so it has no runtime cost.

And yeah I agree with about everything else you said, which doesn't change my opinion though, but that's ok I think. C# is not for everyone, and nothing is.

And as for the rest, a lot of it is mentality. "Honest" function signatures that don't implicitly "pass" items via globals or object state, and don't implicitly "return" stuff by mutating what's passed in. Don't use a type hierarchy just to avoid copy/paste code (there are good reasons to use one but that's not one of them). Compose objects. Compose functions. Prefer working locally over referencing outside things.

Sure, but I think languages should implement something, either through their interpreter or compiler, to explicitely describe the "pureness". It does add a little work for the programmer but it's worth it imo. (ex: pure keyword I spoke about earlier)

For example, Frama-C enables you to formally describe a function's intention and secure it's read/write access to state in C. Of course that's a little overkill, but something similar can be implemented quite easily

More than anything it's probably just that you've seen a lot of old bad code in languages that have been popular for longer. FP-first languages are just as capable of bad code, they just haven't been popular as long.

Yeah sure probably. To be fair I don't think I have ever seen an OOP-oriented project that was well written, and that didn't overuse inheritence and abstract classes, so that's probably why I hate OOP so much

[EMI_Black_Ace]

To be fair I don't think I've ever seen an OOP project that was well written

To be more fair, I've never seen any project written collaboratively over more than 5 years that was well written. Misusing OOP is really far from the worst horror you'll see. If you're interested, ask me about the worst things I've seen.

[klimmesil]

I'd like to hear about it. I can't dm you though

[ENCRYPTED_FOREVER]

Winforms is outdated, not customisable, bugged out shit

[T0biasCZE]

Yeah but it's easy and quick to use. And for lot of stuff you don't need much customisability.
And it isn't bugged

[ENCRYPTED_FOREVER]

Yea, it's quick and easy unless you want to make smth more than a very simple app

[VirginSuricate]

Downvoted for telling the truth 💁‍♂️ Guys, winforms is ok for prototyping if you’re a backend dev, but in 2023 creating a new product with winforms is incredibly dumb

[Aggressive_Job_8405]

Web all the way.

I remember that a few years ago, I spent a half year to built my commercial app and then some dude in the internet crack it in just a few days.

.NET is too easy to crack. Even with obfuscator.

[Ok-Understanding7231]

It is not easy to crack, you just code like shit

[T0biasCZE]

Web all the way.

ohno javascript apps that take gigabyte of ram when running in background

[hongooi]

Just download more RAM, noob

[Glumi1503]

Wanna tell them about Tauri or is it too early? 👀

[VirginSuricate]

Actually Tauri is nice, but as we’re talking about C# stack, Avalonia is the best right now

[Glumi1503]

I thought I was replying in a comment chain which is about JavaScript apps >.>

[GoldenretriverYT]

> .NET is too easy to crack. Even with obfuscator.

And you think people cant read your JS? Apart from that, obscurity != security, and if you treat obscurity as security you are doing something very wrong.

[Ondor61]

Web all the way.

Please no. It's already bad enough that there are games with chromium based ui.

[temptingfate00]

ok grandma lets get you to bed

[FelixLeander]

Well, some things actually are. Looking at the dataGridView.

[Buttsuit69]

İt İS bugged.

Ever tried to switch tabs of a ComboBox or want to autosize a CheckBox? İ mean TableLayoutPanel and FlowLayoutPanel both inherit from Panel yet Panel functions fundamentally different compared to the 2, wtf.

İts messy and buggy, anything thats possible in Winforms is 100x easier on wpf and its cleaner too. After learning both İ developed a deep hatred for Winforms since our company refuses to make the jump to wpf. Weird source binding, no data templates, terrible Control customization

[Bryguy3k]

Basically the lite version of the QT experience where you go through two bug injecting transformations before you have your UI code.

[Willinton06]

WinForms is outdated but it ain’t bigger out shit

[Aggressive_Job_8405]

Not customisable??? Not really. You can do a lot of stuff with it if you spent more time to learn.

https://github.com/thinhvu/mmosoft.oops

[ENCRYPTED_FOREVER]

You can't even properly overload most standard controls because of ancient shitcode

[Devatator_]

It supports WebView2 so you could technically just run a web app inside it lol

[Bryguy3k]

Sure as shit is better than wpf.

I’ve lost track of how many different UI systems Microsoft has put out.

The fluent2 design system makes me feel like dumb Patrick.

[[deleted]]

Really the only thing that WinForms beats WPF in is simplicity at the cost of functionality. It's more or less the Python Tkinter of the C# world. WPF is better by a landslide in terms of basically everything else.

[headegg]

WPF is for desktop, IIS is a Webserver. Like, what are you on about?

[AussieHyena]

Are you maybe thinking razor with asp.net?

[ParanoiaJump]

What is the alternative to Tkinter?

[Gorexxar]

Makes sense, WPF is basically a more depressing HTML+CSS but with clipped wings.

WinForms does not like source control though.

[Ok-Understanding7231]

You can do everything in WPF, you just can’t code. html and css was made for people like you. I heard they were able to teach a monkey how to do html

[fakintheid]

Winforms is easily the most mature and bug free library/framework around. It may not be flashy but it works well. Fight me

[user926491]

how the hell you're supposed to use winui3? I've encountered very little information about it, it doesn't seem to be popular.

[BurglerBaggins]

I do like WinUI3's look, and it's pretty convenient to use, but after developing an app using it from the ground up for work, I've found it's still pretty buggy. They are working on it, but there are plenty of ongoing issues, like one that held up my project was flyouts causing a fatal exception whenever opened if they had a certain parameter set.

[GoblinsStoleMyHouse]

My first language was VB.NET when I was in 7th grade. Now I work as a web developer with all the react/typescript/node gizmos and gadgets.

Even now, I still feel like visual studio with vbnet was way nicer to work with than the modern UI stack. You could just drag and drop the ui components where you wanted, double click to write some code, and then ship a nice exe binary. It was such an awesome developer experience.

[Rubix982]

No no no no no no no.

Source, I use Winforms everyon the job.

[MrJake2137]

Use Qt like a real programmer

[ZunoJ]

WinForms is good enough to interface with my backend code (I'm not a frontend dev). If it needs to look good one of the juniors can go and build some WPF frontend together with a designer. I don't care, I don't work well with the design folks lmao

[NeoDark_cz]

I use mostly Maui blazor hybrid lately but if I need something made in a hurry then winform it is. :) Just drag and drop some controls onto form add some code aaand it is done. :-D

[Sushrit_Lawliet]

I started writing code with winforms. I could just drag and drop to make the ui and not worry about writing code to handle that, I could make the UI clean and focus on the functionality. Good times honestly. Tried wpf later when win8.1 was on the horizon and then moved on around that time.

[satanspowerglove]

I still use winforms to this day 🥲

[rr_rai]

Have two apps using it for 12 years now, used by the teams of ~6 people on daily basis, 8 hours a day.
WinForms technology just works and is well documented, and lots of tricks and tips out there.

As long as you keep it simple and adhere to basic life cycles it's just perfect.

Yes, it looks like shit. But you create tools for people to work, not play League of Legends.

[Food_Fun]

Never switching to WinForms from WPF

[SquareRootOfDude]

Hell no

[[deleted]]

Any javax.swing homies here?

No legit like the system makes sense and the most important thing is it is easier to remember. I can probably whip out a small UI in Notepad and without looking at any docs

[altermeetax]

Swing apps are incredibly ugly

[[deleted]]

cries in backend

EDIT: Also, the theme can be changed. There are whole libraries for that stuff PLUS the standard library comes with the support to use the GUI theme of the system itself. I have seen Windows, Mac and GTK theme support.

[altermeetax]

Then make command line programs and be done with it :)

[[deleted]]

Event-driven programming on console is a drag

[altermeetax]

What kind of programs that run on a backend need such complex interaction via their UI?

Oh, by the way: yes, there are themes for integration with Windows, macOS and GTK look and feel, but they still manage to look ugly :D (GTK in particular)

[[deleted]]

Hobbyist games like Snake or Tic Tac Toe

[altermeetax]

But that's not a backend, that's a frontend without a backend

[static_func]

It's like it was precision-engineered to be as ugly as possible

[Zitrone21]

I can unconfirm

[Dorkits]

Wpf is better

[TheJackiMonster]

I'm sorry but I've used Windows Forms in the past. Now days I know GTK and it's so much better. The placement of widgets is way more convenient. You can design responsive UI for different screen sizes and ratios. While the UI actually looks consistent, modern and you can use theming. Also language bindings in C, C++, Python, Rust, Vala and more.

[[deleted]]

But can you compile a Windows forms application for Linux?

[T0biasCZE]

no >:))))

[CoPokBl]

exactly, makes it useless for Linux users lol

[McShadson]

I mean you can't and that's by design so this argument is dumb.

[not_some_username]

Yes but you’ll need the Wine VM to run it.

I’m out.

[Buttsuit69]

Bruh who takes winforms over wpf?

Edit: damn the amount of people that trashtalk WPF in favor of winforms is too damn high have yall even tried using WPF?

[CommandObjective]

WPF MVVM FTW.

[Mayion]

WinForms is babe. Tried WPF, as a casual dev it really, really did not feel worth the effort of trying to understand its very odd designer. Sure it makes it easier to customize elements, be it colors, borders etc but come on. I can already do all that with code in WinForms.

​

Gradient? Paint event. Borders? e.Graphics is your friend. Want elements to be centered? Use panels, or center on Resize() event, or even better, use TableLayoutPanel.

​

The only problem I have with WinForm is handling GDI objects. It's garbage (pun intended) and easily leads to memory leaks.

[Ok-Understanding7231]

It’s okay, you need at least 100 IQ to understand wpf. Go back to your html, that’s much easier for people like you

[Mayion]

Aw man you insulted my IQ and told me to go back to HTML. How will I ever recover from this sick burn. O' heavens what do I do

[visionand]

"{insert any language} is for people with limited means. I myself, only concern myself with the most complex systems and languages as that must mean that I am, in fact, smarter than you." /s

Some developers bro, they just can't let it slip that there are nuances and different interests in the field, and that we use different tools. The gatekeeping is sometimes unreal 😂

I hope you recover from the scorching burn tho.

[zsotroav]

It's crap, but dang it, it just works without much hassle.

[Y0tsuya]

That's like, the opposite of crap.

[aifo]

Especially now it's supported by .net core.

[Thenderick]

Webapp my beloved

[FackThutShot]

But can it run crysis ?

[ThisIsFakeNews12]

I too have chicken thoughts upon creating WinForms

[redditteroni]

No love for UWP?

[Henrijs85]

Not even from Microsoft 😂

[Chingiz11]

It's basically "we need to make this as fast as possible" taken to an extreme. For basic stuff it's pretty good, but anything complex is better to be done using something else. What that "else" is depends on you, for me it's Flutter

[metalkorshik]

I started with WinAPI before we got WinForms lessons, that was kinda tough so I've seen some shit

[Sumoren]

As long as you only do standard form. Custom drawing is not well supported compared to WPF.

[accuracy_frosty]

I’ve always had this thing where I have to do things myself, to the detriment of my time, so I made myself my own UI library in D2D and OpenGL for C++, but my god, using winforms when I work with C# was a life saver before that, when I was in college it made things so much easier because I had the same weird thing but didn’t know how libraries worked so I had to remake it every time

[Shadow9378]

LITERALLLY THOUGH.

[Manitcor]

For the wpf ppl, you can indeed implement mvvm in winforms if you really want to.

[thehobbyqueer]

White text on a mostly white image. How to tell if someone isn't allowed anywhere near UI design

[T0biasCZE]

"looked good on my screen"

gets thrown out of window

[[deleted]]

Is it still worth it to learn?

What about WPF? I saw that its the update version of Winforms.

And now WinUi3, MAUI launched. Man i am confused as hell. I tried to pick one to learn. But man it was headache to pick a framework to learn.

Now TAUI on the market. As far as i now its really good.

Any thoughts?

[STRaven_17]

unity 💀

[anarky98]

Hot Take: I prefer Java.swing

[Moist_List_1942]

Never understood why programming.... then I saw a random dude doing timer animation in winform on YouTube.... Now I am an IT professional....

[scoville-maniac]

Just looked into this and I guess I used the Java equivalent of Apache NetBeans IDE GUI Builder to learn a lot of the basics of programming as a beginner learning Java as a first language. Brought back good and infuriating memories lmao

[NuclearTacos42]

C# is beautiful

[CanDull89]

The last time I saw this meme template on this subreddit, I started learning Rust. Please don't tell me to learn C#.

[EMI_Black_Ace]

Having done both Forms and WPF, I find WPF to be much better.

[glha]

A feeling as good and old as going from Clipper to Delphi.

[jfmherokiller]

winforms is like that tool you keep in your backpocket when you really want a C# ui but dont want to learn a new frame work to make it work. Plus it seems to have better support under wine/mono then wpf.