WPF Begins its Long Goodbye

It was supposed to replace Windows Forms. Now it will be lucky to live as long.

Windows Presentation Foundation, or WPF, has a special place in my heart. In the distant past, when there was nothing I liked better than a nicely put-together desktop application, WPF was ahead of its time. It had forward-thinking features like reflowable layouts and vector-based rendering. It adopted modern ideas like UI markup and declarative animation. It could even render 3D scenes! I was also personally invested, because WPF was a big part of how I became a Microsoft MVP.

And then, just a few years later, everything fell apart.

But before I go any further into the history of WPF, let’s rewind to introduce the latest controversy around the aging framework.

The Outsourcing Controversy

For years, Microsoft has stuck to the official party line, claiming that WPF is a living, viable technology that continues to get their care and attention. And at the same time, developers routinely raise the alarm that WPF is being ignored. New releases of .NET bring almost no WPF news. Pull requests linger without responses. I could go on, but this graphic tells the story of shrinking developer satisfaction better than anything else:

There was a tiny glimmer of hope a few months ago, when Microsoft released .NET 7 and showcased its relatively small improvements (mostly performance tweaks and long-overdue bug fixes). WPF developers weren’t accustomed to getting many crumbs from the Microsoft table, so even this modest attention felt good.

But the real trouble started in Microsoft’s Community Standup stream, where they dropped the news that WPF was transitioning to a community-run project and being handed off to IDC (Microsoft’s India Developer Center) where, as at least one commentator quipped, “projects go to die.” When asked point-blank if Microsoft will kill off WPF, there was a clear but not-quite-reassuring answer:

“We think of WPF as very mature project, so not that…