"I thought WPF was dead" is usually one of the first things that Kevin Bost hears when discussing today's topic. WPF is not dead. In fact, WPF is supported by .NET 6 and a plethora of third-party apps, extensions and packages. Kevin has been working with WPF for a long time and has become an expert on the framework. In today's episode we discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of WPF, competing frameworks, open-source projects and the path forward. If you need to develop desktop apps for Windows, WPF is still the most mature framework out there. Have you worked with WPF? Are you currently developing applications with WPF? Let us know on Twitter at @dotnet_Podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Adventures in.NET. I'm Sean Kleber, your host, and with me today, co-hosts are Caleb Wells.

 

Hey, how's

 

Thank

 

it going?

 

you, good,

 

into

 

good,

 

the

 

good.

 

thicker client

 

Yeah.

 

applications,

 

And, uh, way

 

a

 

loo.

 

means of sort of leveraging that existing

 

Sean,

 

knowledge

 

Caleb,

 

that they

 

how's

 

have around

 

it going?

 

doing

 

Hey.

 

it,

 

Hey,

 

which is, in my

 

it's

 

opinion,

 

good.

 

great.

 

It's cold down there,

 

It's been

 

huh?

 

a while since we've all been together, no?

 

It

 

What

 

has,

 

if I just...

 

it's

 

It has been, yeah.

 

been a couple

 

Yeah.

 

of

 

We

 

weeks.

 

all been busy, busy, busy.

 

Oh yeah,

 

So

 

I did

 

when's the

 

a

 

last time

 

lunch

 

you.

 

and learn on mediator today. So yeah, that was interesting.

 

When's the last time you've seen snow, Wei?

 

You know what, we go to this snow

 

Yeah.

 

place like, it's like 45 minutes drive away from where I live

 

Yeah.

 

but it's like, it's just fake snow and it's just

 

Yeah,

 

like a, it's

 

and I

 

just

 

will

 

a

 

point

 

wonderland

 

out too,

 

mountain

 

I am not actually

 

and it's just

 

the

 

for

 

original

 

kids to build a snowman

 

author of

 

on,

 

the library,

 

um,

 

for what it's

 

but

 

worth.

 

it's just, yeah, it's...

 

Several years ago, the

 

But

 

So

 

original

 

it's

 

you

 

real

 

wanna

 

author

 

snow,

 

build

 

was,

 

a snowman?

 

um, it's

 

Mm-hmm.

 

about three

 

I'll say,

 

hours away,

 

I'll describe it as Fighting

 

yeah.

 

Burnout. And I

 

Such

 

was

 

a good singing

 

a

 

voice.

 

popular contributor, and so he asked me if I was interested

 

Man,

 

Yeah.

 

in taking over

 

real

 

as

 

snow

 

maintainer

 

for me

 

of the

 

is

 

library.

 

like

 

And I was like,

 

at least six

 

yes.

 

or seven and that's in

 

I

 

the middle

 

do it

 

of

 

because

 

winter.

 

I find it fun.

 

So yeah,

 

Which

 

at

 

is

 

least.

 

also like, because I do live

 

You

 

Anyway.

 

can

 

coding

 

borrow

 

on

 

some

 

Twitch

 

of mine.

 

for

 

You can borrow

 

streaming.

 

mine in the winter,

 

Ha

 

definitely.

 

And...

 

ha ha.

 

Because people have asked me, oh, well, can you cover this? Can you do that? And I'm like,

 

All

 

sure.

 

right, let's

 

But

 

bring

 

ultimately,

 

out our guest.

 

I started doing this

 

Let's

 

live

 

welcome

 

coding because

 

Kevin Bost.

 

I'm having

 

Welcome,

 

fun

 

Kevin.

 

and just kind of sharing that

 

Hey!

 

with everyone else of

 

You care man?

 

let's have fun

 

Hey.

 

building

 

And

 

something.

 

fluidous full disclosure

 

Let's have fun

 

to

 

doing

 

our

 

it.

 

listeners,

 

And I figure if I'm having

 

Kevin

 

fun,

 

and I work together.

 

even

 

So

 

if nobody else is watching or enjoying

 

there's going

 

it,

 

to

 

at

 

be

 

least

 

no

 

I'm enjoying

 

softball

 

myself.

 

questions,

 

And

 

no softball

 

that

 

questions.

 

gets me

 

Yep.

 

at least through the

 

Haha

 

stream, however it works out. There are a couple

 

All right,

 

other

 

Kevin.

 

libraries

 

So I

 

I would highlight

 

think what we're

 

too

 

going to

 

if

 

talk

 

anybody

 

about

 

is getting

 

is

 

ready to dive

 

WPF.

 

into WPF.

 

What the hell

 

There's

 

is

 

another

 

that?

 

UI library called MA apps,

 

Heh.

 

M-A-H apps,

 

Hehehe

 

that is exceptional. There's actually an integration package for My Material Design Library and MA apps, because they add a few additional controls that people want that aren't in the box. The other thing that they add is window Chrome support. So My Material Design Library doesn't do anything with your basic Windows Chrome, so the border around your window. If you want to customize that. you end up either dropping into some lower level APIs or just bring in something like my apps where they have a nice window base that you can then customize. So you wanna change up how the X thing looks you wanna make your window look like a Mac window for some reason, great have at it. You can do that, should you? Probably not, but you can. It's definitely a worthwhile thing to look at and like I said if you want to leverage it with the material design library there is a theme package that you can add in that then brings those same style theming ideas to the Ma Apps control as well. The other thing that got added in Visual Studio not that long ago, or I should say got better not that long ago, was their live visual debugging. Again, web developers were spoiled for so long. They fire up their application. They can go in and start mucking

 

So

 

with

 

when

 

their

 

I'm making a WinForms

 

UI and

 

app,

 

see things

 

I'm

 

change

 

behind

 

in real

 

the times?

 

time and go, yeah, that's what I wanted it to look like. And us desktop developers have been going, man, that'd be really cool. But fairly recently, Microsoft did bring in Hot Reload to try to give us that kind of same functionality. It doesn't work nearly as reliably as the web stuff does, but when it works, it's really nice. At least because I like to be able to see what my app looks like while it's running,

 

So

 

not seeing

 

my VB6

 

a preview of

 

stuff

 

it

 

is

 

in

 

still

 

the designer

 

good.

 

of what it might look like when it's running. I want to... actually see

 

Somewhere.

 

the running application

 

That was so

 

and

 

great, you know,

 

I want

 

drag

 

to move

 

and

 

stuff

 

drop

 

around and

 

and

 

go,

 

you know,

 

yeah

 

edit

 

that

 

and

 

button

 

continue,

 

doesn't look like,

 

you know,

 

let's

 

worked

 

move it

 

perfect.

 

over a little, right? And adjust that kind of thing. And so being able to see that stuff flow through has been really great. It does come with a visual tree inspector. For web developers, think of this like looking at your DOM. Because even though you write XAML for your WPF UI, the XAML that you write and the runtime tree are not equivalent, right? I may put one line of XAML that expands out at runtime into 300 lines of XAML. And so being able to go through and inspect that, oftentimes people are like, I put a button, how come I get all of this extra stuff onto it? It's like, well, when you brought in my material design library, you said button, and I've got a control template that says, well, a button consists of an icon here, a background border here, a text bit over here. Like, there's a bunch of things that go into making up what button is. And in terms of investigating it, the Visual Studio stuff is good, but there's another project out there called Snoop that has been around for much longer than the Visual Studio stuff has been and is absolutely exceptional. So it gives you a lot of the toys that you would hope would have been in the box out of the gate from breaking apart your visual tree. You can have it arbitrarily just invoke C-sharp methods for you. You can muck with properties at runtime. For fun, you can even take Snoop and point it at Visual Studio. There's been a number of times where I've had issues with like Visual Studio UI elements because I run my fonts at bigger than default And I'm fairly confident people don't test that case and so things get cut off. I don't see buttons It's like where's the okay button on this dialogue, so you can actually point snoop at any WPF Component and then go in and muck with it at runtime and just tweak stuff around and go Let me adjust that for you real quick and figure out what this is gonna look like so anybody doing WPF development I would highly recommend adding Snoop to your tool belt because it is very much a must-have tool for being able to Understand what's going on and then be able to tweak stuff back and forth So there's a couple ways to go about doing it. There is, and I'm probably going to butcher it, the UI automation stuff that existed in Windows hasn't received updates very much recently. It used to be the go-to option for most people because it was more or less the de facto only option there. Playwright has actually come out with a desktop head that you can use to go through and test it. So anybody who's used Playwright to go through and do UI testing for their web apps will probably feel fairly fairly close at home. With all of

 

No, I'm

 

Yeah,

 

curious,

 

which

 

Kevin.

 

I've been really impressed

 

I'm

 

with it.

 

a web guy,

 

It is amazing,

 

I mean, through and through,

 

especially

 

right?

 

for going through and doing

 

So

 

it. It's worth noting, though, when you're doing

 

I can't remember

 

UI

 

the

 

testing

 

last time

 

on

 

I did

 

a desktop

 

a

 

application,

 

desktop application.

 

most of these libraries

 

What kind of

 

go

 

applications

 

through the

 

do you develop with WPF these

 

automation

 

days?

 

APIs, which

 

What's

 

are

 

kind

 

aimed

 

of the

 

at

 

focus

 

simulating

 

that

 

user interaction,

 

you see

 

which is really

 

in

 

great

 

that area?

 

until you say that you want to write a UI test that validates that, say, your button turns red when there's invalid input. The automation APIs don't expose that information. And I love picking on background color, because that one feels like the most trivial thing to want to write a UI test on that just doesn't exist. So I've built out a handful of additional tools and libraries, largely driven by the material design project that I was working on. Because the material design project, it's a style and a theming library for WPF. That's really cool. really hard to write a unit test over. Like, how do you assert that the control looks right? That's not an easy assertion, and I wasn't about to start taking screenshots and doing bitmap comparison. That just felt like a nightmare to go through and do. I actually ended up building my own UI automation library called XAML test, specifically to go through and handle these cases. And it's worth noting, I don't think XAML test actually competes with the Playwright or the UI automation stuff because they're aimed at solving slightly different problems. If you are building an application and you want to simulate user interaction and build tests that way, that's coming at it at a slightly higher level. That's the black box level testing of your app where you're trying to just interact with what's there. XAML test takes a very different approach where it injects itself in to the running application. and aims to give you that low-level visual tree interaction. So I can go through and manipulate your UI elements. I can go through and pull out any property that I want. So if I want to validate that, yes, this button turned red when you typed in an invalid password, great. I can write that test and go through and build it out. It also was designed to be able to test, for the Material Design Library, a lot of the styles have triggers that allow you to do conditional style logic. And so being able to

 

Well,

 

validate

 

it is

 

that those

 

still

 

triggers

 

a thing,

 

are working

 

unfortunately.

 

correctly.

 

It

 

That

 

shouldn't

 

hey,

 

be.

 

when I click this, I expect

 

But yeah,

 

the thing to disable

 

no,

 

after

 

you're right.

 

it's been clicked

 

I

 

once.

 

think one

 

Great.

 

of the

 

I

 

biggest

 

want to

 

struggles

 

write that

 

that

 

test

 

a web

 

where

 

person has

 

I validate,

 

when they try

 

you

 

to

 

know,

 

write

 

is

 

a desktop

 

it enabled

 

app

 

true? I click,

 

is having

 

is enabled

 

to really

 

false?

 

worry about

 

It's a simple

 

threading.

 

test for me to write and I want

 

You

 

to

 

know,

 

write

 

on

 

it

 

the

 

with

 

web, you don't

 

what

 

really,

 

feels like a

 

you

 

unit

 

don't, you're

 

testy

 

not concerned

 

type framework,

 

about locking the UI thread or

 

but

 

anything.

 

without doing

 

It just

 

it.

 

kind of does

 

The other

 

it

 

way

 

and

 

people

 

everything

 

sometimes

 

runs itself.

 

write UI

 

You

 

tests

 

got to worry about

 

in

 

that

 

WPF

 

when you're doing

 

is

 

any

 

they'll

 

kind

 

just take

 

of

 

their standard

 

desktop

 

unit test

 

application

 

library.

 

stuff. You're going to lock up

 

and

 

the

 

deal

 

UI

 

with the

 

and

 

threading

 

people don't

 

that

 

know

 

way.

 

why or what's the best way to,

 

Because

 

you know,

 

you

 

prevent

 

have

 

that and get around it.

 

the UI thread that you're dealing with, so without diving too deep into it, there's the apartment states of your thread, the single threaded versus the multi-threaded apartments, where your UI thread is STA, the single threaded apartment. For things like XUnit, there's extensions that will let you run a test where the thread running it runs as an STA thread. which lets you instantiate a UI object and then touch it and go back and forth and make some assertions on it. The part that I really did not like about that is then you are testing UI components outside of the WPF kind of rendering pipeline. And so WPF, when you put a control inside of a window, it will do things like automatically measure, lay out the control, all of the useful stuff. And I wanted to have something that would actually leverage that. rather than trying to simulate that in my test. Because manually calling like a range and measure and all of that to simulate what WPF would do when I put that control in a real window just left me with a bad taste in my mouth. There was too many cases where I was doing stuff in my test to mimic what the real app would do that I didn't want to bring it in. So it's definitely there and I've... Exactly. And so that's why I wrote... XAML test where it basically starts up a WPF shell that you can just dump arbitrary content into and then write tests back and forth. And so it's just gRPC between your test host and the running WPF application, just being able to do that communication. But it is two separate processes so that you have that full WPF app experience and you can get access to everything as though it were a running app. And again, I built it for the Material Design Library, but I've had a couple people say that they pulled it into other things. I'm like... Great, have at it. If it works for you, perfect. But again, it is testing at a little bit lower level. It's no longer black box level testing. So it does kind of depend on what you're looking to gain from the tests. But it does fill in kind of that middle ground that I felt was missing between kind of conventional UI tests and unit tests. Because it didn't feel like there was a lot of middle ground there for what I was building with a library. But it's been a very fun project to to work on and build. That's a good question. So. . Couple factors I would probably be looking at. One would be skill and knowledge of the team because again, knowledge of XAML and MVVM, like I said earlier, is a steep

 

Do you

 

learning

 

think it's

 

curve

 

just... Do

 

but worth it. And

 

you

 

I

 

think

 

think

 

it's just

 

it

 

Microsoft

 

depends on if

 

just

 

that's what

 

not updating their

 

people

 

like, Visual Studio

 

are knowledgeable

 

template

 

on.

 

for WPF because it's not

 

Because

 

getting any love?

 

WinForms does, again, works very well. It is still a viable choice for some desktop applications. And depending on people's knowledge and

 

Yeah,

 

skill set.

 

says the Microsoft

 

One could

 

person.

 

argue that it is easier in some ways to do it because you don't get as much magic out of the box, but you write the code and it does exactly what you tell it to do. Now, oftentimes you realize, oh, I have to write a bunch of lines of code to make it do exactly what I want, but I can write all those lines of code. I'm not trying to deal with kind of weird abstractions of, well, hang on, I wrote this in XAML and now how do I do the same thing in C sharp? How do I manipulate this? Like there's not that. extra learning curve that goes along with it. In my opinion, wind forms is very much you get exactly what you do. Yeah. Yeah. And the WYSIWYG editor on WinForms is very easy for people going. We've taught classes for university students quite a bit and there was a big debate about what framework do you actually teach them. Because the goal was to teach them event-based programming. And you know, click handlers on buttons are the easiest starting place. But then the question comes, okay, well what framework with a button do you want to teach them? And WinForms looked very appealing because it was... like you were saying, that very intuitive interface of, I drag a button onto my thing, it stays there, it works. There's not a lot of, there's not a lot of magic happening. Like, I put a button right there, there's a button right there, it doesn't go anywhere. But you also end up doing a bunch of other stuff, like WinForms, usually my biggest selling point is, everything default anchors top left, right? So you drag the window to make it bigger, and all the UI elements stay. fixed right where you left them. Which, again, it's doing exactly what you told it to do and nothing more. Whereas WPF, they actually change the defaults. They say, no, what we'd rather have is we'd rather have controls fill their containing space by default. Now, some controls don't, but at least by default most things are going to fill their container. Which then means that at least when I resize my window, things start to resize and I start to see that resizing rather than everything just staying fixed. for better or worse, sometimes debatable, but at least then you kind of get something that feels a little better, at least from an end user experience. But it, again, does add that developer complexity of, okay, now I have to remember I have to change these flags now to make it not do that, if that's what I'm... Yeah, if you're looking for cross-platform, Maui or Xamarin Forms are probably the best options. Maui is, I don't think I would pick Xamarin Forms now over Maui at all. Maui has some

 

Places.

 

rough edges, but the amount of magic that it brings and simplicity that it brings over Xamarin Forms is significant. So both of those do allow you to write your front end in XAML. Maui brings in an alternate approach for your UI as well with what they called MVU based

 

So for somebody

 

on the Comet library

 

that's never

 

that

 

done

 

existed for Xamarin

 

WPF

 

Forms.

 

before,

 

So if you're still in Xamarin

 

what

 

Forms

 

are the

 

and you want MVU,

 

key

 

you

 

things

 

can pull

 

to

 

in Comet

 

know about

 

and get the same thing. They

 

before

 

just brought

 

you get

 

it into

 

started

 

the box.

 

and you first launch that

 

But

 

template?

 

it lets you write your UI in

 

I've gotten in there

 

kind

 

sometimes

 

of a more C

 

and

 

Sharpy

 

I

 

layout

 

kind of get lost

 

type

 

with

 

approach.

 

the layout because I'm

 

And

 

used

 

it

 

to

 

gets

 

doing

 

you

 

a web

 

there.

 

layout and it

 

As

 

does

 

far

 

a lot of

 

as

 

things differently

 

picking

 

when

 

the

 

I'm

 

other

 

doing

 

choices,

 

WPF versus

 

WinUI,

 

a web layout.

 

like

 

What

 

I

 

are

 

said,

 

the things that somebody

 

I'm

 

needs

 

really

 

to know

 

rooting

 

to get

 

for

 

started?

 

it to be that nice WPF replacement. I don't think it's mature enough there. There's also not a lot of the same third party support for extra controls. WPF and Windows Forms have been around for so long. All your big names, your Telerics, they've produced really nice libraries and there is a... breadth of third party support available to you, which makes it really nice. Like I said, WinUI 3, if I was building something simple, I could go to it. The other thing that I think people miss out on a lot is you can actually access the newer Window APIs too, even inside of Windows Forms and WPF. So all of the magical stuff that came with Windows 8, what was called Metro at the time, and all the new Windows 10 APIs. You can dive into that. Project Centennial, I believe, that was the code name for it. I don't remember if they renamed it or not when it came out. But you can actually get access to those. I don't know. Native APIs feels like the wrong term. But we'll say platform-specific APIs, if you want to be able to dive into there. Like leveraging the notifications are similar. Or the live tiles inside of the start and that kind of thing. So. That stuff is still available even on the older platforms. You just have to pull in the appropriate packages to do so. So, you say that, but that's actually possible, though. Ha ha! Yes, it absolutely is. I saw a really cool demo where they actually compiled ASP.NET Core into WebAssembly. And I believe the PM's description was, this is potentially the worst possible way to serve up a web page is to bundle the server into WebAssembly and then serve it up. It's like, but as a proof of concept, it worked. but definitely not recommended. That's a great question.

 

Yeah,

 

So, um,

 

yeah. You've been

 

Well,

 

working

 

and

 

on

 

material

 

that for quite

 

is well

 

some

 

thought

 

time.

 

I think

 

out.

 

the one thing I would

 

Yeah.

 

want people to take away from

 

Yeah,

 

it is

 

you've been working on it quite some

 

the

 

time,

 

obvious

 

so

 

question

 

how

 

of is

 

complete

 

WPF

 

is it

 

dead?

 

compared to

 

My

 

the full

 

strong opinion

 

Google design?

 

is no.

 

Have you

 

And

 

implemented everything?

 

it's not going to die until Microsoft manages to port all of their somewhat, what I would argue, critical because Visual Studio is kind of critical off of it. I don't doubt that they've been considering ways of doing it, but it's been around. It is still a very viable platform to build desktop apps on. Still my go-to option of choice. I was building, just last night, a theme editor. So my Git tool of choice is GitKraken. And they added theming support. So naturally, I built a WPF application to go through and edit their theme files so that I could have, for when you want few shit in your Git client, because that's what you need. I mean, that was still one of those cases where I was like, yeah. I'm going to be I'm going to build a nice little desktop application to tweak these JSON files on my local system because that's what's fun and that's what's useful for doing. I will admit I'm a unicorn in that regard. Thank you. Yeah, like I said, it's one of those, I do it for fun. I, unfortunately, when I first started out in my career, I worked for a company that was building a wind forms application. And my team lead kind of on a whim where we had an innovation sprint decided, you know what, reporting this to WPF. I was like, in a sprint? That seems ridiculous. And we did it. And I... I quickly fell in love with WPF

 

How do you

 

and

 

do this?

 

I don't believe I've looked back since. So it's

 

Yeah,

 

very much

 

no,

 

one of those frameworks.

 

that makes perfect sense.

 

I don't

 

Give

 

doubt

 

people

 

it's going

 

the

 

to go

 

control

 

away at

 

to

 

some

 

do what

 

point.

 

they want to do, even

 

That

 

if

 

point

 

it's

 

is not today

 

in poor

 

or

 

taste.

 

this year,

 

So

 

but

 

how does

 

I've

 

this

 

loved it

 

work

 

so far.

 

in XAML? How

 

I'm

 

do

 

hoping

 

you,

 

it...

 

because I'm, right, I know

 

I

 

what

 

probably

 

XAML

 

will

 

is,

 

be.

 

but

 

One of the

 

I

 

last

 

don't use

 

ones still

 

it.

 

sitting there.

 

How

 

Run my own

 

do

 

private

 

you

 

fork of the repo as long as I

 

inject

 

possibly can.

 

or handle styling and JavaScript and webby stuff in XAML?

 

I very much love all.NET stuff. Yeah, it's definitely one of those skill sets that it's not overly highly desired if you look at like job postings or what's there.

 

And what are the styles

 

But

 

we should in?

 

it's one of those people who have, when it's

 

Like

 

needed,

 

what is it? CSS

 

it's hard

 

or what

 

to

 

are

 

find.

 

the styles? Like

 

Because

 

what

 

I know

 

language

 

we've definitely,

 

isn't in here?

 

Rashaun and I work, we've at times struggled to try to hire people that know it well enough to work on it. It's not common for our clients to want WPF work, but the few that do really

 

Hehehe

 

want it.

 

making a face.

 

Yeah.

 

Hehehe Hehehe

 

I'm like

 

Yes.

 

anyway yeah.

 

I'm hoping. I'm hoping. I'm hoping. I'm hoping. Yeah. Yeah, yeah and I think that's the thing is most people slowly start to upgrade and I think that's to Microsoft's credit they've done a really good job of trying to bring things like the project centennial so that people can keep their WPF applications and slowly work them forward or even when because.NET Core 3.1 was when they finally ported WPF over to Core and making it so that people do have those nice upgrade paths so it's not like well WPF only works on Windows 7, and Windows 7 falls out of support whenever, and now you're dead. Making sure that it's still running and going forward, I think shows that there's at least that admission of we can't just leave this in maintenance mode and let it time out with support end dates. It has to be something that's supported going forward.

 

can say this then that makes it all

 

Yeah,

 

that more important or

 

I

 

valuable

 

think

 

or

 

that's the hint to

 

should

 

you,

 

be

 

Sean,

 

appreciated that

 

that

 

you've

 

high pay raise

 

developed

 

is coming.

 

this library that does it for people right so they don't have to get into all the nasty

 

Excellent.

 

XML trees with the styling or whatnot so thank you I mean I'm not use WPF and and I can tell you right now thank you if I used it I'd be all over it

 

Yeah, so you can find all of my links at kibu.dev. That's K-E-B-O-O dot D-E-V That'll get you links to Twitch YouTube any socials that I'm active on you can find all of it there Feel free to drop me a follow Anybody who drops in on my my YouTube or twitch videos. I'm very happy to answer questions There's been quite a few streams where if I've got people in asking questions about something I do not mind rabbit trails at all. I usually go into a stream with an idea of something that I want to do, but that's usually an idea that's loosely held. If people are interested in something, I'm very happy

 

There you

 

to

 

go.

 

either divert or learn other things or even if you just want to leave a comment

 

Absolutely.

 

on one of the videos of something you'd like to see covered in the future, I've put together quite a few videos just based upon requests of, hey, I'd love to see it if you would cover this library or that. Always happy to interact with people.

 

So how about testing with WPF? You're going to test most of your backend cone just using regular X unit tests and things like that. But how about UI testing with WPF? What's that like?

 

Cool, so mine, I love board games. My wife and I spend a great deal of time doing it. One that recently came out is called Blood on the Clock Hour. It's a, I'll say a party social deduction game. So for people who might be familiar with things like One Night Ultimate Werewolf or maybe the video game Among Us where there's traitors and the townsfolk have to suss out who is. who is good and who is lying to them. It is a wonderful game, so that would be my pick for this week.

 

Well that's nice because I just picked up on Playwright. So that was on one of the projects that I'm working on. I had to go out and

 

Yeah.

 

find the tools and ended up on Playwright.

 

Possibly. Does it say tabletop simulator if you're not familiar with it? Does...work for that? Thanks all.

 

You shouldn't have to duplicate that stuff, basically. Right? Yeah.

 

So just wanted to ask, like if I got marked into my manager's office or something and they're like, we need to build a new desktop app, in which scenario would I kind of recommend using WPF? WinForms is, I think it's so intuitive when you think about it. Because Microsoft is doing all this citizen developer stuff with, you know, on the Power Platform with their Canvas apps and all that stuff. And it's very, very similar to WinForms. And I think it is just like that because for a non-developer, if you're targeting a low-code audience, it is actually the easiest place to start. Well, what about the others? Like, what about, because WPF is not cross-platform, right?

 

Yeah.

 

Caleb might want to throw in Blazor into that mix, you know, Blazor Desktop.

 

Mm-hmm

 

Well, yeah,

 

Oh yeah,

 

it is. And yeah,

 

it's buff.

 

yeah, Blazer's taking over the world. And I'm OK with that because I'm a Blazer guy. But yeah, there's some very interesting stuff you can do with Blazer these days. And they just keep pushing the boundaries. So time will tell. But it's a. It's a wonderful new world in the web where you can do C sharp all the way up and down. Yep.

 

Okay, Kevin, so what things that we should cover that we haven't about WPF and.

 

Nice. Nice.

 

I'm just gonna say you're so prolific. I've never seen anyone who is that passionate about WPF. Honestly, like, I kind of miss the train when... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, awesome. That's awesome. Great. I feel like you'll be there till the end, won't

 

Hehehe

 

you?

 

That's what makes

 

Well, you know,

 

Kevin

 

here's,

 

great to work with.

 

yeah, yeah.

 

He's always involved. He's always enthusiastic. He does user group stuff. He does the Twitch stuff. He's always ready to just jump in and make it something fun to work on.

 

We know

 

That's awesome.

 

there is definitely, well, I was going to say, there's definitely some benefits to sticking with a framework or technology or language or whatever and becoming a master of your craft and not jumping to the next thing, right? Because in the web world, it's easy to jump to the next thing. You know, Angular, Vue, React next week. Oh, there's this new one called. Kooby dooby doo, let's try it out, right? I mean, whatever. So the fact that WFPF has been around this long and it works really well. Like you said, it's really mature and it's something that you know really well. I see that as a benefit or a bonus all the way around.

 

Definitely it will become like the cobol of the Windows desktop world where you get paid like you know stupid amounts of money just to because you're the only one who knows that type thing. Ha ha ha

 

Hahaha

 

I'm still waiting for somebody to need classic ASP work done and pay me really,

 

Hahaha

 

really good money. So they still kind of give that love for WPF and bring that into core, but they won't do it for web forms. Dang it. Alright, my bank account is waiting for it. Alright, Kevin. Great discussion. Really good. So if our listeners have questions and they want to either watch a code or get in touch, what's the best way for them to do that? Okay, and if our listeners want to get in touch with the show, we'd love to hear from you. They can get in touch with me on Twitter. I am at.NET Superhero.

 

da da da and I'm at Caleb Wills Codes but

 

All right,

 

are we

 

yep,

 

doing pics?

 

yep, we're doing picks. We're doing

 

Okay

 

picks, so,

 

okay we're

 

yep,

 

just we're flip-flopping because

 

yep, flip and flopping. So

 

okay

 

they can, you know,

 

okay

 

hear about us

 

I'm okay

 

and contact

 

with that

 

us and then we can do our picks. So yeah, go ahead. Let's go away, what's your pick?

 

So my pick this week is um, it's just a TV show called Bob's Burgers. It's actually like really old But um my my Netflix list is so backed up that um, I hardly ever gets chance to watch TV So I'm starting to go through all the stuff from like 10 years ago. So but yeah Bob's Burgers It's kind of like a funny kind of like a animated sitcom, I guess and Yeah, it's got like it's got 10 season. I don't know if it's ended yet, but um It's gonna take me a while to get through it. So, yeah, I thought that'd be my pick.

 

Okay, Caleb, what's your pick?

 

My pick is kind of similar to one you did. Maybe it was last episode or episode before about throwaway emails, right? Mine is not throwaway emails, but it is an email that will remove all trackers and all things that are following you. Duck, duck, go. Now you can now get an email. with an at duck.com and forward it to whatever emails you choose. Um, and if you use that and you're signing up for an account, right? You're going to get newsletters, emails and stuff. When the email comes in, it'll tell you remove tracker from this, remove tracker from this, remove tracker from this. So it's basically removing all of that information that's, you know, tracking you and following you from the emails and you still get them. So. I've used

 

And

 

it a few times.

 

does it cover your, does it hide your original email address as well?

 

Yep,

 

So then

 

yep, they

 

you have

 

do

 

an

 

not

 

alias

 

have

 

basically.

 

your, they don't have it. All they have is your.com email.

 

Oh, that's pretty cool actually.

 

Yeah, right?

 

Yeah, cool. Nice.

 

So yeah.

 

All right, so my pick this week is a TV show. It's an Amazon TV show and it's, I haven't watched it yet, but I watched the previews and the shows will have started coming out just prior to this being published. So listeners, they can probably go out and watch the show now and I got to pick the Rings of Power. You know,

 

Oh, it's already come

 

the

 

out?

 

previews of it looks really, really nice. And I've always been... Tolkien fan and like that

 

Yeah.

 

you know read The Hobbit way way back in the day so I love that show I love the movies everything so the show starts September 1st and

 

Okay,

 

so yeah definitely check it out

 

gotcha, yeah. I was

 

it

 

like,

 

looks

 

wait

 

good

 

a minute, I've been watching the trailers, I'm ready for the first episode, I hope it doesn't suck. But okay, it hadn't come out just yet. Gotcha,

 

Yeah,

 

yep. Ha ha

 

they've

 

ha.

 

got like five different trailers out there, so

 

Right,

 

they all look good.

 

right.

 

So it's in the

 

Yeah.

 

Lord of the Rings world, I'm guessing.

 

Yep.

 

It's

 

Yep.

 

before the rings basically. It's like pre pre.

 

So before

 

Yes.

 

the Hobbit, is it?

 

Yep, so

 

Yeah.

 

this is kind of like how the rings got made,

 

Yeah.

 

Oh, okay.

 

how they came about.

 

So the original author had, wasn't the book written by the original author or anything?

 

Well,

 

Uh, I, this

 

they made

 

is just

 

this stuff

 

based on

 

up.

 

his stuff. Yeah. He

 

Oh,

 

never

 

Yeah.

 

okay.

 

wrote this. He never wrote this. He, they just kind of based it. And of course they probably had to work with the family because the family is still pretty, pretty, uh,

 

protective

 

protective and make sure that everything that they, that happens is something they agree with. So. Yep. They do that. All right, Kevin, what do you got for picks?

 

Man,

 

Okay.

 

I used to love board games. I just don't have a lot of friends around here to play them with anymore. I wonder if, you know, we need to develop a remote desktop video app where you can play board games across the world. Can

 

We could

 

we do

 

use

 

that, Kevin?

 

WPF, maybe.

 

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, it's

 

Hi

 

a thought.

 

guys, great show, great show.

 

Yep.

 

Thanks to our listeners for tuning in and we'll catch everybody on the next episode of AdventuresIn.net.

 

Bye

 

See ya's.

 

y'all.