Hey,
In recent years it would appear there have been a slowing down of changes to the WPF product suite and I'm not seeing much engagement in the WPF product ideas area as well.
Is there an official line from IG regarding the future of these controls? Is there any Roadmap?
I understand WPF is starting to fall out of favour these days but it would be nice to see even some of the smaller quality of life improvements suggested dealt with. It's likely WPF will be around in the enterprise for some time yet.
An official line would certainly be useful to steer our next steps.
Thanks
Scott
Hi Scott - You are right, WPF is not going anywhere. We have a ton of Windows Forms & WPF customers, we have no plans of sunsetting these platforms. For the most part, all the new features / improvements in the last few releases have been around our cross-platform controls, like Charts, Maps, and other data viz related controls, and then support for the new Visual Studio design time experience which was a huge effort. Our data viz controls are in the most need of improvements for interactions, options, etc., which is why we’ve spent so much time there and we’ll continue to. Other controls like all the Grids and supporting controls are pretty mature and have been around for almost 20 years now, the feature capabilities there are pretty solid.
In terms of updates, let us know some of the areas you'd like to see. We don't plan on any massive new controls (like a reporting tool for example) but adding new features / updates is happening in both Windows Forms & WPF and keeping up with new .NET Core features and Visual Studio updates. We’re looking at the feasibility of getting a better Windows 11 UI in the WPF controls as an example, but most customers are delivering apps with their own themes, so the impact of that is minimal as the WPF product is so flexible in terms of branding. As most customers buy the Ultimate suite, you have every platform that we offer, we are investing in other .NET desktop / cross-platform platforms like Blazor, MAUI and Win UI for the next generation of apps.
What quality of life enhancements would you like to see in WPF?
Thanks for the feedback.
Windows 11 theming would certainly be of interest to us. Our pool of WPF developers is very small, so we try to avoid customising the styles to much to avoid issues. Having it out the box is very much appreciated.
One thing we found a bit lacking in the likes of the Office2013 theme is contrast. It's very... white! The design language from Microsoft at the time wasn't great and it's starting to look a bit out of place now.
In terms of Quality of life enhancements, I mean items such as: https://www.infragistics.com/community/ideas/i/ultimate-ui-for-wpf/searchable-field-chooser-for-xamdatagrid
https://www.infragistics.com/community/ideas/i/ultimate-ui-for-wpf/built-in-conditional-formatting-tool-for-xamdatagrid (Probably a bit bigger than quality of life but still of interest)
Hello Scott,
Thank you for listing your recommendations and quality of life enhancements that you’d like to see.
These quality-of-life improvements, as well as Windows 11 / Modern Windows theming are features that we have recently had an internal meeting with our product managers and senior development teams about, and we are planning to work on soon. Stay tuned for future releases that will have some of these features implemented.
Going forward, if you have further quality of life enhancements that you would like to see implemented in the Infragistics for WPF toolset, I would recommend suggesting these improvements at our WPF Ideas Site, here: https://www.infragistics.com/community/ideas/i/ultimate-ui-for-wpf. This will place you in direct communication with our product management teams who plan and prioritize these upcoming features and development based on community and user feedback.
Please let me know if you have any other questions or concerns on this matter.