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…

The promise is any art you want… if you can ask the right question — As a programmer and general tech tinkerer, I’ve seen plenty of AI projects. Some were impressive (GitHub Copilot). Others much less so (like the AI bot that digested all the world’s Christmas music, then wrote this). …

Here’s the last word on what made the cut for .NET 7 — We have a tradition around here, and it has two parts. First, we speculate madly about future C# features by snooping through the C# team’s GitHub (yay for open source!). Then, when the release happens, we take stock of which predictions came true and what is left unfulfilled. In C#…

.NET 7 gives you JavaScript interop without Blazor — If you’ve been a .NET programmer for a few years, you’ve seen some remarkable changes. ASP.NET became modular and modern. C# absorbed new techniques from functional programming. And the entire .NET platform reinvented itself as a cross-platform, open source project. But few developments have been as dramatic as the introduction…

C# is thriving. So why are so many people ready to write it off? — Another day, another clickbait article about why C# is sick. Or dying. Or already dead (you just don’t know it yet). As a person who’s written a lot about dead and dying Microsoft technologies (see my pieces on Silverlight, Access, VB, Expression Studio, and ASP.NET Web Forms), I’ll be the…

Can a single programmer make a successful computer game — all on their own? — When it comes to great feats of coding, it’s hard to match the difficulty, creativity, and sheer audacity of building a modern computer game entirely on your own. Ambitious, yes. Lonely, definitely. Crazy — well, let’s just say that you won’t get far unless you manage to ignore the obvious…

Don’t overlook the most important password rule — Security theatre is the name for a technique that may make people feel safer, but seldom does anything more than waste time and resources. Taking off your shoes for inspection in the airport, a brief trend of the early 2000s, is security theatre. Spraying restaurant seats with antiseptics, a supposed…

What stays in? What gets cut? Let the speculation begin! — Today, it’s called C# Next. It’s still just a bundle of ideas struggling to make it out into the world. But in nine months, parts of C# Next will become the official C# 11. (Side note: That’s a relatively solid deadline, because the evolution of C# is tied to .NET’s…

Sometimes it’s the little things that count — When .NET 6 dropped this November, a few top-line items grabbed all the attention. I’m talking about C# 10, hot reload, Blazor’s AOT compilation, and some serious inner loop performance improvements. All of them are worthy enhancements. But if you look beyond the marquee items, you’ll see that .NET 6…