WPF

FIRST-HAND READS

What people reported, in their own words. Every line links to where it was said.

• “WPF was Microsoft's attempt to nail the 'best of the desktop & best of the web' [And I would argue they effectively nailed it, as a specification.]”

  MIXED · features · Hacker News · 2026-05-17

• “the only truly usable products still seem to be WPF and WinForms”

  MIXED · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-05-04

• “WPF/XAML/whatever is a better way to do a GUI layout -- Instead of pixels you place things in stacks, grids, and panels”

  MIXED · features · Hacker News · 2026-05-02

• “WPF had facilities for theming that seemed capable and well thought out (would be easy, for instance, to turn pill buttons diagonal)”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-04-15

• “Blurry fonts was my main issue with WPF. I get headaches from blurry text and the colour bleeding from ClearType just makes the headache worse.”

  NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-04-06

• “Performance using the WPF widgets was terrible compared to HTML/Javascript/Blink; we ended throwing away most of the WPF code other than the main shell and a few dialogs, reimplementing the importantant stuff with immediate-mode Direct3D/Direct2D to get the necessary speed”

  NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-04-06

• “WPF was the worst framework I ever used. It was unbearably verbose, brutally unforgiving, used 2-way bindings that created updating nightmares, ans not the least it was incredibly slow.”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-04-06

• “I was hoping it would basically bring WPF into first class citizen territory”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-03-22

• “I'm happy with WPF. Starting with .NET 9, it comes with a really good WinUI-style theme.”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-03-22

• “There's a fun bug on WPF and form backgrounds for example which means on fractional DPI screens the background is tiled unpredictably. Had to patch that one up rather quickly one day and it was a mess due to how damn complicated WPF is.”

  NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-02-15

• “it's core WPF: no custom controls, no style prefixes, nothing that breaks your existing project”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-02-10

• “great to develop for too coming from a WPF background at the time”

  POSITIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-01-12

• “I have had too many issues with their frameworks, like WPF, needing to implement Win32 hacks”

  NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2025-11-26

• “write new software using WPF and WinForms even, and it all "just works"”

  POSITIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2025-11-03

• “MVVM makes WPF and Winforms a hassle, and customizing the looks of components is a nightmare, where some seemingly universal attributes will either get misapplied or outright ignored.”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2025-09-24

• “.NET WPF touch screen event messaging system is also broken where it would latch depending on how the finger is swiped off a button. Had to dump that and go with WIN32 as work around so that bug didn't have the capability to crush someone's appendage when being used in machinery.”

  NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2025-09-14

• “fundamental lack of WPF understanding like observables and so on”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Reddit · 2025-05-05

• “WPF Not its strong suit. VS is way better here. Rider only has a preview.”

  NEGATIVE · features · Hacker News · 2024-10-24