Note translation: this is a translation of the article Six years of WPF; what's changed? written on August 3, 2012. Now WPF is not six, but seven years, but nothing has changed.

Before moving to Octopus Deploy full time, I spent a year writing WPF risk assessment systems for traders at an investment bank. Before that, I worked as a consultant, mostly focusing on WPF. For the past six years I have been living and breathing technology, and in this post I want to share some thoughts about the past and the future of WPF and XAML.

Six years ago, I wrote a WPF validation article on the Code Project. I also wrote my error provider, which supports IDataErrorInfo , because you won’t believe it! - WPF 3.0 did not support IDataErrorInfo. Later, I worked on several open source WPF projects like Bindable LINQ ( initial reactive programming for WPF, before the invention of Rx) and Magellan (MVC for WPF a la ASP.NET). I even spent some time in a club dedicated to praising MVVM and throwing links to the Code Project, known as WPF Disciples (“WPF Proponents”).
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When I look back at WPF, I see technology with a great foundation that has been corrupted by poor implementation and, more importantly, a lack of financial investment. I am glad that this is in the past for me.

Here's how the markup of a relatively simple window looked back in 2006 (the code was taken from the project I was working on at the time):

	<Window x:Class="PaulStovell.TrialBalance.UserInterface.MainWindow"
	  xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
	  xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
	  xmlns:tb="clr-namespace:PaulStovell.TrialBalance.UserInterface"
	  xmlns:tbp="clr-namespace:PaulStovell.TrialBalance.UserInterface.Providers"
	  xmlns:system="clr-namespace:System;assembly=mscorlib"
	  Title="TrialBalance" 
	  WindowState="Maximized"
	  Width="1000"
	  Height="700"
	  Icon="{StaticResource Image_ApplicationIcon}"
	  Background="{StaticResource Brush_DefaultWindowBackground}"
	  x:Name="_this">

! x:Class! XML! , ?

, 2013- , WPF . :

	<Window x:Class="PaulStovell.TrialBalance.UserInterface.MainWindow"
	  xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
	  xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
	  xmlns:tb="clr-namespace:PaulStovell.TrialBalance.UserInterface"
	  xmlns:tbp="clr-namespace:PaulStovell.TrialBalance.UserInterface.Providers"
	  xmlns:system="clr-namespace:System;assembly=mscorlib"
	  Title="TrialBalance" 
	  WindowState="Maximized"
	  Width="1000"
	  Height="700"
	  Icon="{StaticResource Image_ApplicationIcon}"
	  Background="{StaticResource Brush_DefaultWindowBackground}"
	  x:Name="_this">

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ASP.NET 2006- ( ):

	<%@ Page Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/TrialBalance.Master" AutoEventWireup="true" EnableViewState="false" CodeBehind="Builds.aspx.cs" Inherits="PaulStovell.TrialBalance.MainWebsite.Builds" Title="Downloads - TrialBalance" %>
	<asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContentPlaceholder" runat="server">
	  <asp:PlaceHolder runat="server" Visible="false" ID="_downloadAreaPlaceholder">
	    <h1>Download</h1>

?

	@model BuildsViewModel	
	@section Main {
	  <h1>Download</h1>
	}

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