Why progress of WPF too slow

[orhantt]

I can't see any significant change in the WPF repo in the last year either. Forget Native AOT, we haven't even gotten proper trimming yet. There's no progress on the .NET 10 preparation milestone. At the very least, I was hoping for some simple visual improvements, but even the Fluent theme hasn't been fully implemented.

We're still opening XML tags to define columns in Grid — this is much simpler in Avalonia. DataGrid still doesn't have an auto filter feature. There's no native DataGrid export-to-Excel feature either, even though both are Microsoft products.

[miloush]

We're still opening XML tags to define columns in Grid — this is much simpler in Avalonia.

#9802 already shipped in .NET 10, you can use Column/RowDefinitions as attributes.

DataGrid still doesn't have an auto filter feature. There's no native DataGrid export-to-Excel feature either, even though both are Microsoft products.

There is no requests for these features in this repo, and I would prefer if the team focused on core features that cannot be provided by 3rd parties. No UI framework provides these built in.

[lextm]

In only a few months, the community fork LibreWPF has evolved into a relatively stable stage for macOS and Linux users, so I don't think you should put all the eggs in one basket.

Besides, it is interesting that you mention a third party framework that doesn't even have a free and open source DataGrid from its vendor. Different from that, WPF offers you a basic and open source grid control and there are tons of more powerful commercial grid control vendors in the ecosystem.

[ekalchev]

WPF was sent to India to die, not to flourish. The only plus of WPF is that is stable and it is fine for small apps. When the apps grow bigger this shit is slow as hell. We have multiple desktop apps that we are trying to migrate to WinUI3/NativeAOT now. The performance difference is huge even if WinUI3 is not the best performant UI framework. If you don't have a good reason to stick with WPF i advice you to run away from it. There so many alternatives now.

[lextm]

VS Shell is still written in WPF, which remains one of the largest WPF apps out there. And VS 2026 is clearly not slow.

Microsoft recently restart to invest into WinUI, but it still lacks of a rich ecosystem like WPF and well established apps (Windows didn't heavily use it). It needs more time to reach the level of stability.

[ekalchev]

Right. I spent a significant amount of time researching how Visual Studio works with DnSpy. They don’t use standard resource management patterns at all—almost everything is custom.

Basically, they’ve built workarounds for many of the things that are slow in WPF, using custom implementations instead of the standard patterns recommended by WPF. But that requires a significant amount of engineering effort and resources.

Unfortunately, most control authors on GitHub don’t bother building these kinds of workarounds, so we end up with slow community controls that are difficult or even impossible to optimize further, even when we’re willing to put in the effort.

fluentribbon/Fluent.Ribbon#1267

[lextm]

Microsoft has its legal obligation to keep its WPF stable for commercial customers, so I don't expect any VS 2026 customization on WPF will end up in upstream WPF repo any time soon. They don't have extra resources to spare either, as their current focus (MAUI and WinUI) already lacks of hands.

But technically, a community fork like LibreWPF has the freedom to adopt such changes and replace the standard (legacy) components, enjoying the performance benefits, while still keeping largely the compatibility goals. That to me remains a better approach than migrating apps to WinUI.

[webprofusion-chrisc]

It's interesting that obvious bugs (e.g. different behavior to .net 4.x) like combobox resetting the selected index to the wrong item have no a activity. Anyone using the keyboard instead of the mouse would encounter this type of problem: #10767

I'm all for stability, I don't think WPF needs many more new features, but any remaining rough edges could at least be rounded off.

[lindexi]

I open source https://github.com/WpfLab/WpfRuntime

WpfRuntime is an experimental and actively maintained WPF repository. It aims to enable faster iteration, provide a straightforward development experience, and make it easier for the community to build, modify, and experiment with WPF.

[deanchalk]

it might surprise some of you to know that WPF hasn't really changed or improved since 2006, but I've spent the last 20 years building and maintaining high performance WPF apps for the investment banking industry. WPF is very capable and should have been given more love from the start by Microsoft. I've just joined a company that specialises in migrating WPF and Winforms to WinUI, because it's seems WPF has no future

[lextm]

WPF hasn't really changed or improved since 2006

That's not very true. Microsoft invested significantly on WPF for .NET Framework 4.0 and .NET Core 3.x.

I've just joined a company that specialises in migrating WPF and Winforms to WinUI, because it's seems WPF has no future

I don't think WinUI alone is more future proof than WPF. Without a cross-platform companion (Uno Platform or ProGPU), its Windows only limitation can be a problem.

Anyway WPF has more promising forks like LibreWPF, so the future is yet to be determined.