Codename Avalon

This week Liam takes the mic — and the segue of a lifetime — to tell the story of a framework he unapologetically loves: WPF.

It’s part personal history, part technology retrospective, and part quiet argument that the ideas WPF introduced never really went away. They just changed frameworks.

We start in 2005, with a beautiful Mac network monitoring tool, a very ugly WinForms companion app, and the tantalising promise of something Microsoft was calling Avalon. From there we walk forward through the moments that shaped modern .NET UI development.

Along the way we get into:

• The quiet indignity of battleship-grey WinForms — and the day Avalon promised something better
• That first moment when a control template clicked, and you realised look and behaviour didn’t have to be the same thing
• Why MVVM felt less like a pattern and more like a small act of liberation
• The strange satisfaction of building a custom control from the measure/arrange level up — and the addictive rabbit hole of virtualisation, animations, and pixel-perfect fidelity
• The “I don’t even see the code anymore” flow state of writing XAML by hand
• Why Silverlight’s death still stings — and why it wasn’t really Microsoft’s fault
• The lineage argument: that WPF’s DNA is quietly running inside WinRT, UWP, WinUI, MAUI — and probably Avalonia
• Why MAUI has already outlived Silverlight, and why “what if they Silverlight it?” isn’t the threat people think it is
• And the uncomfortable truth that Liam still loves WPF — he just doesn’t have a reason to use it anymore

There’s a soft landing at the end about Xamarin’s journey into MAUI, Liam’s very first MAUI UI July post; which was — of course — partially about WPF.

If you’ve ever bound a property, wrangled a DataTemplate, or felt a small flicker of joy the first time a Style did exactly what you wanted — this one’s for you.

No drinks tonight — just Liam’s notes, Matt’s memory, and a healthy dose of nostalgia.

• Josh Smith’s MSDN article introducing MVVM 📰
• Steve Jobs — Thoughts on Flash ✍️
• OpenSilver — Silverlight, reborn on WebAssembly
• Avalonia — cross-platform, XAML-based, and possibly named after you-know-what
• Windows Community Toolkit (formerly WPF Community Toolkit — home of the OG DataGrid)
• Liam’s 2022 MAUI UI July post: .NET MAUI Community Toolkit 📎
• MAUI UI July 📅
• BDD Ep. 42 — Brandon Minnick on the Xamarin → MAUI journey
• Bubbles is back! Catch Matt, Liam and Bubbles at the Sydney Alt.NET Meetup — online, 25th August 🎤

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Cheers! 🍻