> The only areas where HTML5 is winner are styling, maybe layout, and definitely the labor market
You're missing a major feature - cross platform. WPF is Windows only.
As someone who has also built a few WPF apps (altho not for some years now), I absolutely hated working with XAML - the visual designer in Visual Studio was really buggy and brought any machine to it's knees. Doing things without the designer, hand cranking all that XML felt really clunky, and things like event handling and synchronisation were fiddly to get right.
HTML and CSS aren't perfect by a stretch, but at this point I think they're a great option for desktop UIs, especially if cross-platform is desirable (and I say this as a long in the tooth, Microsoft-stack focused architect).
> You're missing a major feature - cross platform. WPF is Windows only.
You’re missing the context. The OP has created that Electron-like thing to embed into a windows-only WPF app.
> the visual designer in Visual Studio was really buggy
Expression blend was, and still is, much better. It’s not especially friendly towards programmers, initially I had to read quite a lot of documentation and articles. But now I use it a lot (albeit not exclusively) and enjoy doing so.
> things like event handling and synchronization were fiddly to get right.
For me, MVVM works in 90%. The trick is to recognize the 10% of things for which it doesn’t, and do something else like code behind, or programmatic visual tree manipulation/generation, or something else.
> I think they're a great option for desktop UIs
If that desktop UI is a thin interface between user and a web server/cloud, maybe. If that desktop UI actually does something locally, I don’t think HTML is a great option: shell integration, WinAPI interop (both need COM interop). Also JavaScript isn’t exceptionally good general-purpose programming language especially for medium to large projects, e.g. MS had to create a TypeScript on top of JS for their VS Code.
> You’re missing the context. The OP has created that Electron-like thing to embed into a windows-only WPF app.
I didn't miss that, I was talking in a more general sense about HTML vs WPF.
> Expression blend was, and still is, much better.
I never did actually try this properly - I had a brief play with it years ago when it first came out, but it seemed like a toy; maybe I should give it a go now it's had time to mature.
> Also JavaScript isn’t exceptionally good general-purpose programming language
No arguments there, I'm a sense-confessed JS hater ;) Typescript however, is an absolute joy to use.
Technically no, the expression was lost a few years ago.
But practically yes, the blend is still a thing. The latest version of visual studio 2017 comes with a corresponding version of it. It’s as useful for everything XAML as the expression one was in 2010 when I started using it.
You're missing a major feature - cross platform. WPF is Windows only.
As someone who has also built a few WPF apps (altho not for some years now), I absolutely hated working with XAML - the visual designer in Visual Studio was really buggy and brought any machine to it's knees. Doing things without the designer, hand cranking all that XML felt really clunky, and things like event handling and synchronisation were fiddly to get right.
HTML and CSS aren't perfect by a stretch, but at this point I think they're a great option for desktop UIs, especially if cross-platform is desirable (and I say this as a long in the tooth, Microsoft-stack focused architect).