Windows Desktop Application Technologies

26th November 2021

I've been recently looking at writing some new desktop apps for Windows in .NET 5.0, because I like to stay within the last ten years when writing programs. Reviewing the Windows developer guidance, Microsoft published a nice, extensive writeup on migrating from legacy desktop apps to WPF in September 2021. In this writeup, they detail the history of Windows UI Desktop Technologies since 1995, from Win32, through WinForms and WPF, to UWP.

They also cite a study by Telerik which details the responses from 2016 of developers and their favoured languages and preferred Windows UI Desktop Technologies, amongst other bits. I shall continue to refer to Windows UI Desktop Technologies as Windows UI Desktop Technologies.

To save the effort of handing out some personal data in exchange for a whitepaper, these are reproduced both within the Microsoft article, and on i-programmer.info.