anyone excited about .NET 8?
Release notes uptill RC2 didnt give me a boner, so I guess it'll be 'ok'

"frozen" types seem fun though

Meh…
Algebraic types and value semantic COW collections would give me a boner.

glad a lot of progress is being made, but not like wildly excited lol

As it matures there will be less WOW features even if I do hope they keep coming.

But even less spectacular updates counts.

I guess they have kept improving overall performance and memory management.

Who knows, MAUI might be useful at some point. Being decoupled from visual studio releases is a start.

@dontbeevil they should get rid of xml and use their flagship programming language C# directly to compose the UI like Flutter, iOS native, mac OS and Android native does.

Xml based UI is a thing of the past.

@Lensflare XML != XAML, XAML actually strikes a good balance between UI-XML and binding amongst UI components and the code-behind. It isnt the most versatile but a better option than both dead-XML and code-only-UI
@dontbeevil @jaylord MAUI will die a quick death, it's one their "I wonder if can do it" projects, not something they'll reliably support even 3-4y down the line

@ostream winapi is C based IIRC. And C is of course absolutely not suitable for declarative, reactive UI.
You should update your knowledge and look at Flutter/Dart, SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose/Kotlin.

XML based ui like XAML from MS and Android’s xml ui was good in the past when the languages were not ripe enough to declare UI in a nice way in the programming language itself.
But now xml is far inferior and all the major players are building systems without it. Except for MS. And the web. HTML is xml based too.

@ostream the current discussion is about xml based UI being good or not. It’s not about if you should use it. In order to participate in that discussion, you should know something about the topic. By mentioning winapi you showed us that you don’t have a clue. That’s why.

@ostream Again: the topic is not about convincing you to use it.
But if you want an answer, ok:

Improvement.
The problem has been solved a thousand times, as you say, because the previous thing has something that wasn’t quite optimal and could be improved. It was always like that and it will be like that in the future. I don’t need to convince you. We will get better tools regardless of you using them or not.

@ostream ok I admit that I don’t know the technicalities about what’s the difference between xml, sgml, or whatever.

What I mean by "xml based" is if it has this kind of syntax:

<node property="value">
<subnode/>
</node>

@ostream the improvements are:

You don’t need to context switch between two different languages.

You don’t need to bind events and data between two different languages which always results in unreliable stringly typed mappings.

You get an exact interactive live preview of what the UI will be instead of a semi accurately predicted static preview.

You get a performance benefit of statically compiled ui instead of dynamically mapped and resolved ui from xml. The performance applies to the changes in ui because view identity can be baked into the type system and allows to make super fast diffs which allows to update the relevant parts that changed instead of the whole ui.

There are probably more improvements that I missed.

@ostream Btw nothing about that is inherently oop. SwiftUI is anti-oop. It’s all about composition over inheritance. I suspect it’s similar with flutter and jetpack compose but I don’t know for sure.

@ostream XAML + .CS and HTML + .JS share a similarity coz the former's design was heavily influced by the latter, i wont say it's reinvention, more like a standard web-pratice being adobted into Native UI, remember XAML is decades old, it aint anything new

@Lensflare I dont think "it'll be faster to run" point works on XAML, coz if I remember right, XAML and the C# are together compiled into a .g.cs file, so at least in Windows in the end you're running native code
I do agree on other points but Id personally still prefer an XML-based UI, coz you get a feel of the layout that way
A code-only UI, i dont think it's a designer's best friend

@ostream winapi is neither declarative nor reactive.

@ostream that’s procedural. Winapi and qt are both procedural.

@ostream With xml based UI, the xml part is declarative and the "code behind" is procedural.

With winapi and qt, everything is procedural.

With flutter, the ui code itself is declarative.