> I got my start in FoxPro, worked some in VB6 and MFC/C++ and then worked in .NET WinForms and WPF which I still use on occasion to this day for things that simply work better on the desktop - mostly tools or applications that need to interface with hardware.
> When I think back on those days one thing that stands out to me is how easy and fast it was to develop functional UIs for these applications due to a plethora of pre-made components, easy to use visual tools that allow easy placement and visualization of content. And maybe more importantly a well defined underlying UI API that supported creation of common controls that addressed the most common use cases.
The sheer ugliness that is produced by .Net developers is astounding. The simplest most ridiculous thing is the sizing of buttons. The great simple thing of using something like bootstrap is that buttons are padded in nice proportions. The only options are text, S/M/L and some colour styles. But if you hand a developer a form designer tool they generate buttons 10x bigger dumped somewhere in the middle of the form.
The other WPF form that's been around wehre I work for 8 years has a peach coloured background... because the company logo is kind of orange.
Sticking to the rules that boostrap / material design give you produces quite nice looking and usable interfaces. But sticking to the rules of Windows UIs gives you at best usable but almost never nice looking.
Then of course there's the unholy curse of Java UIs...
Niche enterprise UIs never even got the benefit of one designed, let alone a team. The devs could be handed the most amazing and the result would still look “undesigned”.
Bootstrap provides cookie cutter design solutions, but it is well known that you’ll benefit from a designer if you need something more custom (and your UI will look bad if you don’t invest much in its design).
You should compare stock wpf and html that renders the system controls. Otherwise there are many equivalents to bootstrap in the wpf world. The team that made your wpf probably would have made the same abomination.
> When I think back on those days one thing that stands out to me is how easy and fast it was to develop functional UIs for these applications due to a plethora of pre-made components, easy to use visual tools that allow easy placement and visualization of content. And maybe more importantly a well defined underlying UI API that supported creation of common controls that addressed the most common use cases.
The sheer ugliness that is produced by .Net developers is astounding. The simplest most ridiculous thing is the sizing of buttons. The great simple thing of using something like bootstrap is that buttons are padded in nice proportions. The only options are text, S/M/L and some colour styles. But if you hand a developer a form designer tool they generate buttons 10x bigger dumped somewhere in the middle of the form.
The other WPF form that's been around wehre I work for 8 years has a peach coloured background... because the company logo is kind of orange.
Sticking to the rules that boostrap / material design give you produces quite nice looking and usable interfaces. But sticking to the rules of Windows UIs gives you at best usable but almost never nice looking.
Then of course there's the unholy curse of Java UIs...