I'm dealing with slick and pretty consumer apps.

Getting winforms to be pretty is not reasonable. With WPF, you can get the pretty, and then trying to get it to perform reasonably where no browser would break a sweat will drive you to distraction.

And UWP, well don't get me started. Perpetually half-baked, trying hard to push a design system (whatever they're calling metro these days) that isn't popular, isn't thought through, and is so low in information density that I can't even imagine pulling off Spotify with it. And you end up shackled to the Windows Store, the sandbox, and a mobile-style execution lifecycle.

I have been doing mostly WPF/UWP the last four years and hardly got any performance or L&F complaints.

Yes, sometimes the default template is not the best, but with a bit of game development skills it is quite easy to improve it, all the way down to metal.

With the browser one needs to find the magic browser specific CSS properties incantation, with the hope of having a set of divs accelerated by the browser engine, without any control how it actually happens.

Microsoft's attention seems to be elsewhere.

It is in UWP.

10 years ago everyone was resiting Windows 7, any XP was the best OS on Earth.

Now 10 years later, it is the same song with Windows 10 and Windows 7 as protagonists.

It's hard to beat WinForms for cranking out a quick and easy UI on Windows.

Kind of.

VCL is also quite good, in spite of how things went for Delphi and C++ Builder.

Nothing prevents you to use WPF/UWP with visual designer and code-behind, just like Forms.

Where WPF/UWL loose in simplicity is when you want to start customizing L&F or use the standard DataGrid.

VCL was the best back in the days when I used Delphi 5/6, it's kinda sad if it's still true that VCL is still a front runner after a decade of near stagnation by whoever owned it at any given point.

I'll admit though that the only IDE I've used that I like as much as Delphi 6 is Intellij.

WinForms is essentially “inspired” by VCL, through Anders Hejlsberg I guess. As are some parts of C#. WPF otoh is inspired by corporate brain damage.

> WPF otoh is inspired by corporate brain damage.

Not at all, WPF is like having a monoid in the category of endofunctors for UI programming.

Its concepts of UI Lego style building blocks, with templates, commands, mvvm, multi-binding, storyboards..., might be hard to grasp if one is happy with plain code-behind snippets, but once one gets it, it is quite powerful way to write large scale UIs.

I don't know any of that terminology or category theory in general, but I'd like to assure anyone who cares that you really don't have to to get the elegance and power of WPF. It was a steep learning curve sure, but totally worth it. As far as visual control, elegance, and development-pleasure, I think it far surpasses WinForms, the Android UI toolkit, Cocoa, and the web stack. (Though XAML is annoyingly verbose.)

The only reason I stay away is because of the performance issues, and the opaque ways in which performance degrades.

> WPF is like having a monoid in the category of endofunctors for UI programming.

Takeaway: I will start using WPF right after I get a solid grasp on category theory. That will happen "very soon".

It might be powerful, but if something goes wrong it’s impossible to debug. That alone negates all of its advantages to me. I don’t like magic I can’t debug or see source code for.