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Windows Forms Lives On in .NET 6
Windows Forms would like you to know that the reports of its death are greatly exaggerated.
How exaggerated? Claims of its death go back at least to 2014, when a post started off with “Everyone knows WinForms is dead, right?” And that was just one of many through the years, as a quick web search will confirm.
But Microsoft begs to differ.
“We continue to support and innovate in Windows Forms runtime,” said Microsoft’s Igor Velikorossov last month in announcing what’s new for WinForms in .NET 6. He’s a software engineer on the dev team for the 19-year-old product, a free and open-source graphical (GUI) class library included as a part of .NET, as described by Wikipedia.
Here’s how Microsoft describes it for you coders who might have been more concerned about learning your ABCs when it was introduced in 2002:
Windows Forms (WinForms) is a UI framework for building Windows desktop applications. It is a .NET wrapper over Windows user interface libraries, such as User32 and GDI+. It also offers controls and other functionality that is unique to Windows Forms.Windows Forms also provides one of the most productive ways to create desktop applications based on the visual designer provided in Visual Studio. It enables drag-and-drop of visual controls and other similar functionality that make it easy to build desktop applications.
Velikorossov said Microsoft began a WinForms modernization and rejuvenation effort back when .NET Core 3.0 came on the scene in 2019. In explaining what’s new for WinForms in .NET 6, he detailed changes in accessibility, application bootstrapping, templates, runtime designers and high DPI and scaling.
[Click on image for larger view.] WinForms Accessibility Improvements (source: Microsoft).
“Making Windows Forms applications more accessible to more users is one of the big goals for the team,” Velikorossov said, listing a host of enhancements:
- Improved support for assistive technology when using Windows Forms apps. UIA providers enable tools like Narrator and others to interact with the elements of an application. UIA is also often used to create test automation to drive apps.
We have now added UIA providers support for the following controls:CheckedListBoxLinkLabelPanelScrollBarTabControlTrackBar
- Improved Narrator announcements in
DataGridView,ErrorProviderandListViewcolumn header controls. - Keyboard …….
Source: https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2021/12/03/winforms-net-6.aspx
