BSA – C#/WPF .NET 5

Most of my focus is on SW for the time being, and it is sadly less interesting to write about yet. My BSA project is ambiguous specially since I keep switching development platform.

Back in the early days I did vector graphics on DOS. The challenge then was that you needed to even develop raster graphics functions yourself. My first 2D drawing was on Windows 95 using C++/MFC. That was a great success, but after that I basically stopped doing UI for a long time. I did a test using GDI+, Lazarus, Qt and even C#/Forms before I finally had a chance to work with Qt/QML.

Qt/QML is so far the best solution in terms of the result, but I am concerned that QML is so slow to develop with, so I want to try yet another solution – C#/WPF and .NET 5.

The main difference between QML and WPF in 2021 is that Visual Studio actually work as it is supposed to – it is a far better integration to XAML and C# than QML is. The debugger work properly and you only code in XAML and C#.

The second difference is 3rd party libraries. In QML they are expensive if they exist at all, while in Visual Studio you have access to ca 235,000 libraries with a single click.

Something that is not different is that you need to modify a lot of controls to have a dark theme etc, but you have the advantage that it’s a lot of 3rd parties that has done this already.

My WPF version of BSA don’t look as cool as my QML version yet, but just wait.

I have coded in C# before and was tempted to develop BSA in Forms since .NET 4.6.2, but .NET 5 and WPF seems to be much faster to work with than QML. My QML version is not lost because I will generate code for QML regardless. And I need to generate code for C#/WPF .NET 5 as well. And don’t worry, I will pick up Lazaruz as well at some point.

Categories: HMI

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