How I Build WPF Apps in the Android Way
I’ve been building Android apps for years; the development experience and community built around it is fantastic. There are a lot of open source libraries and projects from where you can learn from. Thanks to Android Jetpack and Google pushing MVVM design pattern adoption, almost every app follows the same rules and uses the same robust core libraries.
Microsoft vs Google
I can’t say the same for .NET and Microsoft. When I started working on WPF apps, I’ve immediately felt “uncomfortable”. There is a smaller community and really few open source projects, Microsoft is suggesting to use MVVM but you often need to break this pattern because there are controls and classes that are not built for it.
For years, Microsoft and it’s closed-source philosophy slowed down the evolution of the .NET ecosystem. Now, after shifting towards a more “open” approach, Microsoft is trying to build back a strong developer community built around C# and .NET framework. They’re making more open source libraries (“CommunityToolkit” clearly explains the new strategy) and extending support for other platforms such as Linux. Nevertheless, Microsoft is still years behind the Android developer experience.
