Be thankful you've never found yourself involved in the Microsoft system of APIs. They behave beyond irrationally. Perhaps somebody can explain why from an internal view, but from an external view it's like this - WPF was one of Microsoft's first UI frameworks released after the Winforms age. It was initially Windows only but had a large enough following that it eventually ended up getting non-official ports to just about every platform. And it was really quite an excellent UI library.
So then Microsoft decided to follow this up with UWP. UWP was the intended successor to WPF, the 'Universal Windows Platform'. It was supposed to run on any Windows platform. But then the Windows Phone got cancelled, and they also eventually cancelled all support for anything except Windows 10. So it turned into the Windows 10 Platform. And it was heavily tied into the Microsoft store to the point that actually deploying it elsewhere was rendered infeasible. Outside of that it was a technically inferior WPF with a few nicer looking default UI elements and a bunch of new bugs. Oh and some namespaces and other things were changed mostly pretty randomly just enough to make it completely incompatible with WPF.
And then this process repeated multiple times over. Each time they lost more and more developers. If they had simply continued building on WPF I think they would likely be a universal standard for UI development, at least for desktop. Instead they're now onto WinUI 3 which nobody uses, including Microsoft. Oh and all the while this was happening they were also developing Xamarin (and similar timeline of a million subsequent renamings and 'refactorings') which is pretty much the same thing, but different, and cross platform, but not.
I'm the sort that'd naturally leap to conspiratorial explanations - Microsoft pushing anything called "trusted" feels like a rusted van with darkened windows sitting outside a school with "FREE CANDY" sloppily painted on the side. But in this case.. no, Microsoft is just so completely weird and irrational with how they push things, often to the point of self defeat.
all of Microsoft's UI is like this and I really don't get it. Forms, WPF, and UWP were all abandoned at different stages of development.
Microsoft ships a UWP demo repository which includes the most fully functional Bluetooth manager anyone has ever built for W10. The stock Bluetooth manager has maybe 10% of the functionality. It's also fundamentally broken in a lot of ways. But this UWP demo they have should have been the stock app. It's wild.
Then of course you still have 50 year old UIs hiding in the lowest levels of the control panel. You can dig through the archeological record on your own pc and look at Win3 UI designs. It's astonishing.
At this point, I don't know anyone who uses any of Microsoft's UI frameworks for a real product. It's either QT or Avalonia or something. Who would ever trust their newest framework when every prior framework was abandoned half-finished and left to rot for years?
So then Microsoft decided to follow this up with UWP. UWP was the intended successor to WPF, the 'Universal Windows Platform'. It was supposed to run on any Windows platform. But then the Windows Phone got cancelled, and they also eventually cancelled all support for anything except Windows 10. So it turned into the Windows 10 Platform. And it was heavily tied into the Microsoft store to the point that actually deploying it elsewhere was rendered infeasible. Outside of that it was a technically inferior WPF with a few nicer looking default UI elements and a bunch of new bugs. Oh and some namespaces and other things were changed mostly pretty randomly just enough to make it completely incompatible with WPF.
And then this process repeated multiple times over. Each time they lost more and more developers. If they had simply continued building on WPF I think they would likely be a universal standard for UI development, at least for desktop. Instead they're now onto WinUI 3 which nobody uses, including Microsoft. Oh and all the while this was happening they were also developing Xamarin (and similar timeline of a million subsequent renamings and 'refactorings') which is pretty much the same thing, but different, and cross platform, but not.
I'm the sort that'd naturally leap to conspiratorial explanations - Microsoft pushing anything called "trusted" feels like a rusted van with darkened windows sitting outside a school with "FREE CANDY" sloppily painted on the side. But in this case.. no, Microsoft is just so completely weird and irrational with how they push things, often to the point of self defeat.