> So when purchasing Visual Studio subscription in order to write software for windows, you expect nothing to work out of the box?
If you mean I expect to compose my own complex controls out of less complex building blocks, then yes that's what I want and expect.
> Meanwhile, there's Microsoft, using the funds from our subscriptions and building stuff like Xamarin Forms and abandoning it half-way through
I agree WPF and others have been backbenched for 10 years. Microsoft panicked and needed a strategy for cloud and mobile, while they weren't exactly being threatened on desktop. So from a business perspective it made perfect sense: leave desktop for 10 years. Now they are slowly coming back to it with .NET 5 which is nice, but it wasn't very pleasant to be a Windows desktop dev between 2010 and 2020.
If you mean I expect to compose my own complex controls out of less complex building blocks, then yes that's what I want and expect.
> Meanwhile, there's Microsoft, using the funds from our subscriptions and building stuff like Xamarin Forms and abandoning it half-way through
I agree WPF and others have been backbenched for 10 years. Microsoft panicked and needed a strategy for cloud and mobile, while they weren't exactly being threatened on desktop. So from a business perspective it made perfect sense: leave desktop for 10 years. Now they are slowly coming back to it with .NET 5 which is nice, but it wasn't very pleasant to be a Windows desktop dev between 2010 and 2020.