Products · Product
WPF
Raised as a usability problem by 39 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2011–2026), in 37 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
MVVM design causes tight coupling, constant refactoring, and hard debuggingUnreviewed
20112026- Doing WPF well needs careful architecture; converting WinForms apps was a nightmare2022-12-17
- Using WPF in practice feels clunky compared to React/Vue2019-12-02
- WPF's convoluted MVVM design causes high coupling, constant refactoring, and hard debugging2015-09-05
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 44 complaints
- Styling and layout in modern .NET GUI development is much more complicated than in VB62026-05-02
- WPF widgets perform terribly, forcing developers to rewrite the app's core rendering2026-04-06
- Full of footguns that make developers easily make mistakes, plus rigid organization2026-01-27
- Touch interface latches on when finger presses, holds and slides off screen2025-12-12
- Builder generates Xaml that is almost impossible to maintain2025-11-12
- Development workflow is painful and difficult to learn compared to WinForms2025-08-04
- Styling is confusing for people coming from CSS2024-01-07
- Documentation and SDK examples are hard to learn from, so people must buy books2024-01-02
- Layout, margins, styling and grids are hard to express without repetitive, convoluted code2023-11-22
- WYSIWYG designer tools fall short for building more complex applications2023-03-17
- Dynamic row heights force slow layout of every row, making scrolling sluggish2023-03-06
- Text looks blurry and horrible on standard non-HiDPI displays2023-03-05
- Scrolling long lists slows down and spins up CPU because every item is iterated2023-03-05
- Had to import or write extra libraries to handle variable updates through UI bindings2022-12-17
- Open popups overlay everything, even windows from other applications2022-12-17
- Doing WPF well needs careful architecture; converting WinForms apps was a nightmare2022-12-17
- MVVM and converters are hard to reason about and debug2021-12-03
- Styles and bindings are overly verbose and the developer keeps fighting the tooling2021-12-03
- Data bindings and IValueConverter don't allow async, forcing ugly workarounds2021-09-24
- Styling components is awful, making WPF hard to work with for custom UI2021-08-16
- Custom styling requires miserable boilerplate XML and overriding unrelated values2021-07-11
- Must hand-count and specify row and column indices on every child, which is bloated and error-prone2020-03-18
- Grid and StackPanel layouts break, lack sane defaults, and bound comboboxes in datagrids are very slow2020-03-16
- Using WPF in practice feels clunky compared to React/Vue2019-12-02
- Hard to remember and learn the binding syntax2019-09-06
- Data binding is opaque, verbose, and hard to debug when it fails2019-05-23
- Editing layouts by mouse is inconvenient, so developers drop into XAML markup instead2018-11-19
- Grid layouts need upfront planning; adding an alignment line means renumbering rows and columns2018-09-11
- Documentation is atrocious for library and custom control authors2018-08-24
- Too much markup to type, and error messages are unhelpful2018-08-24
- Steep learning curve; the commenter gave up rewriting the app in it three times2018-06-11
- Form designer generates oversized buttons dumped randomly in the middle of forms, hurting usability2018-06-02
- UI-thread freezes from large data binding are opaque and hard to control2018-05-25
- Inverting an enum value needs about 15 lines of converter code elsewhere2018-05-02
- Writing MVVM bindings with converters is cumbersome and slow to do2017-11-15
- Writing XAML breaks down quickly for anything beyond hello world, requiring an IDE2017-06-10
- Designer output is awful and needs manual cleanup, so the visual editor wastes time2017-02-10
- WPF's convoluted MVVM design causes high coupling, constant refactoring, and hard debugging2015-09-05
- Must add Dispatcher.HasThreadAccess checks to every UI method after async calls2015-07-08
- WPF applications hang because rendering blocks the UI thread2015-05-20
- Simple row key-press handling needs a custom dependency property and hours of searching2013-10-10
- Blurry, smoothed text made the interface hard to read and unusable2012-05-18
- Introduces incredible lag and high memory use, giving users a poor experience2011-12-19
- WPF and Silverlight apps feel too slow to match native code2011-06-03