WinForms & WPF — .NET and ARM Support (v22.2)

In a previous post, I shared our v22.2 plans regarding our WinForms HTML & CSS templates engine. In this post, I’ll describe .NET and ARM-related enhancements we expect to ship in our v22.2 release cycle.

.NET 6

As you may know, .NET 6 (released on November 8, 2021) is at the long-term support level (LTS). We intend to migrate our .NET Core-based desktop products to .NET 6 (both WinForms and WPF platforms) this year. Our plans include the following:

• Update our Template Gallery and add missing templates for .NET projects.
• Implement the Project Settings Page for .NET solutions.
• Deprecate the .NET support for Visual Studio 2019, since this IDE version does not support .NET 6 applications.

In addition to these items, we intend to overhaul our internal API:

• Migrate API that uses methods and objects of the System.Drawing namespace (Pen, Brush, StringFormat, Matrix, etc.) to counterparts from the DevExpress.Drawing namespace.
• Replace recently deprecated by Microsoft WebClient and WebRequest classes with the HttpClient class.

This is a huge undertaking which involves updating our internal source code. As a user, you should not encounter significant breaking changes. If anything, this overhaul should introduce a series of positive effects: enhanced cross-platform support, a genuine asynchronous API (for example, the async Task LoadAsync() method instead of the current void LoadAsync() method in the WinForms PictureEdit control), and stronger security due to thorough web request management.

We will keep you posted on any significant changes to .NET support via separate blog posts.

Your feedback counts, so please share your plans regarding .NET in future projects.

ARM Support

Thanks to excellent efficiency levels (without significant performance tradeoffs when compared to x86/x64 processors), ARM adoption continues its ascendence. As you know, the Microsoft Store has supported 64-bit ARM apps since November 2018, and Windows 10 is capable of running both 32-bit and 64-bit ARM applications. The availability of competitive ARM-based laptops is also growing at a rapid pace. Apple's latest MacBooks powered by M1 and M2 chips offer terrific performance/battery life, and Lenovo's ThinkPad X13s (released this March) is the first Windows 11 ARM laptop with Microsoft's Pluton security processor.

Visual Studio cannot ignore ARM and in June 2022, Microsoft announced Visual Studio 2022 17.3 Preview 2 — the first version of Visual Studio that can natively build and debug ARM64 apps on ARM-based processors.

You can already build and run DevExpress WPF applications on ARM64 devices (see ARM Support). In v22.2, we expect to support ARM across our WinForms product line as well.

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