I was thrilled to see the latest updates on the 2023 Roadmap deliverables for WPF, showcasing the remarkable progress they have made towards modernization and infrastructure upgrades. Their commitment to enhancing user experience and improving functionality remains at the forefront of the development efforts.

Modernization Enhancements

1. New Control – FolderBrowserDialog: They are delighted to announce that the implementation review and merge for the new control have been successfully completed. 🎉🎉 Moreover, they have added a sample application for FolderBrowserDialog, allowing users to explore its capabilities firsthand. To ensure seamless integration with existing controls and hierarchy, they have also included several tests and plan to add more in the future.
2. Win11 Theming: The WPF team is currently in the process of completing proof of concepts to determine the best approach for delivering Win11 Theming (I hope one of them uses wpfui). While they are hoping to finish this feature within the next couple of weeks, it may not make it in time for .NET 8, possibly being released in .NET 9. Of course, they will keep the community informed as they finalize the concrete steps for its implementation.
3. Nullability Annotations: They continue to make progress on nullability annotations, with particular focus on the System.Windows.Input.Manipulations assembly. Although this work is ongoing, they wanted to emphasize that it does not hinder community contributions to other assemblies.

Testing infrastructure update

They made significant progress and effort into make testing more robust – this helps both them and us, contributors.

Community Collaboration

Speaking of contributors, it is visible how immensely grateful are they to the community for their invaluable contributions and feedback. As an example, the following community Pull Requests (PRs) have been successfully merged in May and June, addressing various enhancements and bug fixes:

• Modernize the empty string checking in ContentType
• Replace String.CompareOrdinal to string.Equals Part 3
• Improve font performance in FamilyCollection.LookupFamily
• Allow right-click in system menu
• Remove dead code from ReflectionHelper
• Use TextAlignment for TextBox.GetCharacterIndexFromPoint
• Remove dead code from XamlNamespace generic parsing
• Adding GreaterThanZero to DoubleUtil.cs
• Fall back to Window.Title if GetWindowText fails
• Use Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.NetAnalyzers
• Unblock AltGr+Oem2/5 typing inside ListBox
• Fix InputEventArgs.Timestamp field
• Fix sc Color.ToString()

Thanks to these contributors, they were able to resolve several regression issues in .NET 7. Based on the discussions on these items, they deeply appreciate the dedication to improving WPF and they are committed to reducing the turnaround time for addressing issues and reviewing PRs.

I am joining them to say how incredibly proud I am of the progress made on their 2023 Roadmap and are grateful for the ongoing support and collaboration of the community. Together, we are shaping a brighter future for WPF, empowering developers to create exceptional user experiences. For sure, do stay tuned for more exciting updates and enhancements to come!