MS has abandoned WPF; it's now a "community project".
The hot new thing is Avalonia. It's designed to be a mostly drop-in replacement. I really like it, but I'm also slightly worried they might be going for a commercial rug-pull. I hope I'm wrong, and they just keep the paid extension & consulting model to fund their costs.
Avalonia is a cross-platform technology and it is not by Microsoft but I get what you mean.
It's part of the reason why I think the criticism of Electron apps needs to be contextualized. There is often a pretty darn good reason why people choose to use Electron for desktop apps. You can say what you want about react, I don't like it personally, but it's here to stay and it's much more here to stay than any Microsoft UI technology.
There's GTK, but it's not viable on Windows, and it already starts feeling like a 2nd class citizen when you use anything different from the GNOME desktop environment, while Qt forces you to interact with C++ and have to really care about portability, or you use QML which is much slower.
I tried it a couple years ago. Back then, it was still a little bit too slow and inefficient on desktops. It would not match the performance of a well-written Electron app like Obsidian or VSCodium.
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u/sixtyhurtz 2d ago
MS has abandoned WPF; it's now a "community project".
The hot new thing is Avalonia. It's designed to be a mostly drop-in replacement. I really like it, but I'm also slightly worried they might be going for a commercial rug-pull. I hope I'm wrong, and they just keep the paid extension & consulting model to fund their costs.