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So I'm working on a contract converting an old XBase app to WPF. The UI was to be a MDI app. Spent 2 days researching this then found out that MDI is not supported in WPF.
I mean. really??
So I started Googling. Some of the posts I saw talked about how MDI is dead, other say no.
This started me thinking about how much influence Microsoft has. One subtle change like that cause a ripple effect in development arenas.
I personally like options, because my users always want something different. No two UI's are the same. But now, it seems, because of a decision by MS, they will ALL be somewhat the same.
Does this sort of thing bother you, or do you just go with the flow?
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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Haven't you wondered yet why VS2010 or VS2012 don't have a MDI mode?
MS is unapologetic.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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Ya, I have thought of it from time to time. But I'm comfortable with the design of VS because there's a lot of flexibility in the tab docking/detaching. But I also remember VB 6 which had an MDI option.
What I demoed to the customer this morning was basically the VS style - tabs with the option to "float" tabs into windows.
As soon as I get it worked out I'll write up an article and post it here.
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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I'm with you; I can't stand that VS keeps detaching my stuff when I click in the wrong place -- I'd like to at least disable that.
I feel like the geezer at the nudist colony -- I drop my cigar at least three times a day. 
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I won't miss it. MDI was abused by every noob programmer anyway.
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I agree, but that's true for anything a noob touches
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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You do know that MS has been trying to kill MDI off since 2003 don't you?
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That's what I saw in some of my research. However, if you look at how recent MS apps are developed, they really are MDI apps in disguise. Consider Excel 2010. You CAN open multiple docs in one instance, it's just not intuitive.
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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It's not quite MDI. They use multiple Top Level SDI apps instead.
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Semantics I guess. If you look at Excel, there can be many workbooks open at once in a single instance of Excel. That's really the definition of MDI. How the code it between the sheets is transparent to the user.
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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The semantics are important in this case because they have subtle, confusing differences from traditional MDI's.
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Agreed. But the real point is - User's are used to MDI's after using them for so many years. The 'new' (relatively speaking) Office UI (SDI, Ribbon) wasn't well received. I know people now who still complain about the ribbon.
The point I was making is that MS decides to change a UI element, and the whole world goes dark for a while until everyone catches up. And alot of time, people don't like it.
From what I can see, Win 8 isn't that well received either. Again, here's another major UI shift with no really user experience base to back it up.
They learned nothing from Vista.
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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"When the revolution comes, you will eat peaches and cream!"
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Kevin Marois wrote: They learned nothing from Vista.
yeah, they did. They learned that no one is out to make their fortune writing desktop apps anymore. It's either root or die, and so they're rooting in another direction. As stupid as they seem, they're not dead yet.
"Seize the day" - Horace
"It's not what he doesn't know that scares me; it's what he knows for sure that just ain't so!" - Will Rogers, said by him about Herbert Hoover
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cpkilekofp wrote: They learned that no one is out to make their fortune writing desktop apps anymore.
I'v been hearing this "Windows Apps Are Dead" bit for years and it's ridiculous. There are thousands upon thousands of Windows applications that will never be a web, tablet, or phone apps. They're enterprise applications because they don't need to be anything else. They're used in large scale corporations for a wide variety of purposes, and they are best developed as desktop apps. I left a company in January that had a number of Widows desktop apps that are central to their business operations. They are used solely in-house and will never be run in a browser or tablet.
I now make my living working for myself creating and maintaining Windows applications, and I will continue to do so because they're not going anywhere. There are plenty of companies that are making their fortunes creating & selling desktop apps and tools/controls, etc.
What Microsoft has failed to learn is that they really DON'T know best when it comes to software design, and Vista proved it. Win 8 adds to that. It's a failure of design because they're trying to take a UI designed for other platforms and force it down the throat of desktop users. It's completely counter-intuitive in a desktop environment.
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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Kevin Marois wrote: I'v been hearing this "Windows Apps Are Dead" bit for years and it's ridiculous.
Well, you're right. Look at the public parts of my profile: I'm a .NET developer for a (very!) large corporation, and despite the fact that here as elsewhere Ja(va) Rules, .NET has a strong presence because you can still run it "lights out" with higher confidence within its working range than Java (admittedly, this comparison is skewed in .NET's favor by the limited number of environments (Windows, Mono on Linux) on which .NET runs - the variety of environments allows many in which the implemented JVM is, hmmm, less than wholesome in some versions and thus bumps the overall reliability rate across all Java environments down).
What I said specifically was
They learned that no one is out to make their fortune writing desktop apps anymore.
Sure, you can make a living, and a very decent living at that. However, the environment is far too mature for "killer apps" to continue to emerge (yes, I'm deliberately tempting fate in the hope that I'm the one to write one LOL) so the most ambitious among us are tilling new ground in iOS and Android. Desktop apps will continue to have years, decades, and perhaps centuries of growth and change without becoming unrecognizable as desktop apps, and tons of income will flow, but it's farming, with a relatively predictable return barring disaster.
Desktop apps will produce no gold rushes unless a new killer app emerges.
Mobile applications, on the other hand, are making new fortunes. The shift from phone-centered apps to tablet apps is moving at breakneck pace, and the service platform is still in flux. Remember CP/M? No? Maybe no one will remember Android in 30 years, either (NOT a prediction!!). However, I do mean that there's still room for Microsoft to make another turn in their business model.
If you don't know, Microsoft was at first the supplier of BASIC interpreters to many different manufacturers of personal computers, most famously the Apple II via Applesoft, a dialect with which I had personal and professional experience at one time.
Then they bought an operating system which could be adapted to the soon-to-be-introduced architecture of the IBM PC, and after the president of the company that made operating system for more personal computers than any other company (CP/M) turned down IBM's anonymous request for a version for its new Intel 8086 architecture, Microsoft offered its own alternative, thus becoming a multibillion dollar company and beginning a long partnership with IBM.
The next phase of its business led to its break with IBM: Windows. Skipping most of the history, MS developed Windows as a graphical shell for DOS, then built an operating system to support it, Windows NT, that directly competed with IBM's GUI-based OS called OS/2 (which I still consider to have had many technically superior features once version 2.0 was introduced). OS/2 lost when MS changed Windows into 95/NT and could no longer run the most recent version of Office. In case you (or, really, some noob reader) didn't know what a killer app was, Office on Windows 95 killed OS/2 because the corporate user base had decided that Office was the future thus only that which could run Office had a future.
This phase is still in place, but in the late '90s the server became a major emphasis as MS began to acquire and develop IIS, SQL Server (after slicing its share from codevelopment with Sybase), Biztalk, etc., thus bringing us to where we have been through the last 10-12 years or so. Now we have a new direction in Microsoft.
MS continued to sell BASIC interperters to Apple until the Apple II series was discontinued in the 90s.
MS continued to sell DOS for years after all their major desktop applications had become Windows applications.
Despite free alternatives available from the Internet, the various programs of the MS Office suite continue to sell well...just not as well, at least to the consumer.
MS wants to make another fortune, while still needing to milk the cows that already keep them alive. Neither of us will starve if we milk the same cows, but we're not likely to be retiring to waterfront property in Fort Lauderdale, either.
"Seize the day" - Horace
"It's not what he doesn't know that scares me; it's what he knows for sure that just ain't so!" - Will Rogers, said by him about Herbert Hoover
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Interesting piece of writing.
April
Comm100 - Leading Live Chat Software Provider
modified 27-May-14 8:32am.
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cpkilekofp wrote: Then they bought an operating system which could be adapted to the soon-to-be-introduced architecture of the IBM PC, and after the president of the company that made operating system for more personal computers than any other company (CP/M) turned down IBM's anonymous request for a version for its new Intel 8086 architecture, Microsoft offered its own alternative, thus becoming a multibillion dollar company and beginning a long partnership with IBM.
There is a great deal of "mythology" in the various stories of how IBM "bounced off" Digital Resarch and its CP/M OS.
IBM representatives did go to Gary and Dorothy Killdall's company, Digital Research, to inquire about an OS. Dorothy normally handled the business side of the company, and it is not true that Gary ignored IBM by going off flying, in a kind of deliberate insult.
The IBM representatives presented Dorothy with an enormous legally binding non-disclosure agreement, demanding that the the company sign-off on it before they would even talk to DR about what they wanted. Of course, she refused, as Gary would have done.
So, said IBM reps went to Seattle, where Bill Gates, with Ballmer as cheerleader, signed-on on the NDA, and pitched them an OS he did not even own yet, claiming that he owned it. They signed on, and Bill Gates, of course without disclosing what he had done with IBM, bought the "larval stage" OS from its creator.
And, that's how many great fortunes start: with deception.
My remarks are based on first-hand accounts by someone who knew Gary and Dorothy well, as well as Robert X. Cringely's excellent reportage.
yrs, Bill
"So long as … social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates divine destiny, with human fatality … so long as three problems of the age: degradation of man by poverty; ruin of women by starvation; dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night: are not solved: so long as social asphyxia shall be possible … so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless." Victor Hugo, "Les Misérables," 1862
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BillWoodruff wrote: My remarks are based on first-hand accounts by someone who knew Gary and Dorothy
well, as well as Robert X. Cringely's excellent reportage
I shortened Cringely's coverage quite a bit and went with a gloss of the most popular of the legends. I also skipped the part about 86-DOS as not being relevant to my point, though misrepresentation was certainly key to creation of this pact and to many other moments of Microsoft's success (I completely lost faith in their ability to tell the truth when Ballmer proclaimed there was a "Chinese wall" between Microsoft OS development and Microsoft Office development to allow a level playing field - I already knew "Word's not done 'til Lotus won't run" and I knew this had to be a blatant lie as well, which Ballmer himself admitted about three years later). This is the company that most successully implemented the concept of "vaporware" to create FUD in the marketplace.
It's nice to hear the first-hand accounts.
"Seize the day" - Horace
"It's not what he doesn't know that scares me; it's what he knows for sure that just ain't so!" - Will Rogers, said by him about Herbert Hoover
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Hi Kevin,
I wonder if this "hassle" is actually an opportunity for you ?
Scenario: you present your clients with the fact that MDI application architecure is not available in WPF, and, while still present in WinForms, is deprecated by Microsoft and everybody else with any design sense. You offer them a new interface design using multiple vertical and horizontal tabs, or a TreeView (but, please God, not nested TabControls !).
Ka ching, ka ching: your are a Hero, for fifteen minutes, and rake in the loot ... and, you design your own multi-document architecture in such a way that you are the only person on earth who could maintain it 
Happy New Year, Bill
"So long as … social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates divine destiny, with human fatality … so long as three problems of the age: degradation of man by poverty; ruin of women by starvation; dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night: are not solved: so long as social asphyxia shall be possible … so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless." Victor Hugo, "Les Misérables," 1862
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