After reading the price list and after the community license model: no way. Much too expensive. And not usable when using with community license cause this license is poisoned. Can end like LiveCode. No need for crap like that.
Their target market is owners of legacy corporate code bases already built in WinForms, which is a massive, COBOL-like demographic. To jail break them to leverage that code base for multi-platform and web deployments with trivial changes, is well worth the asking price.
Whether it’s something for greenfield development is a different question, and I have some of the same thoughts on that, that you have.
On the other hand I have been let down by probably a dozen vendors during my career and part of my calculus would be the expected lifespan of the project, plus the fact I find it pretty simple to build complex GUIs with WinForms. I use it just for internal tooling at a Windows-only shop and it’s pretty much a no-brainer for that. If this client wanted to stand up those apps on a web server I’d definitely do it that way, or give them the option to spend those $ vs having the front end team replicate all the work with ASP.NET Core or whatever they’re calling it this week. I know which way they’d go.
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But it is no alternative for cross platform development
As I said to Norm, it “can deploy on Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS and of course web“. In what way is that not cross platform? It’s certainly closer to that than Xojo ever was on a good day. It would involve very little conditional code as well.
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It is darned expensive for professional use. It has a small problem if the vendor will die. It is again a lock in. May be I am too free with Java Development while having no kind of lock in with Java development for Desktop, mobile and web.
Everything is lock in ultimately, some less than others. We exempt .NET & Java because they are backed by companies that are in theory too big to die although if you look at e.g. what Oracle did to MySql or what MSFT did to FoxPro, they are not too big to fuck up for at least some portion of their user base, up to & including abandonment.
Free & open source can abandon projects too, for lack of interest & participation.
IIRC WiseJ’s license is perpetual so you only have to upgrade if you want new features / fixes and so it is not one of those that “phones home” and dies when the vendor goes away. It seems to me that given the engineering effort that goes into what they are actually delivering, the price is reasonable. It is not so much WiseJ I worry about as MSFT, should they decide to quit maintaining the WinForms tooling and someone else doesn’t step in to fill the breach.
More broadly it is just that the wider world can’t bring itself to embrace WinForms simply because MSFT = Bad.
I like WinForms and if I ever need to build cross platform apps and I judge the lifespan of what I’m building at least equal to the likely remaining lifespan of WinForms/WiseJ, it would be a contender for me. There are other alternatives as well, particularly for greenfield development. Some of those are even free / open source. It is just that I won’t cut off my nose to spite my face by not considering non-free alternatives as well as my own past experience.
Heh
They’re not wrong here 
I do wish MS would choose a path and stick to it
While as Xojo that was one of the reasons that moving the Windows framework never happened
Was it going to be Winform’s ? WPF ? I forget what else … and now WinUI
The lack of clarity hindered MS & Xojo
So now after an interminable wait Win UI is “IT”
Until MS changes their mind
Again
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And they will.
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You missed the most important point: even IF Oracle would die and even IF they would stop maintaining Javaa there is a hole bunch of companies which will maintain Java forward cause of the OpenJDK maintainers. It is not comparable with any of the other languages in this question.nThat’s the entire point using Java. You have not even a bit contact to Oracle if you don’t want to. Choose Azul, Liberia, Amazon, IBM or what ever you want to.
C# is always in a locking of Microsoft. Yes, it is in parts open sourced. But Java is completely open source and maintained by big companies. And I doubt that the entire industry will die form one day to the other. So: no kind of any code lock. And also with the IDE: you can develop with Eclipse, VSCode, NetBeans, IntelliJ and a few others. Just like you want to. If you wrote your code in Eclipse IDE you can grab it and work with it with NetBeans or IntelliJ without any kind of breaking your back.
The best example was when the Russian war against Ukraine began. At that moment IntelliJ (it was mostly with Russian developers in russia) was no alternative for me anymore and I moved on immediately with Netbeans. From one minute to the other. Cause it works seamlessly. Not like you want to provide me (a code lock needs to be accepted). No locking and immediately with the same codebase without having to change one line of code.
That is something DotNet is far away from it. Really far away. And also the platform independency is much more complex. You need to buy products. There is nothing free. If you want to develop for free, youn can use Java. With Codenameone for mobile, with Vaadin for the web, with JavaFX of Java Swing for Desktop on all platforms. Nothing to pay.As CodenameOne is completely open source you can build with it what ever you want to. As Vaadin is open source: build what you want to. As Java Swing and JavaFX are open source: build and that’s it.
Or: use Kotlin. Is also running on JVM or can be compiled native. For iOS, Android, Linux, macOS, Windows, Rtos, Unix.
Always when people are showing up tools for more than a thousand per year I am asking me the same question: why should I do that now.
Your second argument was: open source is often not really maintained while…as far as I can see there is more maintained in the open source world of Java than it is in the closed source world of C# and Co. So please, tell it to somebody which has a XoJo background and no other world he is working with. When speaking about acne developers C# / Dotnet has between 5 and 6 Million. Java between 9 and 12. So I guess it is not so that there is a loss of maintaining the projects.
Yeah this is the basic problem with MSFT. I have made a good living working with the MSFT stack and TBH it’s never lacked for quality, well-optimized and usually well thought out abstractions – at least for my needs. And you can even mount convincing arguments that the overall technical direction of .NET Core is superior in ways to, e.g., Java.
BUT they blow with the wind and lack the courage of their convictions. They make decisions to change course or drop support based on short term trends without any consideration for the value of developer capital, by which I mean, vibrant, loyal dev communities who should, but don’t, have real input into these decisions.
In the context of the current discussion, WinForms is not a locus of massive investment and innovation at MSFT but their calculus (so far) is that it is worthy of an adequate maintenance effort, although I suspect C# devs feel better about this than VB.NET devs because of the separate issue of Microsoft sending VB.NET onto back-burner support to die of neglect. Once enough VB.NET people move on to anything other than C#, I’d expect WinForms to die as well. IDK if it’s possible legally or feasible economically for other vendors like WiseJ or JetBrains to forge on with WinForms on their own.
Judging from JetBrains proclaiming that they would take up the torch for VB.NET and so far as I know nothing that could be described as moving the language forward has actually materialized, I am thinking that the bulk of devs will take MSFT’s eventual withdrawal as a death knell and that will be that.
However, my calculus is just that I only need WinForms to be a viable platform for me to deliver some tooling to a MSFT-only client for the 5 years or so I will continue to be active. I like it because I (1) know it, it’s (2) pleasant to maintain, (3) presents no technological limitations to get in the way (4) the tools I’m making are pretty stable and don’t need to evolve much once built and (5) if for sake of argument I needed some form of cross platform (most likely web deployment), there’s a viable path to do that without a rewrite.
Quite plausibly these solutions could be tweaked for a generation without there being any real business case for rewriting in some other platform whether MSFT or otherwise.
Finally the client doesn’t give a fig so long as it works and can be maintained without my eventual successor(s) needing to learn some bizarre fringe language or something. Any reasonably competent dev should be able to inherit the code.
Other people’s calculus will be different, and that’s fine.
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@bgrommes I hope you will be around much longer than 5 years. Don’t stop working. It’s healthy and makes the world go around. Who shall do your job then? Everybody in my age is thinking about retirement.
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It’s possible. I just turned 69 and even in the US many people retire at 65. I am having too much fun and making too much money to retire and in the current environment there’s not as much opportunity cost to keep working as there would have been – things besides work are depriving my wife and I of travel enjoyment for example (in our opinion it’s just not safe to travel by air in this country right now, aside from being unpleasant to begin with). It would be significant health issues or my client being unable to continue their investment in this project that would be most likely to change the calculus, and neither of those are obviously on the horizon. Five years is just my best guess.
The other factor is that although my wife & I could retire as comfortably as anyone can these days we have a disabled adult child living with us that we are trying to leave something to live on when we’re gone.
IDK who would do my work but it has to be someone else’s problem at some point. And I would have just as much fun messing around with personal projects. Look at our own Dave here on this site. He’s livin’ the dream!
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Yes, from some reasons that is true, he lives the dream. Me too, I am running my company since 39 years and it still makes much fun. If I can I wanna sink down after the last line of code and that’s it. Somewhen in the future. May be when I am 80+ 
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Hope you are not talking about me,… I was forcibly retired (ie. Laid off at 60), spent 3 years in financial distress until certain things vested. And now am “comfortable”, but would not say “living the dream”