WPF - Why doesn't Microsoft supply a decent set of most-used controls ?

Question

I've been playing with WPF for some months now, and I quite like it. But one of the things I don't get is why MS doesn't put a little more effort in helping developers by supplying basic controls, and I need to get this off my chest :)

For example, I figure most applications somewhere will need to let you edit some properties - for configuration or whatever. What would be the most used types in a proprety-grid editor ?

• text
• numbers (byte, float/double, int, etc)
• colors

....etc.

So why isn't there even something as simple as a control to edit numbers ? Like a generic NumericUpDown control that allows you to type in numbers (no text, no pasting invalid input) or spin them up/down according to some given rules (decimal, floating point, min/maxvalue) ? Why isn't there a generic colorpicker, so people get the same user-experience in every application ? Why isn't there a standard implementation of a SearchTextBox, a BreadCrumb-control, or all these other standard control types users have gotten accustomed to the last 10 years ?

(..but at least they DID have the time to implement a generic splashscreen - because everyone knows that greatly increases user-productivity....)

The well-known ideal is always to give people the same user-experience over different applications. So even if some of those controls would be easy to make - it would be preferred to have one version over different applications.

I see people all over the internet trying to do the same stuff over and over again. Okay, so MS started a WPF Toolkit project on Codeplex that tries to implement some controls, but only did so half-heartedly and is completely dead by now (last update of the roadmap dates back to Mar 21 2009).

The result of this is that a lot of people starting a WPF-project end up spending a lot of time on trying to figure out how to create some generic controls and get really frustrated.

Wasn't the mantra "Developers, developers, developers!" ..?

/Rant

Answer 1

Because its ridiculously easy to make these in WPF. With WPF and silverlight microsoft's focus is on a core framework that makes many tasks (such as stylable controls) dead simple. Tools are more important than prebuilt controls. They are focusing on the NEXT thing rather than a better Winforms.