It is my belief that Windows Forms will outlive WPF and/or XAML. Currently WPF is still the "modern" way to doing Windows applications, but at some point Microsoft will come up with some new scheme, and all the WPF developer will jump onto that.
The developers that have still not abandoned WinForms will not jump shit when the next thing hits either. To keep the huge group of WinForms developers happy, Microsoft will continue to support and develop Winforms. For many, WinForms are still the fasted way to develop simple applications.
So if you want develop for the Windows (desktop) platform, WinForms will be a clear winner for many many years into the future.
WinForms are still the fastest way to develop complex applications as well. From soup to nuts, it's probably the pinnacle of front end development.
Trends started going from WinForms to web around 2000 as pushback against Microsoft so here we are today. I still think from a business standpoint, it was a very expensive thing to do.
Except that WinForms doesn't work on UWP applications other than via Project Centipede and is officially on support as it was communicated at BUILD 2014.
Of cause. My point is that so many business applications are Windows Forms, and will continue to be so for many years to come.
Removing WinForms will disenfranchise a large group of developers, that for one reason or another, it could just be stubbornness, won't switch. Microsoft will sooner kill of WPF than WinForms, to not lose those developers. At least that's my belief.
"Windows Forms is continuing to be supported, but in maintenance mode. They will fix bugs as they are discovered, but new functionality is off the table. Oh, they stress that it isn’t called “WinForms”."
As I don't have time to search for the video on Channel 9.
For native UIs on Windows, there are few better choices. Most line of business applications tend to be spreadsheets on steroids with lots of custom business-related functions, and for that kind of thing web-based UIs are far more difficult to deal with (think displaying thousands of rows, potentially 100+ columns, quick grouping and pivot-table-esque functionality, etc). You can do it with something like Electron and some open source JS libraries, but as someone who has gone down that rabbit hole it is a nightmare compared with using an out-of-the-box component from Infragistics, DevExpress, or Telerik that is much faster than a HTML/CSS/JS interface.
Absolutely not tied to the Store, you can distribute your appx packages any way you want and the users can install them with a double click. The only requirement is that the packages must be signed, so you have to buy a codesigning certificate or ask your users to install your self-signed certificate.
The app also doesn't have to be an UWP app: you can wrap bog-standard desktop applications (even Electron apps), HTML/JS apps (with direct access to UWP APIs) or even nothing: your manifest can just point to your live site, that can check if it's running in this context and then use UWP APIs, those are called "hosted web apps".
XAML is just a way of writing object graphs in XML. It is not tied to WPF or anything (heck, we use it to represent user data and style information within GraphML).
And yes, XAML is used by more than WPF at this point (Silverlight, UWP, and possibly more).
