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

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 th开发者_JAVA技巧e 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

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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.

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I think Microsoft - and some people responding here - are forgetting about the most important part of this post :

"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"

Just Google Image Search on "WPF Color Picker" ( http://www.google.nl/images?q=wpf+color+picker ) and you'll see this idea go down the drain.

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That's exactly what i thought at the beginning with WPF..

But afterall, a NumericUpDown is easily created with a cutom usercontrol, same for all the controls you will ever need, you can create it by yourself in (almost) no time, or grab some implementation googling around, and then you can still customize

I think they provided the very basic implementations for the UI elements and leaved all the custom stuff to developers and who need custom stuff, if they would have done a generic color picker, maybe it wouldn't have had all the functionalities that anyone would ever need

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There are a lot of 3rd party vendors out there that provide powerful custom controls (editor, navigation, grids, menus, property grids, ...).

It's - in general - cheaper to buy from them than to rewrite your own (when it fits your need of course).

Historically, Microsoft has always encouraged a rich "component-based" eco-system around what they provider out-of-the-box features. This has been true from the beginning of component programming (VBX, OCX, ...) with Microsoft technology. This is arguable, but that's the strategy :-)