Pure WPF

This was prompted by a discussion on Padnug.

"Pure" is not a word I'd use often with regard to WPF. WPF rethinks many things, and not all of them have come into flower yet. Which is an optimist's way of saying, parts are missing today. To me, some of its big-picture rethinking has been biased toward massive empowerment of the developer, at the expense of off-the-shelf functionality. DIY over prefab. (I'm thinking especially of its debut without a DataGrid. In WPF you can write dazzling things, and when you know what you're doing the dazzle is just as easy or easier than WinForms... but you have to write them. The OOBE excitement is pretty sparse.) It's also been slow to build a comfort level in the dev community. To some, MVVM goes hand in hand with WPF, but I see senior developers still wary of MVVM or puzzled by it, and there are big areas where reasonable people disagree what it requires. [For example, the eventing between View and VM can be done in several ways, including at least two distinct patterns--classic .NET events vs routed events. Reactive.net (on its way to WPF) reworks the async pattern. Some people abstract the views in ways that the VM can manipulate; others are horrified by that. One's ideas about that are sometimes influence by whether you're using DI or not. In short, there's a fair amount of flux.] Junior devs, or old guard devs who aren't especially current, are mystified if not scared. Plus, of the total .NET workforce, there's more people on the web side than the desktop, I think--so lots of people who've stayed on the cutting edge of .NET as much as they've needed to, haven't touched WPF yet.

That's a long way of saying that to my mind, WPF feels too diffuse to be pure.