Windows UI Frameworks

Isn't wpf deprecated too? I wish there was an official way to make apps in windows...

Do not use WPF. WPF is dead. If you don't want to use WinUI, go with WinForms.

You are missing Winforms and several XAML frameworks (WPF, Silverlight, WinRT and UWP). Even if you use one of the XAML frameworks porting any app of decent size is really hard to almost impossible.I think trouble started with .NET. Since then there was a change in direction almost every 2-3 years.Edit: Forgot WinJS...

WPF is still kicking. The big difference between the UI frameworks is who developed them. WinForms and WPF came from DevDiv, so they will be supported forever and are stable choices. UWP and WinRT came from the Windows team; I'd put money on them being passing fads. React Native came from outside of Microsoft entirely, so it's probably a safe choice too.

What are you talking about? WPF is still supported and a viable way to implement UI components. Same for WinForms. UWP never replaced them. What they are doing with WinApp SDK and WinUI is to extract features that were packaged with UWP to make them available to any type of Windows application.Xamarin is also still a thing, MAUI will be a thing in the future, Uno is another option, Avalon too. There is a lot of options for .Net GUI, most of them are mature and maintained.

I think few people are using the Win32 APIs directly and Microsoft has been shifting their stuff a bunch.WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation ) had been the recommendation a while back, but then Microsoft started pushing UWP (Universal Windows Platform). Both of those have been succeeded by WinUI 3. UWP has been deprecated. WPF is alive, but more in a maintenance mode while WinUI 3 takes over the future. Oh, and WinForms were popular, but now not.There's definitely been a lot of shift

That is what WPF and UWP are for.

WinUI is just a new name for the UWP UI stack now that it is open source and decoupled from the OS, React Native is a wrapper on top of UWP/WinUI, and WPF isn't really getting significant new features other than being taken open source and ported to .net core. So really already there's just one forward-looking native UI stack, which is WinUI.

Do we really need WinUI in 2020?

Having a consistent UI development framework would be a good start. WPF is no longer maintained and UWP brings with it the crappy Store and limited sandboxed capabilities.