Happy 2nd Birthday!
Material Design In XAML Toolkit Turns Two Years Old
On 1st February 2017 Material Design In XAML marks it’s 2nd year since it appeared on GitHub. Right up front I have to apologise for all the bugs I haven’t fixed. Plenty of people are helping out, but the project can only move so fast. I always try to prioritise API quality over cramming in more fixes and updates. Hopefully this shows, as I feel that on the whole the library is easy to use, robust, and ultimately helps make apps look great.
It’s been a busy, successful, and rewarding two years. Sometimes frustrating, always educational. I’m continually dealing with users over email, Twitter, GitHub, Gitter; it’s now got to the point where support is probably 75% of the time I spend on the project. Surely the biggest highlight for me was getting a Microsoft MVP award off the back of this work (and Dragablz), and traveling to Seattle for the MVP Summit. It was great to meet so many people I’ve got to know on GitHub and Twitter.
Two years in I’d like to share some stats on this project. .Net itself is undergoing major open source shakeup, with a big emphasis on the web/ASP side of things. WPF is perhaps more of a “niche” tech, and may not be the bleeding edge XAML platform a anymore, but still has plenty of use, and the some of these stats illustrate the continuing popularity of WPF and the growing popularity of the toolkit:
- Nuget downloads: 84,839
- Average Nuget downloads per day: 118
- GitHub stars: 2,340
- GitHub forks: 4734
- GitHub average views per day: 1675
- GitHub average unique visitors per day: 319
- Website average unique visitors per day: 177
- Gitter chat room users: 300+ users
Two years ago, all these stats were a big fat zero. The trend has been upward ever since. I’ve seen and supported students, enterprises and hobbyists use the toolkit to help bring modern styling, palettes and UX flow to their desktop apps, and there are now
continually new projects appearing on GitHub referencing the library.
This isn’t a monster JavaScript framework, and is much smaller than friend, and big-brother WPF project, MahApps. But it’s healthy, and it’s growing.
Currently I’m focusing on “doobry”, a NoSQL editor for Azure DocumentDb. I feel this is becoming a great example of how to utilise Material Design In XAML on the desktop to create useful, attractive apps. Obviously there will be more to come for the toolkit itself over the next 12 months.
Thanks to all the users, contributors and everyone who has supported the library over the last 2 years!
(Birthday Cake from https://material.uplabs.com/posts/happy-birthday-icon