I feel I’m too young to be making this kind of statement, but the sense of deja vu I get when reading about the layouts in WPF makes me nearly laugh out loud. Of all the things I can remember about Java 1.0 (this was before any number of things we take for granted now) I know that LayoutManagers exist – including the insanely hard to use GridBagLayout. Fortunately I learned over time that it wasn’t always the most appropriate manager (far from it) but it was powerful.

Ever since I started using .NET I’ve been annoyed at WinForms’ lack of layout management facilities. I’m pretty sure that when I complained about this to Chris Anderson once he said that it’s all there really, but just not exposed very well. Hmm. I’ve tried and lost patience a few times – I suspect there are ways of sorting it all out, but it’s not exactly straightforward.

Fortunately it all changes with WPF, which not only has various layout managers (not sure whether there’s anything like Java 1.4’s SpringLayout, which seemed useful last time I looked at it) but also makes them relatively easy to use with XAML. No more GridBagConstraints messes! Hurrah!

Anyway, it’s good to see that .NET 3.0 has caught up with Java 1.0 :) (And no, I’m not under the impression that Java invented the concept of layout managers. It just happens to be the first environment I used them in.)