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So I am a student and I work in an environment where only the result matters, meaning, nobody cares if I use the best coding practices, MVVM, or the likes. They are researchers and need an app that, just works!

It so happens that many come from non-technical background, meaning from Archeology to Zoology, I cater to everybody. The only thing common between them is that all hate CLI apps and need GUI apps that run nicely on their Full HD or 4k screens.

I am C# developer and the UI tool of my choice is WPF. To create nice looking apps I generally use Microsoft's Ribbon Framework. A typical app made by me looks like this:

Sample App

The ribbon looks great as it is pre-styled with nice effects, scales well and so on.

However, now it so happens as more and more of my researchers upgrade to Windows 8 and 10 these apps are starting to look bad and well simply doesn't look nicer any more. They also want the standard toolbar, menubar kind of design, something like this (I did not make it but I really like the simple design!):

enter image description here

So my question, is there any sample app, template, put_buzzword_here, that actually has a simple standard start UI like this which I can edit to fit my needs (with MVVM or whatever, as I said I don't care), so that I don't have to design everything from scratch and skin them (I am really bad at styling WPF apps!)?

Note: I tried contacting Telerik, AppDev etc, for academic pricing. They were too costly. Telerik didn't even care to reply. While Visual Studio is free for us, I really can't afford a $400 for some controls. I tried SyncFusion, it makes my setup very slow.

Thanks.

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  • So basically you're looking for an alternative to WPF (WPF, to my understanding, a C# template UI) that has the Windows 10 modern look to it and doesn't cost all that much to use for commercial use?
    – Tom
    Jun 2, 2016 at 20:04
  • @Tom No, not an alternative but rather some free, well designed templates, starter sample apps for WPF. I cannot switch from C# as a lot of our legacy code is in C# and needs nightly changes.
    – Jishan
    Jun 2, 2016 at 20:07
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    ok, I see, I've added the gratis tag
    – Tom
    Jun 2, 2016 at 20:10
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    Thanks. yes, very similar. But as you see its Modern UI, Windows 10 ish, I want Windows 7 ish UI template.
    – Jishan
    Jun 2, 2016 at 21:09
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    @jeet We have a Skin manager that provide built in styling. We don't have preconfigured templates, but the idea has been considered before and we are open to implementing. We will start with a sample and go from there.
    – Davis Jebaraj
    Jun 2, 2016 at 22:44

1 Answer 1

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Essential Studio for WPF includes a Skin/Theme manager with built in support for several themes.

While we don't have the concept of application templates, we have the controls required to create most common application templates. We have created a sample application.

WPF UI

The whole product is available for free through the community license if you qualify.

I work for Syncfusion.

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  • wow, thanks a lot! No company would do that! You guys are awesome compared to Telerik and the lot!
    – Jishan
    Jun 3, 2016 at 17:31
  • @jeet Thanks for the kind words. Please feel free to contact us through the Syncfusion support system if you have any usage questions or post in Stack overflow.
    – Davis Jebaraj
    Jun 3, 2016 at 20:14

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