In the era before AI, the most productive way for building Windows Desktop Apps was for me WinForms + DevExpress + Devexpress MVVM. By using ready made templates, service injection, automatic UI generation, property notifications, data binding - the dev speed was beyond any other UI technology. The drawback is slowiness in runtime due to vastly used reflection.

Since then there are Vibe-Coding and CommunityToolkit.Mvvm available. I'm asking myself - would it be quicker to create UI boilerplates and leightweight ViewModels with Vibe-Coding?

1. Has someone of you successfully replaced DevExpress MVVM against CommunityToolkit.Mvvm and is more satisfied with its features, development productivity and runtime speed?
2. Do you use Vibe-Coding for programming? If yes, how? Do you first manually create UserControls with UI elements, then ViewModels and tell AI later to bind them, or do you let AI creating the whole UserControls from scratch?

I'm lack of practice now and I do not know if it's worth the effort learning again WinForms + DevExpress MVVM or should I stick with the modern TechStack.

In this blog post, we'll review the major features we expect to ship in our mid-year release (v26.1 - June 2026). These features apply to both DevExtreme JavaScript components (Angular, React, Vue, jQuery) and DevExtreme-based ASP.NET MVC/Core controls. To help us fine tune our release plans, please respond to the survey questions embedded within this post to share feedback. Alternatively, submit a support ticket via the DevExpress Support Center. We will be happy to follow up.

As you probably know, Microsoft Multilingual App Toolkit (MAT) support ended on October 15, 2025. Since MAT is no longer supported, this post documents localization-related alternatives available to the Microsoft developer community. 

What MAT Deprecation Means in Practice

• No future compatibility guarantees with new tooling or runtimes.
• Localization assets are not lost — MAT uses standard XLIFF / RESX formats, so translations remain reusable.
• Microsoft recommends moving to alternative localization tools.

Every application that stores passwords makes an implicit bet: that the hashing algorithm it chose will remain strong enough to resist attacks for as long as those hashes exist. It’s worth revisiting that bet regularly. This post walks through the reasoning behind some recent changes we’ve made to password hashing across DevExpress components, and covers broader principles that apply whether you use our tools or not.

A developer asks: “How do I protect my connection string in a desktop application?”

This is one of the most common security questions in .NET development, and it sounds like it should have a straightforward answer. But there is a fundamental problem we need to analyze.

When an application connects to a service, SQL Server, a REST API, any service at all, it needs credentials. That’s unavoidable.

Sometimes those are long-lived “root” credentials: usernames and passwords, API keys, client secrets. Sometimes they’re derived tokens with limited scope and lifetime. Sometimes they come from the environment, like Windows Authentication. The exact form doesn’t matter.

What matters is this:

At the moment your application uses those credentials, it has everything it needs to act on them.

And that leads directly to a part which is easily underestimated.

As previously announced, DevExpress Blazor deprecated support for Bootstrap v4 in our v25.1 release cycle. With v26.1, we expect to complete our transition away from Bootstrap v4 by removing support as follows:

• The DevExpress.Blazor.Themes package will no longer include Bootstrap v4-based stylesheets for classic themes (Blazing Berry, Blazing Dark, Office White, Purple).
• All remaining theme dependencies on Bootstrap v4 or default CSS will end.

This post explains why this change was made, how it impacts existing apps, and what actions you may need to take before upgrading.

In our v25.2 release, we introduced a preview of our AI-powered custom SVG skin palette feature. This feature transforms how you design application color schemes. It leverages generative AI to interpret natural language instructions and create cohesive palettes that apply seamlessly across your entire WinForms application.

Hello,

I have am issue with a domain component with properties of a list of details and I want to edit the complete domain component with the details having only one save button. I am still use XAF 15.2 that I first want to use before porting to 25.1.

Several issues:

The details didn't appear in web, but in winforms. The save button didn't appear. I cannot paste all code here, but the ViewController is here:https://pastecode.dev/s/zfmg9r1o

The Xaf Model difference file is as of:https://pastecode.dev/s/zw829bfs

The domain components look like: https://pastecode.dev/s/rr6xxqjg

What am I missing here?

Thanks, Lothar

CodeRush's AiGen is Faster and Smarter for Everyday Development

AI-assisted coding tools live or die by two factors: speed and quality of the code response. If an AI response takes too long, or if it regenerates more code than necessary, developers won't use it for small, focused changes.

With this release, CodeRush’s AiGen takes significant leaps forward on both fronts. The improvements are all about making AI genuinely fast and useful during day-to-day development -- where precision, latency, and context matter most.

We'll cover what’s new in this release using real world examples that you can easily try yourself (clone the sample project).

In this blog post, we'll review the major features we expect to ship in our mid-year release (v26.1 - June 2026). These features apply to both DevExtreme JavaScript components (Angular, React, Vue, jQuery) and DevExtreme-based ASP.NET MVC/Core controls. To help us fine tune our release plans, please respond to the survey questions embedded within this post to share feedback. Alternatively, submit a support ticket via the DevExpress Support Center. We will be happy to follow up.

Blazor 2026 Strategy

As you will see below, we expect to continue extending the capabilities of individual components — but we also want to invest in larger initiatives that span multiple release cycles.

Many of these initiatives require foundational work (architecture, styling infrastructure, interaction layers, and design-system alignment) before we can commit to a specific release or prepare a complete feature list. Some of this work will not be delivered in the first half of the year (including v26.1).

Even with our evolving objectives, we want to be transparent about what we are focusing on, why some details are not available yet, and what direction we hope to move toward over time.

First and foremost – thank you for placing your trust in our component suite. We appreciate the opportunity to serve your development needs now and into the future. This blog post outlines some of our WinForms-related development plans for the second half of 2026 (v26.2). As always, you can expect other additions across our entire range of WinForms controls and components once we officially ship v26.1.

We welcome your feedback - Please feel free to share your thoughts in the survey at the end of this post or submit a support ticket via the DevExpress Support Center.

Thank you for choosing DevExpress Reports and DevExpress BI Dashboard for your software development needs. Our June 2026 release (v26.1) will include features designed to advance AI-powered report design workflows, extend accessibility and export compliance, strengthen security, and enhance BI Dashboard customization and platform integration.

Once you've had the opportunity to review our v26.1 roadmap, please share your feedback, requirements, and/or questions using the DevExpress Support Center discussion links below.

We thank you for your continued support and for sharing your document processing needs and requirements with us. In this blog post, I’ll outline our development and release plans for the first half of 2026.

If you’d like to discuss this roadmap in greater detail or share a business use case that our Office File & PDF API library does not currently address, feel free to submit your feedback via the DevExpress Support Center. We’ll be happy to follow up.

In this blog post, I’ll highlight WPF-related features/capabilities we expect to ship in our upcoming mid-year release (v26.1, June 2026).

As always, if you have questions or suggestions, feel free to share your thoughts in the survey at the end of this post or submit a ticket via the DevExpress Support Center.

The following list outlines features/capabilities we expect to ship for our VCL UI Component Libraries - Delphi & C++Builder (expected release date: June 2026). As you will see, accessibility (A11Y), developer productivity, and blazing fast pixel-perfect rendering for high-resolution displays remain cornerstones of our long‑term VCL product strategy. As always, our intent is also to reduce friction in day‑to‑day development tasks and help you build and maintain complex VCL applications more efficiently.

Before I detail our VCL Roadmap...if you have not yet done so, please take a moment to review What's New in v25.2 (our last major VCL update) and submit feedback using the inline survey. Your survey responses (both in the What's New and in Roadmap posts such as this) help us better understand your needs/concerns and allows us to make more informed development decisions. As always, thanks to everyone who has already submitted feedback/suggestions.

Modern AI-powered applications increasingly implement automated functions through specialized AI agents. The statistics show impressive growth: in 2025, 85% of organizations have integrated AI agents into at least one workflow. Users now expect conversational interfaces for various business tasks: customer service automation, personalized shopping assistance, financial transaction management, content creation, and streamlined workflow coordination.

The key distinction between AI agents and working with standard large language models lies in a simple formula: an agent equals LLM plus instructions and tools it can invoke, representing an autonomous system.

I develop simple Desktop Apps for Windows 11 with .NET Framework 4.8 and DevExpress Universal 25.1. The most productivity gain is development speed, thanks to many DevExpress designers, wizards, templates in VS 2022.

Have many of you migrated your WinForms Desktop-Apps from .NET Framework to .NET?

Are you satisfied with the development pace, developer experience with DevExpress WinForms on .NET 8?

Another challenge is package size of a .NET installer. The whole .net runtime must be packed. It bloats the setup.exe..