Microsoft Announces Converter for Bringing Win32 Apps to the Windows Store | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Announces Converter for Bringing Win32 Apps to the Windows Store

techcrunch.com

99 pointsdoener67 comments

It's weird to hear "win32" called "legacy". Last I checked everything from "wininit.exe" to "svchost.exe" to "winlogon.exe" were win32 (or win64) applications. Guess the entire base operating system is legacy! :O

Actually, a lot of what you see in Windows 10 is running on top of UWP.

Some of the UI apps perhaps, but if you ripped out win32, I don't think you'd have a very usable machine left to log on to?

That's true, but only because there isn't a great story in UWP for underlying services.

Non-sandboxed applications and services are not a sustainable strategy anymore.

I wonder how long they'll stick to UWP. In 2 years they probably have another cool next thing.

Yeah, they dropped that .net thing in less than that .. oh wait

They have abandoned WPF, Winforms and Silverlight. Not sure what happened to WinRT.

WinRT got rebranded to UWP.

WPF was XAML v1. Silverlight was XAML v2. UWP has XAML v3. Your skills are still applicable.

There is a little more to it than XAML. Skills wise it's not too bad but I have looked into porting some WPF apps to WinRT a while ago and those frameworks looked very differently under the hood despite some superficial similarity. I still don't understand why they need to create all this framework churn. WPF could have been extended to what UWP is now in my opinion.

XAML was reimplemented in C++ and now renders with DirectComposition instead of Milcore. It's much faster now and far more capable.

You can also now use it with both native C++ and C# thanks to WinRT.

Windows 10 without Win32 would be comparable to iOS. Eventual root access lost on your "PC" and a cut for Microsoft from the store.

Is that true? They never used Winforms or WPF much themselves. Have they really started using the frameworks they push their users into?

Yes. Windows Shell, Xbox, Office, Skype, HoloLens, etc. are all using UWP.

Windows Explorer is not UWP.

The Office version you get with Office 365 ("Desktop Office"), the one, businesses use, is certainly not UWP.

Skype UWP is a preview announced a few days ago.

"Are all using UWP"? No. They are in a transition of moving to UWP, but every serious business application is Win32.

The only one I know for sure that moved from Win32 to another framework was Visual Studio with WPF. I don't think MS ever used MFC or Winforms for any product of considerable size either.

>Windows Explorer is not UWP.

It's a hybrid: start menu, action centre and some other elements are UWP's XAML frames now.

Yeah, one of the things you'll notice if your Modern apps are broken on Windows 10, is that your Start Menu no longer works either. (Not meaning to be negative, but this is how I realized the Start Menu was using their new framework.)

Visual Studio is built with WPF.

What exactly is win64? The API is still called win32, even if used in a 64-bit executable. Can somebody explain it? Was there a failed win64 API attempt at some point like WinFS and other stuff?

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb496995.aspx uses the "Win32" and "Win64" monikers. I assume it is basically win32 with some types extended to 64bits (memory pointers/handles/whatnot)

I wish there would be more details. It reminds me of the very old Carbon Dater from Apple which used to tell you if your MacOS9 program ws compatible with Carbon on MacOSX and tell you exactly which OS function were gone, which were deprecated and what the alternatives for them were.

Is Centennial the same approach?

Or is it a wrapper around your app, taking your straight executable and just failing OS calls that are not supported and forbidden?

Unless I heard it wrong, the title may be a little inaccurate. I believe they said "to the Windows store or any other store". So you may be able to put UWP apps on other web stores, too.

How does this work with the sandboxing requirements. Last time I tried to build an app for the ms store i hit an immediate wall with sandboxing and stopped proceeding with the idea. Are things more lax now?

So can we actually start using this yet? I hope it isn't still vapor.

Let's say I'm building something like an IDE, where I'm not targeting Xbox or phones. Is UWP appropriate for me? Should I aim to be on the Windows Store?

It depends on the IDE; in particular, whether it competes with Microsoft's own line of business. Microsoft has historically had non-compete clauses in its dev tool EULAs. It was an EULA violation, for instance, to use Visual Studio to write a word processor, database, or spreadsheet program.

I don't know if it still holds for the cuddly "new" Microsoft... but tread carefully. Windows Store is curated and thus more restrictive than straight Win32 app development would be.

Wait... what? Do you have a source for that? I can't find anything in my searches to confirm that. I did see various EULAs saying you can't redistribute some bits included with some of the MSDN products (like MSDN documentation and sample Jet DB files) with your product, if your product is primarily a general word processor, database, or spreadsheet application. But nothing like you can't write one of those applications at all.

With this tool I don't see why you wouldn't want to be on the Windows Store, if you can deal with the sandbox.

UWP is another story. With UWP, you have to deal with the mobile-like app lifecycle of getting randomly suspended and/or shut down. This is a hassle to deal with but understandable on a mobile device. For something as heavy, complex, and background-processing intensive as an IDE, it doesn't make sense to me.

What ever happened to programs? Was there something about that word that terribly offended people? Too hard to type out? Is 'app' soon going to be replaced by some kind of pictogram?

Enquiring minds want to know.

Laziness?

App is shorter than Application or Program. Language evolves as well.

App implies microsoft gets a monopoly on control and distribution (as well as revocation), ie app store, ie walled garden. It also implies you should expect it to not be open source, and you should expect to pay at least $0.99 for it.

You can distribute universal Windows apps outside the Windows Store.

You mean programs?

No, I mean apps. I'm just as lazy as anybody else, and I don't see a need to use an older word with an extra syllable and a bunch of baggage just to show off that I was using computers before the iPhone came out.

If they were distributed as .programx files instead of .appx files, maybe you'd have a point.

So when the IPhone came out, the word 'program' was changed to 'app'?

Even before the iPhone came out, people used the abbreviation "app" for "application".

Source: I was around then ;)

But did they use "app" instead of "program"?

True, especially with OS X having .app file extensions. I still called them "Applications" more often than not though.

Oh, so it's like a Mac thing. So why do we have to call Windows programs 'App'?

It's not a Mac-only thing, it has been used on Linux and Windows for decades.

http://www.drdobbs.com/windows/windows-apps-and-exception-ha...

In popular usage, pretty much.

I'd object more if it were something like "nuculer" where we're adding in wrong letters to pronounce it wrong, but I really don't care if something is an "app" or a "program".

As far as connotations go, "app" tends to mean a simple single-purpose piece of software, and "program" is an all encompassing legacy blob that takes a dump in 40 different folders because it can't keep its shit together. Not always true, but still what I think of. I tend to use the words that way when the software in question falls into one category or the other.

Will I call Forza an app because it's on the store? Eh, maybe. I'll probably call it a game (does anybody call those "programs"?). Would I call AutoCAD an app if they started distributing it as a UWP package? Less certain. Maybe not. Skype? Absolutely.

If your customers check a setting called “side-loading” in "Updates & Security" under "For developers" with a fairly scary warning, then yes you can sell outside the Windows Store.

Nope. Now you can double-click the appx file. Demonstrated on Build keynote.

Well, that's a whole lot nicer than their website is currently telling me. I did look for updated instructions as this has been a bit of issue with contractor supplied software.

These settings are about digital signatures of applications.

Yes, they've been trailing that for a while. Do you know if there's any kind of legally-binding commitment to keep this option open, or might this be a temporary thing while they try to get some traction for the platform?

I'm sure it's not legally binding, but neither is Apple's letting people run unsigned applications or even signed applications from outside the app store.

MS seems pretty serious about trying to get developers on board with their platform. I can't imagine them reversing course on this, especially with "Tim Sweeney is wrong about everything, UWP is an open platform" being a recurring subtext of the keynote.

program is kinda hard to say because of the 2 r's.

You're decades late on this. "App" has been used as a shorthand way to refer to programs for a loooong time. Random example, Apple had an object oriented framework called MacApp in 1985.

But outside of the Apple world program was most commonly used. It took the rise of the iPhone for app to displace program.

This makes sense. The tight knit NeXT community used the "app" meme regularly staring at least in 1990 if not sooner.

To me, "app" was just short for "application", and it usually implied something more than a program. A program was more of an individual binary and its data files. An application could be a suite of programs; basically, it was a superset of "program" that could include multiple binaries acting toward a common purpose.

An "App" (mobile-style) is a new word. It implies (again, to me) a sandboxed program with a simplified, single-window, full-screen UI.

The same 3 letters (app) have been used my entire life to refer to computer programs, but the connotation has shifted a lot.

It seems pretty constant to me. It has always meant a user-facing program that's largely self-contained. It's not synonymous with "program," but since this story is about converting stuff for the Windows Store, I think it's being used correctly here.

Whitelisting permissions instead of blacklisting them, hopefully.

As far as I know, that is the main difference: apps are sandboxed programs which you can easily install and deinstall without affecting the rest of the system.

Or...?

In my mind an app is a sandboxed, focused thing that lives in a single window and behind a single launcher icon. application or program or any other older term from before iOS introduced "apps" could be a collection of a half-dozen different entries in your start menu, or an application like GIMP that scatters a bunch of different windows around your screen. "App" implies a level of simplicity.

App has been short for "application" since at least the DOS days, when Lotus 1-2-3 was frequently called the PC's "killer app".

yes, but the meaning of words can change over time.

(disclaimer, I'm a Microsoft employee and this is only my opinion).

There's an important distinction which often don't see discussed when this topic comes up: It can be very dangerous to install a program on your machine, but an 'app' comes with some assurance. People often think of the app store as a method for MS to grab your money, but in my opinion it fixes many of the installation/deployment problems that have existed on windows since... 95?

'Programs' typically require an MSI for installation. You'd better know, and trust, the MSI before you give it the required administrative privileges it needs to run, because a rogue MSI can absolutely own your machine.

On the other hand, 'Apps' declare what they are going to do to your machine via the manifest, so you kind of know what you are getting into before your install. The apps are sandboxed, so they have limited ability to tamper with your machine, and they can be uninstalled in a more uniform fashion.

In short, I feel much better telling my Grandma that she can install an 'App', but i'm much less confident telling her that it's ok to install a program via Installer.MSI.

This sounds nice and reasonable, but I think it's a post hoc explanation that doesn't quite work. Look at the language in the linked article. It talks about converting my "Win32 apps" into "Universal Windows Platform apps". But those legacy programs aren't "apps" within the meaning you've laid out.

I'll confess ignorance over what exactly the converter does, or how it does it. I don't know anything more than what was announced today. The article says that it converts win32/.net apps into appx packages, and I'd assume that this does encompass 'the meaning that I've laid out'.

It does. It sandboxes the filesystem and registry as well.

gp uses 'app' the way you did, presumably to mean UWP application. Win32 apps are "programs"/"applications" written using the Win32 api. I don't think there's anything post-hoc in the explanation other than the use of the word "app".

A couple of days ago, I was thinking how rare we use program word now. web apps, mobile apps, standalone apps...

In Germany by the way "app" almost always means "mobile app", while desktop apps are still being called "Programme" aka programs in English.

Fairly sure it is just short for application.

They used to be called apps when we made them for J2ME phones. Symbian apps were not sandboxed, but J2ME ones were, and this was the majority. Later on apple brought sandboxed apps to the iphone.

And no-one knew what an app was back then, most seemed surprised that a person even made the games they played on their phones.

I wish Reactos was a valid replacement. I just want win32 without MS, they can keep the other garbage.

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