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Comment by ridiculous_fish | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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