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Comment by jug | Hacker News Reader

I find UWP pretty terrible. :( It feels like developing for a weakest link (the traditional cross-platform problem) which is often Windows Phone or something. Which doesn't exist!! Windows Phone doesn't bloody exist! If MS had amazing mobile market penetration UWP would be amazing but what is this?! How is UWP exactly better than WPF for Windows desktop apps? It isn't. But it's where MS now wants you to be, because they have crazy deeams.

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WPF has a dependency on the CLR which made it a non-starter for the Windows and Office teams. That's the main reason WinRT/UWP XAML was developed in the first place; they wanted a developer platform they could use themselves, and those teams are unlikely to adopt C# anytime soon.

Actually WinRT/UWP are the Longhorn ideas, using the original design of .NET, originally known as COM+ Runtime.

Also a reason why .NET is AOT compiled to native code on UWP.

Right, they tried adopting C#/XAML for the shell and Office with Longhorn, and when that project failed they decided to essentially reimplement WPF and .net in native code, e.g.

WPF text stack -> DirectWrite

WPF visual layer -> Direct2D, Windows.UI.Composition

WPF UI layer -> WinRT XAML

.net type system/metadata -> WinRT metadata

CAS/partial trust/other .net security stuff -> AppContainer

ClickOnce -> AppX

If you compare what .net was supposed to be around 3.0 with what .net Core is now, they've basically stripped out all of the "OS-like" stuff - UI frameworks, app model/packaging, security - and taken the stance that those are the responsibility of the OS. UWP is just the Windows native implementation of the stuff that was stripped out of .net to be left up to each OS

I always thought that .NET should have been AOT compiled to native code since day one, not the JIT/NGEN mix, given Anders experience with Turbo Pascal and Delphi.

But as someone that follows Windows development since 3.0, and had the pleasure to being introduced to Oberon, I think one of the biggest reasons for Longhorn's failure was the wars between DevTools and WinDev.

To build on your mappings, many other components shown up as COM in Vista and since then the majority of Windows APIs are actually COM based, not Win32 C style ones.

Reading the paper about Ext-VOS, .NET's genesis, and doing the comparisasion with how WinRT looks like, was quite interesting.

right now? Two words: Composition API. It's fairly new addition but they've started integrating UWP with hardware accelerated effects (through abstraction of DirectX). Means that finally you can run animations butterly smooth with 60 fps and do more bitmap-based effects on ui elements.

The downside with UWP is that it lives in the runtime sandbox so it's limited in how it can interact with the os (for good and bad). On the plus side there's some really nice integration with OS notifications, app services, handover and stuff like that. I really hope the composition stuff comes to WPF however

Windows Phone still exists. A lot of companies are still buying a lot of Windows Phones. But you will not get them in a customer store, they're OEM phones. Also Windows IoT is and will be used a lot in POS systems, refrigerators, cars, and so on. In this case, UWP makes a lot of sense. But you will never read about it in you famous news blog or paper.

You can still get them in European stores.

Actually when my S3 dies, I will most likely keep using one of those ones instead.

>How is UWP exactly better than WPF for Windows desktop apps?

CoreWindow lets you recolor the window decorations without having to owner-draw the entire thing. But that's all i've got.

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