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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

As a developer, the Windows target is baffling. I briefly considered porting a few apps I wrote over to Windows just to re-learn the platform again. Might be fun! Back in the day, the choice was easy: MFC/Win32

Now, I have no idea where to even start! C#? C++? .NET? Win32? MFC? WPF? XAML? WinForms? UWP? What a rat’s next! How did MS let the development ecosystem get so muddied? I know I can go online and research all of these, learn the trade offs, and hope I bet on the right horse, but then again I could also choose to simply leave this crazy platform alone and work on more features on the platforms that are more comfortable.

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Here's how simple I think it is:

Out (but not gone/forgotten): Win32 (hand-coded C, C++ MFC, C++ ATL and related alphabet soup [aka back in the day the choice wasn't easy, either], VB6, .NET WinForms, etc), WPF/Silverlight (a .NET only XAML platform)

In: UWP (C++ with XAML, C#/.NET with XAML, JS with HTML/CSS)

Just three UI platforms to consider (Win32, WPF, UWP), two of which are mostly deprecated and not recommended if you are building a fresh application or porting one to a new UI. The remaining platform (UWP) gives you language choice (C++, C# or other .NET languages, JS), but not UI design framework/markup language choice (XAML, unless JS and then HTML).

If you are doing a fresh port of a C++ application from another platform, the choice seems pretty simple to target the UWP and use XAML to define your UI.

Except that with Win7’s dominance your UWP isn’t going to run on most of your clients for many years. In a corporate environment it sorts of kills it from the outset. I think Microsoft made a big mistake by not making UWP win7 compatible.

Windows 7 doesn't have "many years" left. Windows 7 has less than two years left in its support lifetime. (2020 is when extended support ends.)

In the mean time, if you, in a corporate environment, must Windows 7 until the bitter end in 2020, you can use WPF as a bootstrap step towards UWP. The XAML is similar between them and a lot of the coding paradigms are same (MVVM patterns), and if you architect well (.NET Standard 2.0 libraries) you can share 100% of your business logic between a WPF application and a UWP application.

Xamarin.Forms also has an open source WPF renderer if you'd prefer to further go the cross-platform route. (Xamarin.Forms supports UWP, iOS, Android, macOS.)

I agree that I think Microsoft should have had the .NET Standard, XAML Standard, WPF Xamarin.Forms development stories in place sooner to better leverage developers that need to support older Windows, but many of those pieces are in place now if that is what corporate developers were waiting for.

I'm not developing anything desktop right now but when I think about it the conclusion I come to is to give up on MS technologies and go with QT. Much more stable and you get Linux for (almost) free.

Yea, this is where I ended up. If I’m going to port something to oddball non-Unix-based or otherwise less-important platforms, like Windows, Qt makes the most sense.

This reminds me of "How Microsoft Lost the API War": https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...

You forgot Universal Web Apps in your list, which like UWP is the least universal of the Windows ecosystem.

You start at Electron. Having used most of the GUI frameworks listed above, making a GUI app in HTML/JavaScript is faaaar easier.

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