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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me, or does Microsoft create a whole new Windows API with every release? How are people supposed to build anything without a stable API? No wonder everyone has switched to Electron.

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The API is very stable. Any Win32 app from the last 24 years will still run. 16 bit apps will still run on the 32 bit version of Windows. They promote the cool new thing every so often, but all the old stuff still works and eventually gets the access to the new features.

Win32 is super stable. The .NET Ui toolkits churn every 3 years or so without much improvement. Very frustrating.

I haven't seen much (if any) churn in Windows Forms or WPF toolkits in about a decade. Are you sure about that 3 year thing?

i meant every 3 years there is a new, incompatible toolkit. Winforms, Html5/JS, WPF, Silverlight, WinRT, now UWP. Instead of refining what they have they create something new (possibly with less capability like WinRT), and put the previous toolkit into maintenance mode with only minor development.

This isn't as bad as it seems on Desktop. If you build to the old old api (win32), it has enough support to basically work forever. Longer if you stick around to release updates.

If you build to the new release, there's a good chance it's not going to work well on the next one though. This is part of why Windows Mobile failed. There weren't that many apps to begin with, but you needed to build differently for WP7, WP8, and WM10 if you wanted things to really work. And WM10 never got any users.

They just can't seem to settle on a UI framework. They have like 5 at this point.

They really need to just figure out how you make a GUI app on windows.

I want to make a GUI app in the same framework the Office team uses, if its good enough for them then good enough for me, see "eating your own dog food".

Coincidentally office is adopting more and more UWP controls in their Win32 app using these publicly available interop technologies.

Unfortunately, the public APIs for the ribbon interface are broken to an extent. I havent checked recently, but as an add-on, it was impossible to get 2 excel windows to display different values in a textbox embedded in a ribbon for 2 sheets openned in the same excel process.

Despite the appearance of being separate processes because of separate windows, excel is basically a detached MDI interface where each sheet gets its own window, but same process. I think the other Office products are the same (but I'm not sure). I dont know how many hours I wasted at a previous employer trying to figure out what was wrong, but finally gave up after many frustrating hours.

That, as well as their new icons, the applications icons and even more so the icons inside the applications is terrible in my eyes. It feels like when your side lose the elections, the future is gloomy because of wrong decisions someone else took and you have zero control over it, while they have so much effect on you.

That’s probably why Office 365 freezes a lot when you unplug screens and also sometimes renders a little blurry. They haven’t made it better.

This perception is due to the comparable longevity of the Windows ecosystem. Rate of change is the same as Android, or Apple's products. They just they keep the old ones around, and have twice the history.

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