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Comment by elorant | Hacker News Reader

It's simple. You wait for five years before you start developing in any given technology. By that time it will either have been substituted or polished.

UWP was a clustefuck from the beginning, especially after everyone realized that MS intended to give-up on mobile. There aren't many people who bought into it and given Microsoft's infamous support for legacy code it's no surprise that they decided to tank it. Bottom line, my guess is that very few people will be hurt by this decision. They've all moved to greener pastures long ago.

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Suppose I'm going to add simple Windows gui for an app today, what should I use out of > 5 year old technologies? WinAPI in classic way, using Petzold's "Programming Windows, 4th edition" as a guidebook? WinAPI wouldn't be enough, I suppose, so can I use at least Comctl32 or is it deprecated? Should I use MFC? ATL? COM? Or should I use WinForms with .NET? Even if my app is written in native code? Isn't it for "business apps" only? Can I use it to write another Winamp?

I'd probably choose Qt.

There is no clear choice in windows desktop anymore. Only obsolete or soon to be obsolete options. If I had to do it now my first choice would be to go web based, then qt or WPF. Electron looks very appealing too. Pretty sad but it looks like MS doesn’t care about the desktop much anymore.

None of it is going away, the problem is it doesn't get the attention it deserves. All the while Microsoft is busy introducing UWP or whatever comes next they are ignoring everything that came behind it.

On the subject of cross platform I wouldn't go for qt or anything like it unless I really needed it. All those frameworks are too compromised if you are targeting a single platform. Possibly even if you aren't.

so can I use at least Comctl32 or is it deprecated?

Of course you can. The Common Controls are part of Win32 in the same way that user32 and gdi32 are.

Also worth noting that Microsoft is in the unique position that they do not want to break countless applications and realise that backwards compatibility is their strong point and a major reason why people use Windows, so even if something is "deprecated", unless it's related to some low-level system functionality, chances are it is not going to stop working. I'd say that they use "deprecation" more as a way of marketing newer-but-not-necessarily-better technologies.

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