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Comment by jandeboevrie | Hacker News Reader

Will be cool to update our MFC app to look better. Wonder if it will still work on wine then, it does now with VS2019 and the old win 98 look. But the app is almost 20 years old... Still maintained and worked on today. And until ms stops support MFC, no change needed. Change just costs money for no significant profit or advantage to us or our customers.

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The new API is only supported on the latest versions of Windows 10. If your app has users on older Windows versions, the suggestion of using this API will almost certainly be shelved for at least a few years. That’s how it works on Android - google shows off a new API and we make plans to use it 5 years later when users actually have it on their devices.

WinUI 3 is decoupled from the platform and is one of its major improvements, apps built with it will run on Windows 10 builds as far back as 1803 (that’s two years old and is EOL even for enterprise customers).

That's pretty great, and kudos to Microsoft.

However the person I was replying to has a 20 year old app. I'm going to guess they still have users on Windows 8, 7, maybe even Vista and XP. Using the WinUI API, even a bit of it, will leave those users in the lurch.

True, but anyone making commercial apps have to support Windows 8.1 for a few years (still not EOL!) at the very least. Some even support Windows 7 (only EOL'd a few months ago).

Haven't thought about MFC in many years. Your comment reminded me of a time in the 90's when I was learning how to build UIs using Win32 calls and then I learned about MFC and I thought it was the greatest thing ever.

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