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Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

Yes and no. I'm an employee so it doesn't really matter, but my side-project desktop apps pay well enough that I could live off them if I go for a student lifestyle (no pricey events, no restaurants, cooking yourself, cleaning yourself).

It was a long way. I started in the Pro Audio niche and initially supported Windows, Linux, Mac. Over time, I learned the hard way that supporting Apple's constantly changing OS is very expensive, plus Mac users tend to act the most entitled when stuff doesn't look or feel like their native OS. And Linux just never sold a license, instead I got lots of Open Source bitching. So eventually, I dropped Linux and Mac support, doubled down on the new Windows APIs and then things got nicely profitable. Price is one-off $299 for the regular app kit with perpetual updates (so far). People use the apps for making movie sound effects.

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cleaning yourself

I did not realize this was a mark of the student life. Who knew I was still a student at age 49?

Had to smile

I, too, am a couple of pay raises away from paying someone else to clean me

TBH this is not a pay issue, no matter whether I can afford it.

I would hate that a stranger enters my house to clean, and I would hate it even more when I was not at home.

The more I look at the parent's list of "student" activities, the more I realize I am a "student" in every way, despite my "lead engineer" title!

Apple like to nuke their developer ecosystem from orbit on a regular basis. It is quite tiresome. Qt protects me from it to some extent, but cross platform frameworks have their own issues.

As a developer mainly on Mac, which windows APIs are you referring to that are new, and how do you normally distribute your app, is it through a Windows store or independently?

Dxva, the windows dx12 multimedia API

Separate store and fastspring.

Thanks. What Windows GUI framework do you recommend for someone coming from mac? Or is there only one main framework?

In the audio world, everyone swears by JUCE.

what Microsoft fat client technology are you using?

the current problem for me with Microsoft fat client is there are too much options and no clear one that Microsoft will support long term.

Yea, I develop a hobby project targeting desktop Mac (Objective C GUI, C++ business logic) and I’m not sure what Windows technology I should use should I ever decide to port to Windows. There are so many and they are all in various stages of unsupported. C#? C++? .NET? Win32? MFC? WPF? XAML? WinForms? UWP? Maybe just give up on trying to read the future and use Qt. Fucking madness!

I faced that question over a decade ago, and after looking around at my options, I went with Qt. No regrets. Sure, it had its flaws, and sometimes the "not-quite-nativeness" shows through, but it worked pretty well and gave me support for all 3 major desktop systems. And although someone else has long since taken over maintenance of the application in question, it's still going strong (and still built with Qt).

C# 2.0 WinForms, or Win32, for simple run-anywhere tools with no dependencies.

Qt 5+ for anything with any level of complexity. Windows has already given up on 'native' UI.

JUCE for audio plugins.

Don't bother with all the 'modern' pretend-windows-is-a-touchscreen-os frameworks.

It's a mess.

If pressed I would say WinForms is the most practical choice for most apps today - even though it sucks, even though it's ugly. It's actively worked on (unlike WPF) and it lets you use the latest .NET version.

WebView2 (better Electron) is probably where most Windows development is going in the future, the Windows team is investing a heck of a lot more in it than other technologies.

C# on .net 6.0 with either WinForms or WPF.

Do not use WPF. WPF is dead. If you don't want to use WinUI, go with WinForms.

WPF isn't dead, it's done.

It's never looked finished to me, it was abandoned at birth.

Beside all the sibling comments, avoid WinUI, regardless of 2.x or 3.x variants.

They deprecated .NET Native and C++/CX and are yet to provide any tooling that compares to them.

.NET Native is stuck in C# 7, while C++/CX got replaced by C++/WinRT with the argument that it is ISO C++ friendly, when in reality it offers the same tooling as using Visual C++ 6.0 with ATL back in the days before .NET came to be, but their developers are so stuck in COM pre-historic tooling that they don't acknowledge that.

Apparently WinUI 3.0 would be the future, with the merge WinRT and Win32, however issues pile up exponentially and even Windows 11 is making use of the deprecated UWP, as the team cannot keep up.

Since MAUI depends on WinUI 3.0, it is yet another reason why it keeps being postponed.

Windows on 2022 with Microsoft stacks MFC (yes really, much better than C++/WinRT), WinForms or WPF (eventually with C++ if required).

Otherwise Qt, Delphi or C++ Builder if enough budget, or PWAs if possible to do so.

We're talking Microsoft here, they will probably be patching any crap they put out 10 years from now to maintain some enterprise app nobody knows how to update. Even when they gave up on Silverlight it was supported for almost 10 years afterwards.

Directx for everything to make things fast and to get nvenc hardware encoding.

Imgui and juce are great frameworks.

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