Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

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Anyone doing Windows desktop development can definitly feel this.

After the mismanagement of WinRT, finally fixed with UWP on Windows 10, instead of improving the .NET Native and C++/CX experience, they created Project Reunion, deprecated .NET Native and C++/CX, replacing them with lesser tooling, pivoted Project Reunion into Windows SDK, and are years away of reaching feature parity with UWP, let alone Forms, WPF, MFC.

The current team seems composed by interns without experience on previous Microsoft frameworks, while the more experienced folks seem to have moved into Azure, Google or Amazon, from their twitter feeds.

Just have some fun going through the WinUI, CsWinRT, C++/WinRT, WinAppSDK, Win2D, and see the endless amount of bug tickets, measured in thousands.

Blazour seems to be the new kid in town, to the point of even trying to push it inside MAUI as pseudo-Electron replacement.

Meanwhile the other business units are focused on Web or Android.

It looks like "Azure OS" is the new Windows.

Windows really is a clusterf*k right now. In addition to the mess of frameworks that you talk about, Windows 11 has been a mess. From the random Bing-related crap getting increasingly prevalent and pervasive around the OS to the TPM fiasco (they originally let you install it on non-supported hardware but are now withholding updates). From the feature regression (e.g., taskbar is now immovable) to the yet-another-redesign that they teased/leaked during Build this year.

At this point, I'd prefer an Azure OS that I could install locally and have the Windows team slowly transition to supporting Wine, improving Linux DEs/Wayland (or even create their own DE), since I believe that they're using some Wayland compositor (mutter?) for gWSL anyways, and contributing to the Linux kernel, which they're already doing to some degree. I genuinely don't know how feasible that is and I'm aware it's wishful thinking, but a person can dream.

Then again, it would probably be to the Linux community's detriment and they'd just do the same scummy Bing/telemetry/dark pattern crap to foster ad revenue.

The taskbar is now immovable?? When did that happen?

Sorry, I was slightly off. It can only be aligned to the bottom or left now (no right or top alignment). This change was made with Windows 11.

Only the taskbar's icons can be aligned to the center or the bottom left of the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. The taskbar cannot be moved to the left, right or top of the screen in Windows 11, a huge regression.

I didn’t even realize that widgets were so under-developed? I legit thought I’d look into writing one today as I suddenly had a use case. Apparently at the moment the only way to write one is Win32 flavored C++ and a bunch of COM Black Magic. One would assume from their marketing that they’d have at least started at .NET. But instead it’s C++ and Someday(TM) PWAs (via Edge I assume) can provide widgets.

That just runs completely counter to all the Dev Experience marketing you get from them. It feels like Widgets were slapped together by the kernel team at the last minute.

When Longhorn failed, mostly due to WinDev sabotage[0], they doubled down on using COM, hence why since Vista all major Windows APIs are COM based, and if we are lucky there are some .NET bindings as well.

WinRT is basically the evolution of this, going back to the design board as if .NET never happened, hence .NET Native and C++/CX abstracting what is basically COM + IInspectable + .NET metadata instead of TLB + App Identity.

WinRT eventually became UWP, as they improved the developer experience, only to kill .NET Native, replace C++/CX with C++/WinRT (similar dev experience as using ATL), and move that infrastructure on top of standard COM on Win32 side.

So now you have classical COM, and Windows Runtime components are the modern COM.

Meanwhile DevDiv seems to have had enough of this and decided to focus on .NET with cross platform experience, and Web technologies, hence why even Visual Studio is quite lacking on WinUI tooling.

[0] - If they really cared they would have doubled down on it like Android and ChromeOS did, and all those C# 7 - 11 performance improvements would have been done at the time.

I noticed the same, I can’t believe the inexperience of the developers Microsoft has picked to work on these important frameworks. It appears like a form of self sabotage.

“The current team seems composed by interns without experience on previous Microsoft frameworks, “

That’s my suspicion too. And I believe they did the same thing with Teams and hired some interns who are learning Agile to rapidly deliver “feature”.

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