Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

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Additionally, most likely they will bork yet again the development experience.

For those losing count, Windows 8 introduced WinRT with three UI models (phone/tablet/desktop), Windows 8.1 introduced UAP and reduced the UI models to 2 (phone/tablet and desktop), Windows 10 introduced UWP and merged all UI models into a universal one (U in UWP).

.NET Native and C++/CX were introduced as a reboot of the Windows platform where COM takes again the center stage, as if .NET as such never happened and we got the evolution of VB 6 instead.

Due to lack of update, and multiple rewrites, they came up with WinUI 3.0 and WinAppSDK, which dropped .NET Native and C++/CX, .NET and C++/WinRT are still lacking versus the former in Visual Studio tooling for WinUI development, WinUI 3.0 is still years behind UWP features, many key people that used to be in the community calls have either left Microsoft, or moved into Azure.

Now they are rebooting it yet again? Good luck convincing those of us that had enough from this mismanagement.

I just still write WinForms. It looks like crap, works everywhere and everyone knows how to use it

Can you imagine that the aging MFC still provides better developer experience in Visual Studio than C++/WinRT? How they managed to bork that?!?

A few years ago I "adopted" an abandoned GPL3 Windows app written using MFC (using the single-view multiple document options). I updated the dependencies, and migrated the project from VS6 to VS2022 and 64-bits.

Even if I wanted to update the UI components, Microsoft's documentation is such a mess from having multiple diverging UI paradigms, I can't figure it out.

I don't develop native Windows apps anymore, but for me the deployment of UWP apps was just not acceptable. I tend to not want to register apps in a software store. I happily provide repositories or packages, but I don't need the dependency on a manufacturer.

I think it was just them wanting to push their stores and auth solutions and all this crappy overhead.

And yes, I still use Winforms for some internal tooling. I did my WPF tour as well...

There is not a single user in our whole company that uses touch on a Windows PC. Just give it up...

Nowadays I target Azure OS, among the competing clouds as well.

So I did gave up, my comments are more a heads up to make others aware how WinDev managed to kill the advocacy of the most passionate people regarding WinRT tooling.

I care less and less about that. Visual Stutio is the only reason that I still use Windows now and it becomes weaker and weaker. So yesterday, I spent over 10 minutes just to find out that VS failed to terminate a process it launched in debugging mode. and Windows 10 screwed up the task manager. I thought it was something else as I couldn't see the process in task manager. Eventually had to use command line to kill it.

In the paste decade, VS just got more and more bloated and lots of cosmetic works...

If the screenshot in the article is any indication of what is to come, they at least didn't change the design language again and there is no indication of a new UI framework.

Applications that work and look good in Windows 11 are likely to look good in Windows 12. It doesn't look like a reboot at all and more in line with the regular changes that we have seen within Windows 10 between the larger updates.

If only the same could be told about the respective SDKs and VS tooling.

Do you not write your desktop GUIs with Godot? /s

I recall reading an article here on HN about how that was now a better developer experience for building UIs than writing native apps, with extra bonus that if you want to port, you can.

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