Looking for some advice here. I’d be interested to develop simple GUI’s at work. I don’t have much experience of that. I have a license for VS2015 to maintain legacy VB and C++ but I think an upgrade could be arranged. I’m comfortable doing web dev but the browser remains limiting. In my situation, would learning native gui development be worthwhile or is it much easier to stick to websites and/or Electron?

This was exactly why I gave up on .Net ecosystem. I learned c# as my first programming language, then I started playing around with winforms and then making utility apps for windows phone, everything was great except suddenly wp got killed and they released UWP afterwards, and then UWP got killed to make rooms for whatever came after it… all happened within span of 5 years, it’s really exhausting for developers especially knowing that something you spent time learning and working with probably gonna get dropped sometimes soon..

Yes! Bing is finding its footing and is introducing nifty value-adds.

But, that has taken a long time, during which it was mostly the butt of jokes.

So, not saying all of these were abject failures and a few are still around and doing OK (Surface) or better (Bing). But, I'd argue that the projects were so rushed and reactionary that they were delivered compromised, embarrassed, and with too little direction and advocacy.

Oh, and I'd like to add Microsoft Store to the list.

My org forces ChatGPT to be used through Bing Chat when internal company data is involved. It’s an avalanche of popups, dialogues, links, “did you know”s, color and animations.

Quite unpleasant to use compared to just vanilla ChatGPT, which offers a zen-like experience in comparison.

This one is funny. There was enormous marketing buildup and they even did a full release event with media outlets posting live from the audience, Apple event style.

A little more than a month later MS decided to cancel it. And to be fair, it wasn't that great of a product, but the fact that they burned through all of that development and a massive marketing rollout only to throw it in the trash a few weeks later.... just peak late-00s Microsoft.

Wife here still using some Lumia 525 or 535 Dual-Sim. Only for calls, no messages or internet. Still works surprisingly great.

> I liked mine too. Sometimes I think I was the only one, but now I know there were at least three of us.

I'm pretty sure there were hundreds of us; but maybe only tens.

I don't think Microsoft understands how constantly churning the development framework impacts potential developers, because Windows is so big that developers will suffer through churn until they realize they should just stick to ancient methods that will continue to work. Windows Phone had no ancient methods, and important new OS features were tied to new frameworks anyway, but there wasn't enough users to encourage most developers to suffer through it. That they couldn't make Windows Mobile 10 work (well) on low end devices like the Lumia 520 is probably a mix of organizational and engineering failure, but either way, the push from Microsoft to build 'universal windows platform' apps that would only run on Windows Mobile 10 prompted developers to cut support for WP7 and WP8 in favor of WM10, even though WM10 never had more users than the earlier versions.

Also, mobile Edge was soooooo much worse than mobile IE, woof.

#totallynotstillbitter

I remember a lot of positive commentary on Windows Phone's UI and concepts. It was distinctive from iPhone and Android, which, with Android largely aping iOS, were pretty same-same, so it was a refreshing reinterpretation. And besides that, a third credible competitor was and still is welcome.

I think you were far from alone in your disappointment watching it wither on the vine.

There was no lack of games, Valve even needs to emulate DirectX and Win32, as Android developers couldn't care less about Steam Deck.

The rewrites across multiple versions, that is what killed the desire to target the devices.

To me it was also crazy how basically being the third player to the table for the modern smartphone, they pretended to already be in Apple's position. Like you said, lack of third party apps killed it. On a whim I wanted to dabble in WP dev a bit in I think late 2014, and just to launch the dev environment I needed to have a dev account which was still paid at that point iirc. I guess that's how you get more people to port their apps over to a platform that has no market share.

And obviously the lack of all the Google apps. Again there was obviously some manager on crack thinking that that'll get everyone to switch to the according Microsoft offerings, and maybe people just stop using YouTube. But surprise, it didn't work out!

Also the aggressive power saving which meant every time you were sending some photos on WhatsApp or other messenger, you had to make sure to keep the screen on and the app in the foreground until it's done uploading, otherwise there was a 90% chance it would get aborted and restarted next time you turned on the screen.

WP 7 is an entirely different story and not what people talk about when they say Windows Phone. It was a reskinned Windows CE because they wanted to release a product and 8 wasn't done yet.