Zune, Phone, Surface, Windows 8, Windows RT, Bing, Cortana, Continuum, Project Astoria, I'm sure I'm forgetting. Apple and Google execs must have been amused.
No wonder that Windows developer community decided to ignore whatever is related to WinUI, and focus on the stable technologies from the past.
For C++, you're better off with Qt, wxWidgets.
You can use Visual Studio Community if the licence still fits your work, or in the case of Qt, Qt Creator alongside a recent VS or MinGW.
Only if you need cross platform.
On the Microsoft tooling stack even MFC offers better development experience on Visual Studio.
I left it out on purpose, because I doubt the OP would like to use MFC, and I wouldn't even recomend XAML C++ development experience to my enemies.
Apparently, Microsoft couldn’t even setup the project template, need to manually edit the project file adding WindowsAppSDKSelfContained setting. After that it launches, but the binaries are now 151MB in 386 files, for a single AMD64 architecture.
By comparison, an empty WPF application compiles into 171 KB of binaries in 5 files, and the binary is CPU-agnostic, it runs on all CPU architectures. It depends on the .NET 7 runtime, but the runtime for my processor only takes 55MB to download. And if you’re unhappy about the runtime, you can instead target the older .NET framework 4.8 which comes preinstalled on Windows 10 and 11.
At least Native AOT might support WinUI in .NET 9, something to look forward to, for anyone that still cares outside Redmond.
iOS: UIKit -> SwiftUI
MacOS: AppKit -> Catalyst -> SwiftUI
there was definitely some churn within each one of those from version to version, but no complete rewrite needed afaik.
If you want to dabble in desktop with C#, Avalonia is the best way to go nowadays. I'm having a blast with it working on a couple of projects for my assigned client, and in a couple of personal toy projects.
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.
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.
Quite unpleasant to use compared to just vanilla ChatGPT, which offers a zen-like experience in comparison.