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How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

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31–40 of 99 posts

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#31
post #28

Microsoft used to make most of their money by continuously moving the cheese; hopefully their transition to a focus on cloud stuff will continue to reduce this needless churn.

When I get all of the cheese that I used to have back, I'll be happy. There's still a lot of stuff there that I used to have fairly solid, powerful libraries for that has been replaced by brittle, incomplete APIs.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#32
It's not just one announcement; they keep changing their mind about what the future of the windows API is. WinRT is the final nail in the coffin. Now with WinRT on one side being tied to Windows Store apps and .net/WPF on the other side being limited to normal desktop applications, who in their right mind would devote time to building an app in either?

In particular, if you're making enterprise software, for example, and aren't interested in the Windows Store, what can you do except throw up your hands in the air and switch to the web.

Even if you're determined to make a desktop app application, at this point WPF seems even more likely to become problematic in the future than the Win32 API!

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#33
post #30

The Windows Store is still a wasteland, and we're four or five years on at this point. The Windows 8 tablet-ification push was a serious misstep, and it is a damned shame, because the underlying guts of Windows have gotten much better since Win7.

> because the underlying guts of Windows have gotten much better since Win7.

I'd love to read a summary of the improvements if anyone has a link handy.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#35
It's crazy to think that the owner of the win32 API, probably the strongest asset in contemporary computing, ended up with such a disorganized developer story - winforms, wpf, winrt, silverlight, html.

The last thing you want your "developers, developers, developers" to do is to stop and think about which APIs they need to evaluate switching to. Because that's how you build mindshare on iOS, Android, OSX, ChromeOS.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#36

It's not just one announcement; they keep changing their mind about what the future of the windows API is. WinRT is the final nail in the coffin. Now with WinRT on one side being tied to Windows Store apps and .net/WPF on the other side being limited to normal desktop applications, who in their right mind would devote time to building an app in either? In particular, if you're making enterprise software, for example,…

.NET runs on both, just not 100% API compatible.

Mac OS X and iOS aren't also 100% compatible, neither are ChromeOS and Android.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#37

Great to see someone holding Sinofsky to task for this! Some background, from what I recall: - During the planning for Windows 8 XAML was the leading candidate for the UI technology but late in the process Sinofsky personally overruled it to make HTML the preferred UI technology. - Through the first half of Win8 development XAML support for Win8 was essentially a side project by DevDiv with very little support by Win…

This isn't about Silverlight vs Browser HTML.

This about creating "Native" apps using JavaScript and html as an interface for native apps. Fundamentally it still using the same components C++/Com store and .Net store apps. They've just written a language adapter for it.

XAML is alive and well in the WinRT apps.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#38

It's not just one announcement; they keep changing their mind about what the future of the windows API is. WinRT is the final nail in the coffin. Now with WinRT on one side being tied to Windows Store apps and .net/WPF on the other side being limited to normal desktop applications, who in their right mind would devote time to building an app in either? In particular, if you're making enterprise software, for example,…

You make .Net store app, and then distribute it how you want? Thought that was obvious.

You can create your own business store if you want, or you distribute the app through a file.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#39
post #30

The Windows Store is still a wasteland, and we're four or five years on at this point. The Windows 8 tablet-ification push was a serious misstep, and it is a damned shame, because the underlying guts of Windows have gotten much better since Win7.

> because the underlying guts of Windows have gotten much better since Win7. I'd love to read a summary of the improvements if anyone has a link handy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_8

Everything other than #2

---

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_10

Everything other than #s 1.3, 1.4, 2.3, and 3.3

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#40
post #35

It's crazy to think that the owner of the win32 API, probably the strongest asset in contemporary computing, ended up with such a disorganized developer story - winforms, wpf, winrt, silverlight, html. The last thing you want your "developers, developers, developers" to do is to stop and think about which APIs they need to evaluate switching to. Because that's how you build mindshare on iOS, Android, OSX, ChromeOS.

It's WinRT via .net/C++/js for future apps. Everything else is legacy supported.
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