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Microsoft knows Windows is obsolete. a sneak peek at its replacement

zdnet.com

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Re: Microsoft knows Windows is obsolete. a sneak peek at its replacement

#51

Post by digi_owl »

pjmlp wrote: post #17
jbb67 wrote: post #7

UWP is a locked lock, annoying, walled garden that nobody wants to write programs for, Nobody wants to write programs for it, and the only people who run UWP programs are those who either have no choice or do so by mistake. If we can't run WIN32 or freely write win32 programs then windows is dead.

Yeah sure, it is the year of something on desktop. Legacy Win32 applications can be packaged as UWP ones.

Desktop Bridge?

Missed that one, as was under the impression that UWP and Win32 was strictly separated.

I do notice that this results in the Win32 program for all intents and purposes becoming a UWP app. Complete with the issues of installs only happening via the store...

Re: Microsoft knows Windows is obsolete. a sneak peek at its replacement

#52

Post by frik »

captainmuon wrote: post #40
flohofwoe wrote: post #15

The article paints UWP as a modern programming environment, superior to Win32, that only 'lazy developers' would reject, when in reality it is a confusing mess of desktop and outdated mobile paradigms from 10 years ago when mobile devices had dramatically less RAM and were much less powerful then 'real computers'. UWP is in many ways worse than Win32, it requires much more boilerplate code to get stuff done, and requ…

UWP is about 10 years or more too late. C++/CX is a dialect of C++ that has refcounted pointers (like COM). It is much better than the (also proprietary) extensions for COM to C++ MSVC had decades ago, and it is also much better IMO that managed C++ and C++/CLI. Of course, in a way it is still a hack. But I read that MS is also working on a way of doing managed components in modern C++ (i.e. 11/14/17). MS is doing a…

In an alternative reality were DotNet never happened and MS evolved Win32API with COM (so basically continue the strategy of 1989-1998 until the great break with DotNet happened), yes then a new "Win64API" with modern C++ would have been great. But the Web happened, DotNet original vision failed, their pivoted vision was declared as legacy 5 days ago too, and UWP failed with no one buying their Win10phone (0.02% global market share).

Re: Microsoft knows Windows is obsolete. a sneak peek at its replacement

#53

Post by Const-me »

flohofwoe wrote: post #15

The article paints UWP as a modern programming environment, superior to Win32, that only 'lazy developers' would reject, when in reality it is a confusing mess of desktop and outdated mobile paradigms from 10 years ago when mobile devices had dramatically less RAM and were much less powerful then 'real computers'. UWP is in many ways worse than Win32, it requires much more boilerplate code to get stuff done, and requ…

> it requires much more boilerplate code to get stuff done

Depends on the language. In C# it’s straightforward. In C++ yes it could be cumbersome. But that’s a language limitation, C++ lacks async-await so some boilerplate code is required to consume asynchronous APIs.

> good luck trying to compile most existing C/C++ code on UWP

Did that more than once. The largest problem is slightly different CRT, i.e. not all CRT functions are available.

For the language however, C++/CX is merely a syntactic sugar on top of regular C++ compiler that compile your stuff into native code. You can enable/disable “Consume Windows Runtime Extensions (/ZW)” for individual C++ source files inside a single project. The linker will happily link everything together.

Also, if you don’t like C++/CX you don’t even required to use it. You can compile your C/C++ code into a UWP DLL that’s not windows runtime components, but expose C-style API instead. You’ll be able to use that in UWP apps just fine.

Re: Microsoft knows Windows is obsolete. a sneak peek at its replacement

#55

Post by maxxxxx »

jetti wrote: post #34
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #4

"Some of it is developer laziness. It's not like they haven't had 15 years to learn and adopt .NET and the past five years to adopt Metro/Modern/UWP." Once I can't target Win32 anymore I'll switch to the browser. Metro/Modern/UWP isn't on my radar. I doubt I'm alone in those thoughts.

That line really bothers me. I'm writing a new application in WPF (thus using Win32) and am avoiding UWP because of the fact that I want (actually need to) support older platforms. As I'm writing this software to make money and it is B2B, I can't afford to ignore Windows 7 as many businesses are still running it and many more still target it. I'm currently learning UWP as well but why would I bet my product on a tech…

My advice would be to learn Web development.

Re: Microsoft knows Windows is obsolete. a sneak peek at its replacement

#56

Post by pcr0 »

robotnoises wrote: post #18

I suppose this means no more electron or nwjs apps, either, probably to many's delight.

To the contrary, I think they're encouraging Electron apps. Electron apps can be packaged directly to Windows Store. Another case in point: Visual Studio Code.

Re: Microsoft knows Windows is obsolete. a sneak peek at its replacement

#57

Post by zanny »

tyfon wrote: post #20
jerf wrote: post #6

What happens to Steam and similar apps? (Honest question.)

They are screwed.. Which is why they have been betting so heard on Linux recently. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/microsofts-latest-tac...

They haven't really been betting on Linux at all for about two years. All major development efforts, at least consumer facing ones, have pretty much stopped. SteamOS now is as bad as it was when the Steam Machines released, which are still awful. Feral and Aspyr are pretty much the only two games in town nowadays producing consistent and good Linux ports of AAA titles. And they are just that, though - ports. Neither company has the developer manpower or budget for their ports to make good native OpenGL games. Likewise, the other major source of Linux titles is Unity, whom also haven't invested much in making a well optimized OpenGL rendering engine compared to their DX one.

The end result is that games run poorly on Linux and give a terrible experience to anyone trying it, because nobody wants to invest in native titles that are as optimized as the Windows ones... besides Valve. Pretty much every Valve game runs as good or better on Linux than on Windows, but they were the exception able to throw what is in all likelihood more money than they have made from Linux users in their first year on the platform to port these titles correctly.

Top it off with how bad the uptake on Vulkan has been relative to DX12, and the future is not bright for Linux gaming. It is way better than it ever was, and for anyone except a hardcore gamer the library is definitely vast enough to not feel any desire to use Windows over Linux for the sole reason of gaming, but its in such a shoddy state it won't win over hearts or minds any time soon.

Re: Microsoft knows Windows is obsolete. a sneak peek at its replacement

#58

Post by zanny »

douche wrote: post #27

Ok, so Windows S is a Windows Chromebook. I imagine we'll just continue to ignore that UWP and the Windows Store exist. Wake me up when full versions of Office and Visual Studio are built as UWP apps.

Difference is Chromebooks are fairly open hardware wise. Almost every model uses a Coreboot you can use alternative payloads on, so you can naively boot Linux, or run it under Crouton is a nearly no overhead environment. Some Chromebooks are bad eggs that never provide unlocks to their firmware, but most do.

Apple and Microsoft would never be that respectful of its users. The whole point of how draconian iOS and Windows RT 2.0 (aka 10 S) are is to strip user freedom to make more money.

Re: Microsoft knows Windows is obsolete. a sneak peek at its replacement

#59

Post by JohnDeHope »

r3bl wrote: post #46
JohnDeHope wrote: post #11

Is there a list of apps that are missing from the Windows Store that cause friction for Windows S? I see it often called a chicken and egg problem. But I never see anyone suggest a list of what they think the eggs are. (I don't think the problem is missing apps. My guess is that most UWP apps in the Windows Store use a tablet-ey, metro, modern ui, and nobody seems to like it much.)

Oh boy, where do I start! I have a two-in-one laptop/tablet (from Lenovo's Yoga series), and while I have really tried to use the Store apps so that they are comfortable in the tablet mode, I've yet to find a PDF reader that doesn't crash randomly (including Adobe Reader's Microsoft Store port) and have basically no decent epub reader (I can't find a single app in the store that will open two epub files without any w…

Thanks that was helpful for educating me.
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