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Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

arstechnica.com

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Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#21

Post by pjmlp »

hfdgiutdryg wrote: post #5

I wonder what the overall adoption rates are for UWP. As someone who's written Windows software since the 90s, I can't shake the feeling that Microsoft just churns out completely new development stacks every few years.

Like everyone else, the biggest difference is that Microsoft keeps the old tech around, while most other companies are willing to loose customers that don't want to move into the new stacks.

On one side it is a big reason why they have achieved their market size on the desktop, on the other side we reach this kind of situations where new tech improved tech like Singularity, Midori, Longhorn or now UWP gets thrown into the garbage can in the name of backwards compatibility. Quite sad.

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#22

Post by pjmlp »

pjc50 wrote: post #16
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what is holding back Win32: there has not been any serious development of the desktop developer story since WPF in 2005 (WPF only received token updates since then, the last major update was in 2010 when they finally added a DataGrid control, lol) - but WPF is not well-suited for many types of software which have to fall-back on “pure” Win32 and the story there is nothing but depressing. Apple got it…

> The story is so bad Microsoft’s own flagship software has to build their own UI frameworks I think this might be the other way round: if they're not eating their own dogfood, it's much easier for the UI framework to come adrift from actual use cases. It's really telling that in Windows 8/10 they "modernised" some , but not all, of the control panel UI. It's basically random as to whether a setting you need will be…

I do Windows development since 3.0, currently maintaining a couple of Forms and WPF applications, the Forms are the hardest to maintain due event handling spaghetti code instead of proper MVVM with data binding, no use of Table/StackLayout components and still do background handling in BackgroundWorker classes.

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#23

Post by stiGGG »

simongray wrote: post #13
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Apple introduced Cocoa they also introduced Carbon however, an extension of the legacy MacOS APIs. Apple already slowly killed their Win32.

It's actually kind of impressive how much transitional stuff Apple has introduced and then removed with Mac OS X and how right many of their decisions turned out. I guess Cocoa itself was an extension of the legacy NextStep API too. They also had Classic for running old Mac apps directly in OSX and later Rosetta for running PowerPC binaries on Intel (I guess the same tech was used for the 32->64 bit transition). So m…

I don’t think you really can compare Apple’s and Microsoft’s situation here. Think of the extreme bigger amount of software that was written for Windows including all that custom made business software for small companies. Apple was always in the situation that a lot of their 3rd party developers were also „fans“, who are more willing to keep up with their transitions, where however most the Microsoft tech developers were just doing their job and want to keep their stuff only running with the least amount of work necessary.

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#24

Post by pjmlp »

vezycash wrote: post #10

Ms is my favorite tech company. They, however are their own worst enemy. They produce many awesome but crippled stuff - like honey stained with drops of bird shit. UWP's appx format is awesome - one click installation, sandbox, clean uninstallation, potential for diff updates. All these have nothing to do with portability. But they crippled it by making it store only until recently... Too late. One reason I hate usin…

It is also one of my favorite ones, I think the continuous throw away of technology like Singularity, Midori, XNA, Longhorn, UWP,... is the usual outcome of the internal politics between WinDev, DevTools and Marketing divisions.

It was supposed to get better after the reorganization, but apparently it hardly changed.

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#25

Post by vezycash »

pjmlp wrote: post #24
vezycash wrote: post #10

Ms is my favorite tech company. They, however are their own worst enemy. They produce many awesome but crippled stuff - like honey stained with drops of bird shit. UWP's appx format is awesome - one click installation, sandbox, clean uninstallation, potential for diff updates. All these have nothing to do with portability. But they crippled it by making it store only until recently... Too late. One reason I hate usin…

It is also one of my favorite ones, I think the continuous throw away of technology like Singularity, Midori, XNA, Longhorn, UWP,... is the usual outcome of the internal politics between WinDev, DevTools and Marketing divisions. It was supposed to get better after the reorganization, but apparently it hardly changed.

>It was supposed to get better after the reorganization

I feel that reorganization was a financial sleight of hand to raise the stock price by emphasize money making projects and hide lack-lustre offerings.

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#26

Post by vezycash »

harryf wrote: post #11
vezycash wrote: post #10

Ms is my favorite tech company. They, however are their own worst enemy. They produce many awesome but crippled stuff - like honey stained with drops of bird shit. UWP's appx format is awesome - one click installation, sandbox, clean uninstallation, potential for diff updates. All these have nothing to do with portability. But they crippled it by making it store only until recently... Too late. One reason I hate usin…

> like honey stained with drops of bird shit. That is a very specific image that I've never encountered in real life. Is it something that only beekeepers get to witness or is there some bird that homes in on honey pots?

I'm not a beekeeper. I used to write professionally but quit.

The honey/bird poo imagery was simply the most striking I could think of.

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#27

Post by buckminster »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #20
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what is holding back Win32: there has not been any serious development of the desktop developer story since WPF in 2005 (WPF only received token updates since then, the last major update was in 2010 when they finally added a DataGrid control, lol) - but WPF is not well-suited for many types of software which have to fall-back on “pure” Win32 and the story there is nothing but depressing. Apple got it…

What's bad about GDI? (I used to do windows but have not been following, I remember that you need to do GetDC and ReleaseDC on a window handle to get the device context and then to release it - in pairs, else...)

It doesn't do antialiasing.

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#28

Post by vardump »

threeseed wrote: post #14
hfdgiutdryg wrote: post #5

I wonder what the overall adoption rates are for UWP. As someone who's written Windows software since the 90s, I can't shake the feeling that Microsoft just churns out completely new development stacks every few years.

There is also Electron/Javascript. Skype/Teams are developed in it and they have invested a lot of effort into TypeScript.

Skype has become so clunky and slow lately, so I find myself avoiding it whenever possible. Could this be the reason behind the worse quality?

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#30

Post by mrweasel »

hfdgiutdryg wrote: post #5

I wonder what the overall adoption rates are for UWP. As someone who's written Windows software since the 90s, I can't shake the feeling that Microsoft just churns out completely new development stacks every few years.

WinForms will out live UWP, WFP and pretty much everything else Microsoft develops in terms of GUI frameworks. It works for the vast majority of programs that businesses need, it's easy to use and so far it's been the best investment in terms of learning a "framework".

If Microsoft want's to move forward, they need to consider moving new stuff into WinForms and expand that with the features of UWP, WPF, XAML and other technologies they've tried to introduce over the years.

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