Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by opencl » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 1:58 PM UTC

maxsilver wrote: post #33

pjmlp wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 int…

Microsoft shot themselves in the foot with UWP. It's actually pretty nice to write apps with it (in my personal opinion, anyway). But UWP only supports Windows 10. Very few commercial products are able to drop Windows 7 support (and like, literally zero enterprise products can drop Windows 7 support). So, no matter how nice UWP gets, most companies that would still be willing to write a native Windows app are 5+ year…

UWP doesn't even support Windows 8, it is strictly Windows 10. Not that 8 is very relevant.

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

#42

Post by maxxxxx » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 2:04 PM UTC

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.

Honestly, if I had to develop a new desktop app for Windows I would seriously think about Electron. It's frustrating that there is no premier desktop app framework for Windows anymore. UWP is too limited, WPF is pretty much deprecated. Win32 has a huge learning curve and finding devs would be very difficult. Pretty sad situation.

Maybe their secret plan is to push people into writing web apps with ASP.NET? Event that doesn't work because a lot of people will use Node instead.

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

#43

Post by maxsilver » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 2:04 PM UTC

opencl wrote: post #41

maxsilver wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft shot themselves in the foot with UWP. It's actually pretty nice to write apps with it (in my personal opinion, anyway). But UWP only supports Windows 10. Very few commercial products are able to drop Windows 7 support (and like, literally zero enterprise products can drop Windows 7 support). So, no matter how nice UWP gets, most companies that would still be willing to write a native Windows app are 5+ year…

UWP doesn't even support Windows 8, it is strictly Windows 10. Not that 8 is very relevant.

Oops, sorry, you are correct, I got it mixed up with the 8/8.1 SDK. Fixed.

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

#44

Post by maxxxxx » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 2:09 PM UTC

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…

"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 in a Metro-flavoured window or a Win32-flavoured one."

That's really infuriating. Makes me wonder what all these devs they have are doing the whole day.

"To me, the trouble with everything after WinForms is that it lacks a really compelling reason to upgrade. It's not easier to develop for and it's not nicer to use, and on many desktop systems the font rendering is much uglier in the new system. It does perform better at high DPI, but (catch-22) few people use high DPI windows systems because it's not well supported by even the OS let alone the applications. "

WPF had great potential and I think they could have made it a wonderful environment if they had kept improving it. Clean up XAML syntax (maybe something like they with ASP.NET and Razor) , simplify data binding syntax and debugging, make MVVM first class citizen and it would be great. Instead they (almost) stopped development of WPF and cranked out a series of half baked successors like WinRT, Silverlight and UWP.

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

#45

Post by maxxxxx » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 2:10 PM UTC

GordonS wrote: post #38

pjmlp wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is the Visual Studio WPF designer these days? I worked on a WPF app around 5 years ago, and the form designer in Visual Studio was appalingly slow and quite buggy. I also wasn't a big fan of XAML - no matter how much time I spent using it, it mostly seemed more difficult and awkward to get components where you wanted them than with WinForms.

The designer is fine now.

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

#46

Post by maxxxxx » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 2:12 PM UTC

maxsilver wrote: post #33

pjmlp wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 int…

Microsoft shot themselves in the foot with UWP. It's actually pretty nice to write apps with it (in my personal opinion, anyway). But UWP only supports Windows 10. Very few commercial products are able to drop Windows 7 support (and like, literally zero enterprise products can drop Windows 7 support). So, no matter how nice UWP gets, most companies that would still be willing to write a native Windows app are 5+ year…

"Very few commercial products are able to drop Windows 7 support (and like, literally zero enterprise products can drop Windows 7 support)."

You would be suicidial if you based any product you want to sell to business on UWP. Not only doesn't it Win 7 or 8 but I don't see in what way UWP is better than WPF.

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

#47

Post by maxxxxx » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 2:14 PM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #30

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 othe…

"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. "

They could have done this 10-15 years ago. It's too late now.

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

#48

Post by spiritcat » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 2:17 PM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #29

pawelmurias wrote: post #15

Touch centered desktop uis need to die

One of the features I specifically look for in a laptop is "NO TOUCH SCREEN". I really don't understand it. Why would I want touch on a laptop or desktop PC?

for doing mobile development obv

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

#49

Post by cesarb » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 2:18 PM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #29

pawelmurias wrote: post #15

Touch centered desktop uis need to die

One of the features I specifically look for in a laptop is "NO TOUCH SCREEN". I really don't understand it. Why would I want touch on a laptop or desktop PC?

Story time. At a previous company, we had an annoying crash bug - it crashed on some of the client's computers, but never on any of ours. Finally the client lent us the personal laptop of one of their workers, which reliably reproduced the crash, and we debugged it while sitting on one of the client's meeting rooms and found the cause. It was a crash deep in the obsolete framework we were using, which manifested when receiving a particular kind of accessibility message, which came from one of the components for Microsoft's touch screen system.

The reason we could never reproduce the crash before was that, being techies, none of us had any modern laptop, personal or not, with a touch screen. The client, being less technical, had some of their workers with touch screen laptops and the then-recent touch-focused version of Windows (which we also tended to avoid).

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

#50

Post by maxsilver » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 2:20 PM UTC

maxxxxx wrote: post #46

maxsilver wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft shot themselves in the foot with UWP. It's actually pretty nice to write apps with it (in my personal opinion, anyway). But UWP only supports Windows 10. Very few commercial products are able to drop Windows 7 support (and like, literally zero enterprise products can drop Windows 7 support). So, no matter how nice UWP gets, most companies that would still be willing to write a native Windows app are 5+ year…

"Very few commercial products are able to drop Windows 7 support (and like, literally zero enterprise products can drop Windows 7 support)." You would be suicidial if you based any product you want to sell to business on UWP. Not only doesn't it Win 7 or 8 but I don't see in what way UWP is better than WPF.

I have found one working enterprise use case.

UWP is great if you are exclusively deploying to brand new Windows 10 Embedded devices. (I think this is now called "Windows IoT Core" or something similar). That's what I've been using it for, and that's worked well. It carries a nice side benefit that our sales team all has Windows 10 Pro laptops, and UWP 'just works' there too for sales demos, presentations, and such.

But I agree, selling UWP apps to businesses for traditional desktop use is ridiculously difficult.

> I don't see in what way UWP is better than WPF.

For a long time, UWP was the only way to get a working WebView (one based off of Edge instead of IE). But I think they fixed that and backported Edge to WPF a few months ago. (EDIT: they did kind of fix that - https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2018/05/09/modern-webvie... )