Just 4 months ago they announced they were suspending development of OneNote Win32 in favor of just the UWP version [1] Moreover, they have (had?) an entire multi-year roadmap planned around UWP, including the eventual release of a version of windows which was supposed to substantially reduce day-to-day reliance on Win32 for lower powered devices, codenamed Project Polaris [2], in an attempt to compete with Chromeboo…
"If Microsoft can't even release their marquee apps on it, why should anyone else feel confident in developing on the platform?" That's why I avoid any kind of Windows desktop development. They release a new framework every 2-3 years and developers are expected to adopt it. But then they drop support for that framework quickly and release a new incompatible one. In the Windows environment choice is bad. You only have…
Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows
101–110 of 143 posts
Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows
#102Earlier 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.
Yes and no. They've taken down the documentation, but there's still a number of (non-GUI, non-kernel) Carbon APIs that are still not deprecated (as of 10.11, at least), and still allowed in the Mac App Store. I'm using AHGotoPage() because NSHelpManager has no equivalent and nobody has been able to explain to me how to make that class do a similar task reliably. (In hindsight, AppleHelp is such a disaster that I shou…
Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
"If Microsoft can't even release their marquee apps on it, why should anyone else feel confident in developing on the platform?" That's why I avoid any kind of Windows desktop development. They release a new framework every 2-3 years and developers are expected to adopt it. But then they drop support for that framework quickly and release a new incompatible one. In the Windows environment choice is bad. You only have…
> They release a new framework every 2-3 years and developers are expected to adopt it. But then they drop support for that framework quickly and release a new incompatible one. Doesn't matter, as a developer you're free to pick whichever you like. You can run VB6 apps on Windows 10. A software I've made on my first job with MFC for NT4.0 still runs on Win10. WPF is awesome, I still pick it now in 2018 when I need co…
Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
"If Microsoft can't even release their marquee apps on it, why should anyone else feel confident in developing on the platform?" That's why I avoid any kind of Windows desktop development. They release a new framework every 2-3 years and developers are expected to adopt it. But then they drop support for that framework quickly and release a new incompatible one. In the Windows environment choice is bad. You only have…
True, but it's not like frameworks stop working. I still write an occasional app in WinForms and it works great.
Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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 up…
WPF was really nice from what I remember of it. MVVM was super easily integrated with XAML.
For me the whole thing was cumbersome and nowhere near as productive as WinForms. Not only that but problems it purported to solve like high-dpi support still had issues.
Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows
#107The headline is misleading. Microsoft is suspending development of the UWP Office applications, which happen to be touch-friendly. However, the headline implies that the remaining Win32 versions do not have a touch-friendly mode, which is false. The Win32 versions can be switched between "mouse" and "touch" modes. In touch mode, the pointing targets are all much larger. But as with most user interfaces on modern Wind…
Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows
#1081) UWP is the branding behind many technologies, but most commonly thought of as the containerization and sandboxed subset of the Win32 API available to the application. This would have been great had it not poorly abstracted a lot of very common I/O APIs. The first version didn't allow normal socket API, you had to use the HTTP or some janky intern's first project streaming socket API.
Another annoyance, none of the file system APIs that had 20 years of software written around worked anymore, instead you had to rewrite on top of a completely different API that was in no way compatible with the previous API set.
Contrast that with Apple's iOS sandbox story, the entire Foundation and Core Foundation library, including all of the expected POSIX (BSD variant) code continued to be available. Developers early in the platform's life could take their previous work and just recompile it for the phone and build a new mobile UI on top of it.
iOS in the very beginning had its fans but also only one or two developers who were eager to convince management they should write software for it. Whereas Microsoft's vision for requiring you to rewrite the majority of your software from the bottom to the top on this container system meant serious up front investment. For a new platform, the chicken and egg problem meant even Microsoft couldn't justify the cost.
2) Over time Microsoft has changed course and re-enabled a lot of the Win32 restrictions they engineered in place to write containerized applications. It's still not 100% there and I think they probably gave up trying to make it work. Instead they decided just to allow Win32 software in its entirety to run on the sandbox through another marketing platform, "Desktop Bridge." This brought a flood of 3rd party apps to the Microsoft Store since it was finally easy to port software over.
It's definitely not the same though, because UI (xaml) is still locked behind the container system. Yet all the work the Windows UI team is investing in is in this new container XAML UI. It's a nice UI surface, because you get a lot for free now, High-DPI and scaling just works and animations that don't look like garbage.
Unfortunately you cannot have both. You cannot have the newest UI framework and continue to have access to the entire platform API in a sandbox. Microsoft enabled a bunch of super hacks to try to allow you to write containerized UI but it's not straightforward and you're better off picking one platform or the other.
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So thiiiiis is where I see the demise of Mobile Office. Desktop Bridge will allow Win32 Office to continue to work on all tablets and desktops. Even the ARM variant will run them, and Win32 Office already has an ARM port, so it's not likely that will change. They won't get access to the containerized UI, but Office has always been its on custom UI beast. So I doubt they need to suffer the limitations of the containerized API subset, get full access in the Win32 API and unify the teams.
It makes perfect sense to me and if I were the PMs in charge of this, I would have done this a while ago.
Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They release a new framework every 2-3 years and developers are expected to adopt it. But then they drop support for that framework quickly and release a new incompatible one. Doesn't matter, as a developer you're free to pick whichever you like. You can run VB6 apps on Windows 10. A software I've made on my first job with MFC for NT4.0 still runs on Win10. WPF is awesome, I still pick it now in 2018 when I need co…
You can but it would be better for developers if you could rely on a framework being developed rather than frozen in time. I'm pretty sure there are no classes supporting touch in MFC.
Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
GDI, Win32, and XAML are the only ones that come to mind for me, am I missing some? 3 frameworks in 3 decades seems reasonable considering they all still work. The same can't be said for MacOS If you're referring to Silverlight, that was never a serious desktop UI framework. It was initially targeted as a Flash /Java killer but pivoted to cross platform desktop apps when it became clear that it would never be adopted…
You are missing Winforms and several XAML frameworks (WPF, Silverlight, WinRT and UWP). Even if you use one of the XAML frameworks porting any app of decent size is really hard to almost impossible. I think trouble started with .NET. Since then there was a change in direction almost every 2-3 years. Edit: Forgot WinJS...
So since .NET was introduced there has been an ongoing power struggle between the two camps regarding how the future of Windows development should look like.
The whole Longhorn/Vista debacle was more a side effect of those political issues than actual technical problems. Likewise with lack of management support for bringing Singularity and Midori outcomes into mainstream Windows, or trying to replace .NET with WinRT.
The reorganization was supposed to help sort out such silos, apparently it wasn't successful at that.