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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

#121

Post by scarface74 »

maxxxxx wrote: post #79
013a wrote: post #58

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…

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.

I agree with you. I would never take a job doing Windows desktop development and I am a big fan of .Net and Microsoft’s development tools.

But web development is far worse.

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

#122

Post by maxxxxx »

slededit wrote: post #120
maxxxxx wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Everything lives on top of win32. Even UWP is a wrapper around win32, if you look at the modules list you'll see gdi.dll in the list. In a sense the rest of these frameworks are all just libraries. You can choose the one that makes your life easier but win32 will do the heavy lifting. Because of this its relatively easy for them to add support for new features to the various frameworks. They just wire up the win32 ca…

I don't think that's correct. In Winforms and MFC every control is a Win32 window. As far as i know WPF has only one root window and then does all the drawing by itself on a canvas.

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

#123

Post by maxxxxx »

cptskippy wrote: post #81
013a wrote: post #58

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…

The UWP version of Office has never really made sense. Office is a massive project and a moving target from a features perspective. It seems like a monumental task to reimplement it from scratch. It makes more sense to gradually rewrite portions of it but that doesn't work well with the annual release model. It does however work with the O365 continuous release model they adapted from Windows 10. Just as they're grad…

"gradually porting Control Panel and other legacy Win32 apps to the Settings App"

They have been porting the control panel since Windows 8 and it's still far from done.

How hard can it be to rewrite control panel in UWP?.

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

#124

Post by thrower123 »

maxxxxx wrote: post #123
cptskippy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UWP version of Office has never really made sense. Office is a massive project and a moving target from a features perspective. It seems like a monumental task to reimplement it from scratch. It makes more sense to gradually rewrite portions of it but that doesn't work well with the annual release model. It does however work with the O365 continuous release model they adapted from Windows 10. Just as they're grad…

"gradually porting Control Panel and other legacy Win32 apps to the Settings App" They have been porting the control panel since Windows 8 and it's still far from done. How hard can it be to rewrite control panel in UWP?.

With all the bits that have lived in there since Win95, I suspect it is something of a Lovecraftian horror.

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

#125

Post by tinus_hn »

maxxxxx wrote: post #123
cptskippy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UWP version of Office has never really made sense. Office is a massive project and a moving target from a features perspective. It seems like a monumental task to reimplement it from scratch. It makes more sense to gradually rewrite portions of it but that doesn't work well with the annual release model. It does however work with the O365 continuous release model they adapted from Windows 10. Just as they're grad…

"gradually porting Control Panel and other legacy Win32 apps to the Settings App" They have been porting the control panel since Windows 8 and it's still far from done. How hard can it be to rewrite control panel in UWP?.

Parts of it are public API with the API specifying the look and even the size of the panels. It’s impossible to rewrite without breaking compatibility.

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

#126

Post by tinus_hn »

jcelerier wrote: post #34
threeseed wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's also Qt which they used for OneDrive

I’m not sure if it’s true but it seems to me like they replaced their own client with an alternative one they bought from another company, which has parts written in Qt.

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

#127

Post by pjmlp »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #118
MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's a graphics API designed for early-1990s needs. It's missing things we expect today like 30-bit colour support and all-VRAM memory (GDI was hardware accelerated but they gimped it in Windows Vista to ensure compatibility with the DWM). When working with Win32 it just isn't possible to avoid having to use GDI, for example dealing with painting to a window surface Win32 will give you a GDI device context by default…

> Direct2D is nice - but setting it up in your code isn't easy - and Microsoft does not maintain an up-to-date C#/.NET library for Direct2D.

They do for Direct2D on UWP, https://github.com/Microsoft/Win2D

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

#128

Post by [deleted] »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #118
MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's a graphics API designed for early-1990s needs. It's missing things we expect today like 30-bit colour support and all-VRAM memory (GDI was hardware accelerated but they gimped it in Windows Vista to ensure compatibility with the DWM). When working with Win32 it just isn't possible to avoid having to use GDI, for example dealing with painting to a window surface Win32 will give you a GDI device context by default…

[deleted]

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

#129

Post by scarface74 »

maxxxxx wrote: post #83
cptskippy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that's not what Microsoft does at all. The .NET Framework is forward compatible and very rarely breaks compatibility. You can select multiple compilation targets for .NET and have a single piece of code that compiles to multiple frameoworks concurrently. I currently am maintaining a handful of Projects that build Nuget packages compatible with .NET Core, .NET Standard and .NET Framework. If you do have compati…

We aren't talking about .NET in general bit about desktop UI frameworks. If you started with ASP.NET MVC years ago you still are on the main platform that's in full development. With desktop development you have several frameworks that are either in support mode or not fully featured.

ASP.Net MVC 5 (ASP.NET Core) was a complete rewrite of MVC/Web API. The MVC work that was done previously would have to be completely rewritten.

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

#130

Post by scarface74 »

pjmlp wrote: post #18
simongray wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because Apple does the "take it our way or leave" approach. Which is also a reason why they hardly have a meaningful market share across the enterprise world.

Sure they do. It’s on mobile. While MS isn’t going anywhere in the Enterprise, anyone who is focused on the desktop when it comes to MS development instead of web, cloud, or even cross platform mobile development is headed down a dead end.
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