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"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.
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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.
> I'm pretty sure there are no classes supporting touch in MFC. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/mfc/reference/cwnd-clas...
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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.
I used to work on the office UWP apps, and I’ve seen the underlying code.
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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…
What do you mean same can’t be said for macOS? Carbon and Cocoa. Cocoa has been around since 2001 (17 years), and is still going. Since 2007 UIKit has been around (11 years) and doesn’t seem as if it’s going anywhere either. I personally think Apple has the nicest UI frameworks to develop for, and the longevity is quite good. The frameworks (particularly UIKit) regularly get meaningful updates to make it modern, and…
I wasn't so much taking a shot at Apple as I was trying to point out the stability of Windows. The reality though is that APIs on either system outlive the usefulness of most applications.
In a purely technical sense though you can't run a 2001 era Cocoa App on a 2018 Mac without recompilation. You can't run a System 7 era App on a 2018 App without at least minor API tweaks (Cocoa isn't 100% compatible with System 9's API). You can run a 1990s era Win32 App on a 2018 Windows 10 PC without recompilation.
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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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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.
Compatibility with what? Do people do UI automation with the control panel?
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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.
A little secret, laptops and 2-1 convertibles are desktops as well, while being mobile.
But in the real world when people talk about “mobile software” everyone knows that people are talking about iOS and Android. No one is chasing after the Windows software market, it’s been a diminishing platform for the past decade.
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I think it matters a lot. If I develop an application that's supposed to be in development for many years I want to use a framework that has a forward path to the latest OS features.
> a framework that has a forward path to the latest OS features. Microsoft usually adds support of OS features into old frameworks. For example, they have added touch support into their 25+ years old MFC. Technically speaking, WPF gets updated regularly with each release of .NET framework. For example, in 4.6.2 they have implemented per-monitor DPI scaling support. As a developer, I like stable APIs, and frameworks w…
Which framework provides the best of both worlds?
Not UWP, since it doesn't offer full multitasking and is limited in various other ways like sandboxing that I can't opt out of.
Is there ANY framework that provides the best of both worlds?
The 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…
Do I have to go around telling each app that supports touch mode to go to touch mode, or is there a way I can configure it centrally?
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…