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Microsoft Confirms UWP Is Not the Future of Windows Apps

thurrott.com

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Re: Microsoft Confirms UWP Is Not the Future of Windows Apps

#61

Post by maxxxxx »

naikrovek wrote: post #57
maxxxxx wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Win32 is super stable. The .NET Ui toolkits churn every 3 years or so without much improvement. Very frustrating.

I haven't seen much (if any) churn in Windows Forms or WPF toolkits in about a decade. Are you sure about that 3 year thing?

i meant every 3 years there is a new, incompatible toolkit. Winforms, Html5/JS, WPF, Silverlight, WinRT, now UWP. Instead of refining what they have they create something new (possibly with less capability like WinRT), and put the previous toolkit into maintenance mode with only minor development.

Re: Microsoft Confirms UWP Is Not the Future of Windows Apps

#62

Post by donmcronald »

tasdev wrote: post #31

The comments on this post really make me wonder how many people have actually written a UWP app or tried using the API? I have experience across a heap of stacks... Cocoa, Cocoa Touch, Android, Win32/WinForms/WPF, Web, Xamarin Forms etc... I love UWP. It was pretty ordinary in the first few releases but it has matured well, has great documentation and the UI framework is developed in the open on GitHub. I am by no me…

I wouldn’t be pleased if I had to use a LOB app without sub-pixel anti-aliasing.

Re: Microsoft Confirms UWP Is Not the Future of Windows Apps

#63

Post by hz10 »

hz10 wrote: post #54

Disagree with the simplistic conclusion. Before I make a long comment, please spend a few minutes to take a look at this video and make your own conclusion: https://youtu.be/GrKA4D_8ngY?t=382

My interpretation of the direction is the opposite of Thurrott’s in some sense – UWP will be expanded and morphed together with Windows Forms and WPP into .Net core app eventually with .Net Core 5.0 Here is my take of UWP development that I have expressed on different occasions: 1. The best target OS compared with Android and iOS. 2. The best IDE (VS). Android Studio is catching up fast, but still has a long way to go before rivaling VS. 3. The best user experience compared with apps on other platforms (e.g. Android) for for which I also develop apps. 4. The worst app store by far. I have been suspecting that Microsoft Store killed Windows Phone. WP came out late, but it had a decent chance to survive and thrive (its market share actually reached double digits in some European countries), but the lack of apps killed it eventually. I blame Microsoft Store for it. It is pretty much the worst in every sense and had glitches one after another. If Microsoft had outsourced the app store to a competent company, Windows Phone could be rivaling iPhone and Android now. It is as if Microsoft thought the poor store was not hurting UWP apps enough, they introduced .Net Native toolchain nightmare to hit UWP further. I have never noticed any promised app performance benefit. Instead, one app’s performance deteriorated so much that it became almost unusable under certain circumstances after .Net Native was used. An app’s debug version may behave significantly differently than its release version compiled with .Net Native. It takes 10 to 20 minutes to generate an app package with .Net Native. More than 90% app development problems I have encountered are related to .Net Native nightmare one way or another. Sideloading UWP app could make up a little bit for the store’s deficiency, but it seems they have changed the sideloading mechanism many times. I have lost track of it. In summary, UWP apps are the first-class products marketed and sold by a third-class store. I cannot help mentioning one emerging technology that adds absolute excitement to UWP – Uno Platform. It allows C# UWP code used for creating iOS, Android and WebAssembly web apps. It is truly “program once, run on billions of devices".

Re: Microsoft Confirms UWP Is Not the Future of Windows Apps

#64

Post by flukus »

contextfree wrote: post #3

I think from a developer perspective this is pretty misleading because all the "new" stuff in Windows development is just repackagings of UWP subsystems to work with Win32 apps. WinUI is the UWP UI stack, MSIX is the UWP package format, etc. So even if they aren't really pushing the UWP "brand" anymore, if you have a UWP app you are already using all of the "new" stuff.

That wasn't the impressions I got from the article:

> And the way we know that’s true is that Win32, WPF, and WinForms have all been “elevated to full status”—Gallo’s words—in Windows 10 all these years later.

It sounds like they're promoting Win32 as a long term option. I wouldn't expect them to say "UWP is dead", MS has a history of playing "it's not dead it's just resting" with UI frameworks, WPF was one of those.

I'm also curios what these changes mean for compatability? Anything that can't be used on windows 7+ will be dead on arrival. If they could just provide a "This is how you build windows apps for 7,8,10+ that we won't deprecate in future" I'd be happy.

Re: Microsoft Confirms UWP Is Not the Future of Windows Apps

#65

Post by techntoke »

crispinb wrote: post #42
techntoke wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegram works great, Slack works fine as does Discord. LibreOffice is descent, there are a few Money Manager apps. I'm not a huge fan of GTK or KDE-based apps, but ones developed in React Native and Qt with static binaries, then I really enjoy the quality and having the latest version integrated into my package manager. It is much cleaner to install and remove overall. Containers would help isolate this even more. I…

You're adding to my list of cross-platform apps. I agree that most of the important ones are fine under Linux, but I still haven't seen many (any?) great linux-specific ones. There are obviously reasons to use Linux (I do), I just don't think unique (end-user, GUI) app availability is amongst them.

I guess it depends on what distro you're using.

Re: Microsoft Confirms UWP Is Not the Future of Windows Apps

#66

Post by IceWreck »

MR4D wrote: post #60

The future of windows is JavaScript. And no, I’m not kidding. Anyone who has used Office 365 in their browser can see that for many desktop things, you no longer need a framework. For everything else, it’s probably a custom library on top of DirectX anyway. And I’m not saying I agree with this, but MSFT opened that door and others will follow whether they want them to or not.

Hell no. Whats wrong with plain old win32. Compiled software will almost always be faster than interpreted JS. Do we need a new system? UWP is more or less a flop, but the old way still works.

Now, I don't use windows on a regular basis, but clearly something was wrong with the UWP UX design.

But we don't need to replace it with a web based version of everything. Imagine electron based apps for your calculator....they'll be very very resource heavy.

Re: Microsoft Confirms UWP Is Not the Future of Windows Apps

#67

Post by miguelrochefort »

hz10 wrote: post #63
hz10 wrote: post #54

Disagree with the simplistic conclusion. Before I make a long comment, please spend a few minutes to take a look at this video and make your own conclusion: https://youtu.be/GrKA4D_8ngY?t=382

My interpretation of the direction is the opposite of Thurrott’s in some sense – UWP will be expanded and morphed together with Windows Forms and WPP into .Net core app eventually with .Net Core 5.0 Here is my take of UWP development that I have expressed on different occasions: 1. The best target OS compared with Android and iOS. 2. The best IDE (VS). Android Studio is catching up fast, but still has a long way to g…

I worked on Uno for a few years. We used it to build over a hundred iOS and Android apps. Nobody would guess they're built with UWP.

I have done native development for UWP, iOS, Android. UWP delivers the most consistent API, advanced tooling, and productive devrloper experience by far. This is part of why we picked UWP as the abstraction API for Uno.

That said, I believe that modern web development frameworks offer an even better developer experience, thanks to projects like TypeScript and React. I can't comment about Flutter yet.

Re: Microsoft Confirms UWP Is Not the Future of Windows Apps

#68

Post by majewsky »

MR4D wrote: post #60

The future of windows is JavaScript. And no, I’m not kidding. Anyone who has used Office 365 in their browser can see that for many desktop things, you no longer need a framework. For everything else, it’s probably a custom library on top of DirectX anyway. And I’m not saying I agree with this, but MSFT opened that door and others will follow whether they want them to or not.

Office 365 sure is impressing from a technical standpoint. It's also frustratingly slow compared to desktop Office, in my experience.

Re: Microsoft Confirms UWP Is Not the Future of Windows Apps

#69

Post by tonyhenrique »

I believe that with the new XAML Desktop initiative, we finally will get access to a broader Universal XAML dialect wich probably will be very based on the UWP XAML, but will be able to run outside the UWP AppModel and restrictions. If you see that along with the new .NET 5 perspective that will include even WebAssembly, maybe even SVG GUI on the Browser, we have a chance to finally have a decent cross-platform GUI and powerful programming languages, that I see as curated result of this decade of javaScript experiences. We will have the best of the two worlds, the Web and Native, the dynamic and typed, avaliable. All that said, I think that we are in good company also having the UNO Platform community folks, that I see as a garantee that all this will happen in a way that envolves the community needs.

https://platform.uno/

Re: Microsoft Confirms UWP Is Not the Future of Windows Apps

#70

Post by vborovikov »

naikrovek wrote: post #56
rayiner wrote: post #44

What the hell is wrong with Microsoft? Everyone is excited about WSL, but Microsoft is failing miserably at their core competencies. They killed off Win32 OneNote to create UWP OneNote (which offers a fraction of the features), and then kills UWP? Every new Microsoft app somehow does less than the version you were using when Win2k came out.

UWP isn't being killed; the UWP API is merging with other framework APIs into a single platform API for Windows. UWP as an API is very good. UWP as a user interface wasn't well received. There was a talk at the recent Build conference about it, which is now available on YouTube if you want to find it and judge for yourself.

What is the title?
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