I'm not quite sure I know enough to guess, does this suggest that new normal desktop applications may soon be able to take advantage of a unified upgrade mechanism rather than every program rolling their own?
Microsoft Throws in the Towel on UWP, Elevates Win32
21–30 of 104 posts
Re: Microsoft Throws in the Towel on UWP, Elevates Win32
#22I watched the videos for every session from the current Build conference I could find on this topic, but still don’t understand the strategy. Like at all. Listing the GUI toolkits that Microsoft is currently investing in, there’s UWP, WPF, React Native and also a new thing called WinUI. Not all of them will survive (by which I mean will continue to get significant new feature releases say three years from now). So it…
Electron gets a lot of stick but you can write good looking cross platform applications easily.
Until someone does something better that isn’t single platform it has to be here to stay
Re: Microsoft Throws in the Towel on UWP, Elevates Win32
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
COM isn't C++. It's a language independent interface. There's no reason why COM (and therefore UWP) can't be used from C.
It can be used from C but is a huge pain that makes it obvious whoever designed the interface (or COM in general) really went off the deep end with the abstraction level. There's a major difference between a C API designed to be used from C (Win32, POSIX) and one that only happens to be usable from C. Compare a sane "C API designed to be used from C": https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/dlgbox/usin... th…
Without a language that wraps the naked COM calls it's truly a nightmare. Using COM from C# is pretty OK and VB6 was great too. C++ is worse. To me COM is like an assembly language for interop that needs to be wrapped with higher language constructs. You could probably write a few C macros to reduce the boilerplate code a lot.
Re: Microsoft Throws in the Towel on UWP, Elevates Win32
#24How do they expect desktop developers to bet on anything MS does? Since .NET came out they constantly keep changing direction without any cohesive strategy. The server development strategy looks pretty good with MVC and now Core. But desktop development is just terrible. If I have to write a new app I will either think about making it web based or maybe use qt but I think I will avoid any MS UI toolkit.
I gave up on chasing every new shiny thing MS produces. Winforms work great. They are stable - there are a million packages for it out there and it can work with the version of the framework that's installed with every copy of Windows.
And it's open-source now! I'm looking forward to people creating a better, more portable winforms even if we can't get it from Microsoft.
Re: Microsoft Throws in the Towel on UWP, Elevates Win32
#25How do they expect desktop developers to bet on anything MS does? Since .NET came out they constantly keep changing direction without any cohesive strategy. The server development strategy looks pretty good with MVC and now Core. But desktop development is just terrible. If I have to write a new app I will either think about making it web based or maybe use qt but I think I will avoid any MS UI toolkit.
If you read the article, it doesn't sound like anything is being abandoned, so I'm not sure how your comment is relevant here. MS does have a tradition of abandoning products (like some other infamous tools vendors) but UWP isn't being abandoned according to the article.
Re: Microsoft Throws in the Towel on UWP, Elevates Win32
#26I watched the videos for every session from the current Build conference I could find on this topic, but still don’t understand the strategy. Like at all. Listing the GUI toolkits that Microsoft is currently investing in, there’s UWP, WPF, React Native and also a new thing called WinUI. Not all of them will survive (by which I mean will continue to get significant new feature releases say three years from now). So it…
Electron gets a lot of stick but you can write good looking cross platform applications easily. Until someone does something better that isn’t single platform it has to be here to stay
As a long time Windows desktop dev I am horrified to say that Electron looks really attractive as dev platform on Windows :-)
Re: Microsoft Throws in the Towel on UWP, Elevates Win32
#27Thank god. Among other things UWP didn't allow PAGE_EXECUTE on the memory mapping calls, meaning that JITs were disallowed. That's pretty core to general purpose computing in a real way, IMO.
iOS also disallows JIT’s. I’m not saying this is okay, but it is quite clearly possible to have a successful software platform without them. (Excluding the platform-holder’s own JIT’s, of course.)
iOS is not really “general-purpose computing”.
Re: Microsoft Throws in the Towel on UWP, Elevates Win32
#28How do they expect desktop developers to bet on anything MS does? Since .NET came out they constantly keep changing direction without any cohesive strategy. The server development strategy looks pretty good with MVC and now Core. But desktop development is just terrible. If I have to write a new app I will either think about making it web based or maybe use qt but I think I will avoid any MS UI toolkit.
If you read the article, it doesn't sound like anything is being abandoned, so I'm not sure how your comment is relevant here. MS does have a tradition of abandoning products (like some other infamous tools vendors) but UWP isn't being abandoned according to the article.
I think we have distinguish between UWP as UI toolkit and UWP for as library for system functions. The latter will stay but I am really doubtful about the former. I don't know of any aspect where UWP UI ie better than WPF or Win32 so I doubt it will get more than the little adoption it already has.
Re: Microsoft Throws in the Towel on UWP, Elevates Win32
#29About 7 years too late. This thing should have been drowned in the bathtub when it was called WinRT. An excellent example of the hubris of the Windows division, leading to the demise of Windows Phone (and Windows in due course).
The genius who convinced Microsoft to throw its weight behind an API completely incompatible with everything they had done before should be lauded for chutzpah. They couldn't have done a better job of destroying Windows, if that was their goal.
Re: Microsoft Throws in the Towel on UWP, Elevates Win32
#30How do they expect desktop developers to bet on anything MS does? Since .NET came out they constantly keep changing direction without any cohesive strategy. The server development strategy looks pretty good with MVC and now Core. But desktop development is just terrible. If I have to write a new app I will either think about making it web based or maybe use qt but I think I will avoid any MS UI toolkit.
Does it matter what flavor of the month they focus on, as long as they don’t drop support for things?
Silverlight, Winforms, MFC, etc. still all work perfectly fine.