61–70 of 104 posts
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I believe this was true at one point, but isn't any more. Whilst you cannot allocate executable memory, you can use VirtualProtectFromApp to remap memory as executable [1]. UWP does enforce W^X though. You do need the codeGeneration capability. (Disclaimer, work for Microsoft - made LuaJIT run on UWP in my free time, this definitely works :) ) [1] - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/api/memorya...
VirtualProtectFromApp has the exact same signature as VirtualProtect, just supporting fewer constants and being legal in UWP apps. I don't suppose you have any insight as to why Microsoft forced this kind of API churn? Why I have to lace my code with #ifdef s to support both UWP Apps and earlier OSes? What's the upside? I feel like VirtualProtect could've just supported fewer constants inside the sandbox. Maybe to li…
Fun fact: your UWP app also links in gdi.dll and user32 as well.
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This has improved recently. WinRT is basically just COM + IInspectable so it's possible to use from any language that supports the msvc abi. The gist is that Microsoft ships .midl files which can then be used to generate bindings. C++: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/cpp-and-winrt-a... Rust: https://crates.io/crates/winrt C: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7436144/using-winrt-from... etc.
Hm. Where's the actual documentation on the MIDL format, or the ABI, or how it should be translated?
kind of swig for com/winrt supporting just now only c++ and python https://github.com/Microsoft/xlang/wiki/xlang-faq
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A lot of people, including me, do not think that "good looking" and "native looking" should be any different, and for that, Electron is a failure --- native applications use the UI of the platform and are consistent with other applications on the platform, while Electron applications obviously look different from them, and have the same look regardless of platform, completely ignoring the standard native UI it provid…
I honestly think the days of the cohesive desktop platform are done. It arguably reached its peak with OS X (perhaps circa Snow Leopard), but the idea has been falling into disrepair even on the mac. It's hard to see any strong force moving us back to it, but given the current situation, if I were a desktop app developer I don't think it's something I would consider it worth investing too much effort in.
I 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
About 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 bett…
Ideologically, I'm opposed to the assertions you've made in these two paragraphs primarily because the bloat and backwards compatibility requirements made innovation more difficult given the diversity of hosts which had to be supported. But I'll acknowledge that I've got a substantial bias here considering I both keenly observed and to a very modest extent contributed to external coverage of the development of the pl…
UWP meant dropping support for old Windows, you can't even access the filesystem (open a playlist file? Unzip an archive? Open subtitle files? Nah), and you can only publish on Windows Store which nobody visits. It didn't catch on.
I feel for the developers at MS building a platform nobody would use. Until this announcement.
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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.
Too bad Winforms is butt ugly.
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Of course Microsoft supports it, why not? There is no magic in COM, had COM object written in C
I don't mean that calling COM objects from C doesn't work . I just mean that COM isn't designed to be used from C.
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A lot of people, including me, do not think that "good looking" and "native looking" should be any different, and for that, Electron is a failure --- native applications use the UI of the platform and are consistent with other applications on the platform, while Electron applications obviously look different from them, and have the same look regardless of platform, completely ignoring the standard native UI it provid…
The only people who ever bring this up are all on HN. Spotify is electron, vs code is electron, slack is electron. I have them open all day, and never even notice.
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I honestly think the days of the cohesive desktop platform are done. It arguably reached its peak with OS X (perhaps circa Snow Leopard), but the idea has been falling into disrepair even on the mac. It's hard to see any strong force moving us back to it, but given the current situation, if I were a desktop app developer I don't think it's something I would consider it worth investing too much effort in.
Maybe my memory is bad but I don't think OS X ever really had it. The flag-carrying apps (Adobe, Final Cut, Garageband) had custom UIs. Built ins like Calendar had skeumorphic UIs.
Not perfect (what is?), and many of the longstanding apps are still around, but the steam has arguably gone out of the platform.