101–106 of 106 posts
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Winforms did not replace Win32 and WPF did not replace Winforms. That's the problem.
The older libraries may still be around, but they're not the recommended choice anymore and they don't support everything you can do with the newer libraries. It'll be the same with HTML5 and Windows 8: you'll need to switch to develop apps for the new UI, but old apps will still work.
I think a lot of developers are simply getting tired of MS cranking out half baked technologies and abandoning them after a while. If you want to write a desktop app there simply is no obvious platform of choice. You have Winforms (abandoned), WPF (slow, future unclear, do fonts render OK now?), MFC (has been out of date for 10 years), Win32 (hard to use), Silverlight (direction changes every 3 months). They all have…
1. MS wanted to keep Windows APIs growing quickly to keep anyone from making a compatible platform. I can't imagine how many $B a year it costs to maintain that. This is probably less of a goal than it used to be, as the baseline Windows install is now so many GB that it's an impediment for the nimble VMs and ultra-portable clients that are the future.
2. MS seems to pitch to (and staff from) a young audience, folks in school and moving to the workplace as application software developers. This crowd has a natural turnover period of only a few years.
But one thing they really are quite good at is supporting stuff for a long time. You can today build an app with .Net framework 2.0 with VS 2005 and it will install and run about as well as it ever did. For native code compatibility typically goes all the way back to Win95 apps. When old apps don't work it's usually a result of unambiguous security or stability improvements made to the OS. Even then Windows often provides virtualized registry and filesystem areas that trick the apps into working.
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> .. but we can blame Microsoft for some confusion here. Well, Microsoft may not have explained everything at once (Who does?) but that doesn't explicitly mean they forced people to overreact.
That's one of the many things I like in open source - there are no secrets, no big surprises and nobody ever forces you anything.
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I know Peter personally, and he is one of the more well-educated, intelligent, and astonishingly competent developers I know. Nice flamebait, though.
I read the article one more time, it does seem to be much more lucid now. I'll attribute my bad interpretation of it on the fact I read it very late last night - when it seemed to me he was saying that HTML5+JS was replacing .NET and WPF. He still makes some absurd claims though: "... they were told that all their experience, all their knowledge, and every program they have written in the past would be useless on Win…
Perhaps the only reason a shift in Win app development tooling isn't such a big deal today is simply that MS does not have the clout that they did back then. Windows 8? Seriously, it's many years off before anybody (including MS) going to try to make a profit on a shrinkwrapped app that doesn't run on Windows XP.
But there are nevertheless a great many developers who've hitched their wagon to MS as a career path. They're understandably antsy as they watch all the hot demand go for iPhone/Android/tablet development. This would explain a lot of the angst I think.
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Most VB6 shops I know took the kool aid and went VB.Net or C#. It would take a whole lot lot of disappointment for them to move away from Microsoft.
Yes for new development, but major projects developed in VB6 still needs to be supported.