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Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework

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Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework

#41

Post by crinkly »

cheschire wrote: post #30
muhehe wrote: post #20

I already lost count how many UI frameworks are in windows. It looks like complete chaos and mess. I really wonder what they expect from open-sourcing it. Just to pretend how open they are? Or is there any real benefit to developers who target windows?

WinUI is an evolution of UWP which is an evolution of WinRT. WinUI has been around for years. MAUI is not exactly a competing product and is more about enabling cross platform UI development. Different intent. WinUI is actually ok tech. It’s evolved over the years through a few iterations, now on WinUI 3. Im mostly with you though. Until they rebuild the entire OS in it, including all of the administrative controls a…

Still writing win32 stuff like it’s 1995 here. We have bits of ATL/MFC hanging out which are throughly abandoned.

I don’t trust WinUI at all.

I was surprised, when I spoke to a former colleague, to find that an internal tool I wrote 25 years ago is still being maintained. Win32 as well.

Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework

#42

Post by ffsm8 »

crinkly wrote: post #41
cheschire wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WinUI is an evolution of UWP which is an evolution of WinRT. WinUI has been around for years. MAUI is not exactly a competing product and is more about enabling cross platform UI development. Different intent. WinUI is actually ok tech. It’s evolved over the years through a few iterations, now on WinUI 3. Im mostly with you though. Until they rebuild the entire OS in it, including all of the administrative controls a…

Still writing win32 stuff like it’s 1995 here. We have bits of ATL/MFC hanging out which are throughly abandoned. I don’t trust WinUI at all. I was surprised, when I spoke to a former colleague, to find that an internal tool I wrote 25 years ago is still being maintained. Win32 as well.

Software that solves an actual problem has the tendency to stick around, no matter how much time elapsed.

Just remember, cobol is still in active use, today

Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework

#43

Post by _mlbt »

sirwhinesalot wrote: post #27
elygre wrote: post #23

I won’t benefit from this. At the same time, I cannot see a single bad thing about it, so I’m surprised about all the negative energy.

The "bad thing" is that it's effectively getting abandoned, open sourcing it won't make any difference. It's not like external contributions will suddenly turn it into something usable, and they'll just have a skeleton crew maintaining it, like they do WinForms and WPF. People are tired of Microsoft and their ever growing graveyard of ill thought out, half-baked, "native" UI frameworks.

Native UI is effectively dead outside of Apple’s platforms, and even there it’s hanging on for dear life. HTML, CSS and JavaScript won the cross platform toolkit battle.

Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework

#44

Post by criddell »

madduci wrote: post #40
muhehe wrote: post #20

I already lost count how many UI frameworks are in windows. It looks like complete chaos and mess. I really wonder what they expect from open-sourcing it. Just to pretend how open they are? Or is there any real benefit to developers who target windows?

Just go for MFC FTW, it is in feature freeze but I will last probably for the next 20 years yet.

MFC/Win32 + XAML Islands (through the Windows App SDK) is a pretty nice combination for stability and access to new features.

Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework

#45

Post by DiabloD3 »

qcnguy wrote: post #35
cheschire wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WinUI is an evolution of UWP which is an evolution of WinRT. WinUI has been around for years. MAUI is not exactly a competing product and is more about enabling cross platform UI development. Different intent. WinUI is actually ok tech. It’s evolved over the years through a few iterations, now on WinUI 3. Im mostly with you though. Until they rebuild the entire OS in it, including all of the administrative controls a…

WinRT came out of UWP I think. UWP was their first attempt to move beyond .NET

You have that backwards. WinRT is the managed languages runtime for Windows, introduced in Win8. Its sort of the replacement for COM/OLE but also defines the ABI dialect in a way that allows managed languages to call unmanaged code without an FFI penalty.

UWP is built on WinRT, and acts as a fully managed app container, similarly to how phone apps exist on your phone. It allows WinRT apps to be deployed to any Microsoft platform, Windows, XBox, Windows Phone, etc, but also Android and iOS, and also as PWA, and are guaranteed to run identically on any of those platforms. UWP apps must be written a fully managed language that runs on the CLR (ex: C# runs on the CLR, but C++/WinRT does not). UWP also uses the second generation of WinUI-family XAML UIs, which means all UWP apps use completely native UIs, instead of slow non-native Javascript shit in a web canvas.

The WinUI family of XAML UIs started with WPF, and a slightly incompatible version of it also appeared in Silverlight (WPF = WinUI 1.0), then was brought to UWP (= WinUI 2.0), and is now its own stand alone thing that any app can use, managed or not, as 3.0.

WinRT is not an attempt to move beyond .NET, instead it is their way of allowing .NET to natively call code, and make .NET languages first class in Windows.

Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework

#47

Post by sirwhinesalot »

_mlbt wrote: post #43
sirwhinesalot wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "bad thing" is that it's effectively getting abandoned, open sourcing it won't make any difference. It's not like external contributions will suddenly turn it into something usable, and they'll just have a skeleton crew maintaining it, like they do WinForms and WPF. People are tired of Microsoft and their ever growing graveyard of ill thought out, half-baked, "native" UI frameworks.

Native UI is effectively dead outside of Apple’s platforms, and even there it’s hanging on for dear life. HTML, CSS and JavaScript won the cross platform toolkit battle.

Sadly yes. And all the platforms are to blame. Microsoft and their 1000 half-working frameworks made writing a wrapper that was any better than wxWidgets impossible.

But also Apple "totally not deprecating" AppKit and pushing everyone to the mess that is SwiftUI, Gnome breaking backwards compatibility as a sport, and Qt messing around with QML, meant "native UI" became quicksand.

Even going HTML, CSS and JavaScript wouldn't be too bad if the browser engines provided by the OSes were any good, but it took Microsoft giving up and switching to rebranded Chromium as a browser for Windows to provide a usable one in WebView 2.

WebKitGTK is also terrible compared to the macOS version of WebKit, which hurts projects like Wails and Tauri. So everyone bundles a freaking copy of Chromium with their applications.

I should have studied mechanical engineering.

Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework

#48

Post by DiabloD3 »

cheschire wrote: post #30
muhehe wrote: post #20

I already lost count how many UI frameworks are in windows. It looks like complete chaos and mess. I really wonder what they expect from open-sourcing it. Just to pretend how open they are? Or is there any real benefit to developers who target windows?

WinUI is an evolution of UWP which is an evolution of WinRT. WinUI has been around for years. MAUI is not exactly a competing product and is more about enabling cross platform UI development. Different intent. WinUI is actually ok tech. It’s evolved over the years through a few iterations, now on WinUI 3. Im mostly with you though. Until they rebuild the entire OS in it, including all of the administrative controls a…

They already do, though. The big UI refresh in Win10 is all XAML, and the new Win11 taskbar (the one we all hate) is now a totally normal XAML app.

WinUI 3's big changes (to get a 3.0 version number) is not with the XAML stack itself, but its new ability to be called by unmanaged apps as a normal UI toolkit, so it can finally be used by all apps. No more using Shell UI like we're writing Win 3.1 apps.

And yes, some stuff in Win11 still isn't WinUI, which is kind of annoying, but some of those dialogs hidden away in Windows are at least 20 years old, and probably would need to be entirely rewritten, not merely have their UI's updated.

Also, fun fact: The Win8/10 taskbar's code predates Avalon (the prototype/codename for WPF), and trying to change/fix it at all usually ended up breaking it. It's one of the few binaries on Windows that would not be recompiled to build a new release image in fear of breaking it. Rewriting the taskbar made sense, GETTING RID OF SMALL MODE DID NOT, GODDAMNIT MICROSOFT.

Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework

#49

Post by badsectoracula »

madduci wrote: post #40
muhehe wrote: post #20

I already lost count how many UI frameworks are in windows. It looks like complete chaos and mess. I really wonder what they expect from open-sourcing it. Just to pretend how open they are? Or is there any real benefit to developers who target windows?

Just go for MFC FTW, it is in feature freeze but I will last probably for the next 20 years yet.

You could also go for wxWidgets as it is kinda MFC-y but better and cross-platform, though like MFC you can combine it with Win32 API code (almost) seamlessly.

Or go with Qt, though that doesn't use native controls.

Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework

#50

Post by paavohtl »

perching_aix wrote: post #32
flohofwoe wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the Windows team even using WinUI for the native Win11 desktop UI? ;)

The Start Menu is apparently a React Native app, so I'm going to hazard a guess and just assume WinUI is built on top of React, and that the Start Menu at least is thus indeed built with WinUI. But it's also clear that some other parts aren't, so who knows what's what. I'm sure there are folks who spent time reverse engineering it all though who do.

The start menu is not a React Native app, but it's actually even worse. Only the recommended section (which is basically recently used files - plus probably advertisements in some scenarios) is. The rest of the start menu is WinUI, to my knowledge.
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