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Windows native app development is a mess

domenic.me

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Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#31

Post by hofrogs »

netbioserror wrote: post #22
bentt wrote: post #12

I wonder if Unity (the game engine) actually has a sneaky potential here. It’s cross platform, fast, and maybe just maybe less bloated than carrying around an entire browser like Electron?

Speaking from personal experience, Godot has the sneakiest potential. It has all the UI components and flexible layout containers you could ask for, a signaling system that lets you put the methods from less relevant components in the scripts for more relevant ones (making for a more compact project), and you can also manually compile slim template builds for cleaner distribution. There's a future there.

There are already tools made in Godot, including the godot editor itself. This page has some of them: https://gamefromscratch.com/godot-developed-non-game-applica...

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#33

Post by cv5005 »

lucianbr wrote: post #20
cv5005 wrote: post #11

I'm an embedded programmer who occassionally needs to write various windows programs to interface with embedded devices (usually via serial port or usb), and I find it a breeze to write native gui programs in pure win32 and c++. Recently had to add a new feature to and old program that was last updated in the XP era and two things to note: 1. The program did not need to be updated to run on Vista, 7, 10 and 11, shit…

How does it look? I mean, what do the widgets look like?

This was an MFC project, so your old standard win32 common controls that looks the same since 98 or so.

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#34

Post by Traubenfuchs »

lpcvoid wrote: post #14
pdpi wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (Win11 reverts). I must've missed that one. What did they revert?

It doesn't matter - what Microslop says and what they do are traditionally very distinct things. But in case you want to read yourself: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/03/20/our-com...

"File explorer launch experience" -hard to tell if this is satire…

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#35

Post by mschuster91 »

ashwinnair99 wrote: post #2

It has been a mess for 15 years and Microsoft keeps making it worse by adding new frameworks without retiring the old ones. Win32, WPF, WinUI, MAUI. Nobody knows which one to pick.

> without retiring the old ones

They'd lose too much enterprise software that's not being maintained any longer but still is business critical.

You can still run most programs from the Windows 95 era unmodified on a modern Windows 11 machine and a lot of things is relying on that under the hood.

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#36

Post by moron4hire »

bentt wrote: post #12

I wonder if Unity (the game engine) actually has a sneaky potential here. It’s cross platform, fast, and maybe just maybe less bloated than carrying around an entire browser like Electron?

Unity's 2D UI stuff is very poorly designed, with lots of edge cases where auto-calculated fields can hit a divide-by-zero issue and then become unrecoverable because the value is now NaN which can't be auto-calculated back to a number.

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#37

Post by sylens »

Author raises several good points. Why isn't the latest .NET runtime pulled down into Windows 11 devices via Windows Update? Why isn't there a better path forward for deployment?

It's another example of how they have completely abandoned any attempt at providing a good user experience across their products

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#38

Post by samiv »

Seems to me that really the simplest solution to authors problem is to write C++ safely. I mean...this is a trivial utility app. If you can't get that right in modern C++ you should probably just not even pretend to be a C++ programmer.

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#39

Post by fsloth »

intrasight wrote: post #4

"So when I went to work on my app, I was astonished to find that twenty years after the release of WPF, the boilerplate had barely changed." Such is the benefit and the curse, I guess, of having the Windows API being locked in the distant past for backwards compatibility. I've always been surprised that Microsoft didn't do a full operating system refactor and provide a compatibility layer for running old binaries. Pe…

"I've always been surprised that Microsoft didn't do a full operating system refactor and provide a compatibility layer for running old binaries"

Just keeping a legacy system in working order is different skillset than writing a new system from scratch.

So you need a new team. Nothing from Windows maintenance transfers.

Maybe would require hiring someone who knows how to design an OS.

It would be a major undertaking, needing protection by CEO (and if it would not succeed CEO would loose a lot of prestige).

I'm not saying MS does not have the existing talent base. I don't _know_.

But I've been inside a house maintaining a monstrous legacy codebase.

I can tell you - it requires surprisingly little deep understanding just to keep an existing system going.

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#40

Post by sourcegrift »

mschuster91 wrote: post #27
jordand wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one big challenge I've had with big legacy Win32/C++ codebases is migrating it fully from 32bit to 64bit. Loads of know-how and docs for complex GUI controls and structs are lost to time, or really fragmented. Other than that, yeah it really does all just work once you're past that.

Doesn't WINE have pretty decent documentation by now from all the reverse engineering?

Wine cannot even install office 2014. It's not really as food as some claim sadly.
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