When I tried to release a flutter app via exe installer, google drive said it was a virus but it otherwise installed just fine in windows 10/11. I'm doing the same thing for msix for now. But when I searched for certificates I could only find closer to $200/yr and you need to load it in the latest $100 yubikey due to the fips requirement. I didn't realize that CAs dont let you just get the private/public key files any more. Only distribution method is hardware based fips key. I've given up entirely on code signing since I only made a single open source project for amateur radio.
Windows native app development is a mess
171–180 of 481 posts
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#172> But, in 2026, writing a greenfield application in a memory-unsafe language like C++ is a crime. I disagree, the GUI layer is far from behind a safety critical component, and C++ is a battle-tested choice for everything from GUI, videos games, to industrial applications. If C++ is safe enough to control airplanes and nuclear reactors when used well, it is certainly safe enough for something as trivial a GUI. The art…
Yet we cannot consider Qt to be native app development since every app requires the Qt runtime. Native means system libraries only.
I have always considered Qt apps (even for Windows) to be native. Think of VLC, VirtualBox, etc.
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#173Let me chime in and say that plain Win32 API is a perfectly viable option if you are using C++ (or another "OO" language) and if you are willing to sink a couple of weeks into writing your own MFC-like wrapper. Clearly this is not an option for those who are just starting up with Windows GUI work, but with little experience it is really a matter of 2-3 weeks of ground work and then you have full control over all nuan…
Judging from the screenshots, that doesn't produce Windows 11 style UIs, right? I.e. it contributes to the problem exploree at https://ntdotdev.wordpress.com/2023/01/01/state-of-the-windo...
Jesus, that's way worse than I expected before clicking
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#174Again, unless you have existing Windows 8/10 applications that were written against WinRT, UAP or UWP[0], that make use of WinUI 2.0, forget about touching anything related to WinUI 3.0 or WinAppSDK, stay away from the marketing. Exception being the few APIs that have been introduced in Win32 that instead of COM, actually depend on WinRT like the new MIDI 2.0 or Windows ML. Keep using Win32, MFC (yes it is in a bette…
In that light, it is troubling that Friday’s blog post [0] announced “moving core Windows experiences to the WinUI3 framework” as a measure to improve the quality of said experiences. [0] https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/03/20/our-com...
As long as it only applies to Microsoft employees, maybe the pain using C++/WinRT will finally improve the Visual Studio tooling for the rest of us, but I doubt it.
Thus better leave WinUI to the Windows team.
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#175The author is right, it's really such a mess. The lessons I've learnt building and shipping a few a Windows apps at scale are basically: (1) Learn Win32 and use those ancient APIs if possible, they're extraordinarily stable and you'll probably need to reach for them anyway. They're not that scary. (2) Don't use any Microsoft-owned UI toolkit, you'll get burnt. Literally anything is better. Ideally choose a toolkit th…
> "(2) Don't use any Microsoft-owned UI toolkit, you'll get burnt" This is 100% true for all of their techs produced within the past ~20 years, but WPF and Winforms are extremely stable with no real issues. It's so weird too because most of everything they've done in the past 20 years has basically just been incomplete remixes of WPF. If they just stuck with WPF and extended it onward, something like a UI toolkit equ…
Ahhm. At previous $DAYJOB, I inherited a WPF app written in 2012; I stumbled upon several WONTFIX bugs through the years - mostly having to do with shared memory bitmaps, having to manually call GC at times, and a host of other things.
Stable, but many issues. Stay away if you value your sanity and do anything nontrivial.
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#176Again, unless you have existing Windows 8/10 applications that were written against WinRT, UAP or UWP[0], that make use of WinUI 2.0, forget about touching anything related to WinUI 3.0 or WinAppSDK, stay away from the marketing. Exception being the few APIs that have been introduced in Win32 that instead of COM, actually depend on WinRT like the new MIDI 2.0 or Windows ML. Keep using Win32, MFC (yes it is in a bette…
Just wanted to add a shoutout to WinJS for posterity, with which I built a Windows 8 app that I had published to the Windows Store for a brief period of time. Then they open-sourced the UI part of WinJS and decided it was just a web framework instead of an officially supported method for building Windows apps iirc, which was the end of my foray into the Windows store. https://github.com/winjs/winjs
I have a WinJS book somewhere, from Microsoft Press.
When it was announced at PDC, they only talked about WinJS and nothing else, the folks of .NET Rocks have a few shows where they mention they thought .NET was done, and they needed to refocus into something else.
The show where they interview Miguel de Icaza they go into this.
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#177It 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.
Yes, and the hubris sting-of-death was UWP. They tried to make Windows into a mobile OS, severely restricting the alowed actions of programs, including strict certification to be able to run them (elsewhere). Of course nobody went for this and UWP died a quiet death. Recently there are signs that MS is trying to go back to making products that users actualle want (Win11 reverts). We'll see...
It's hard to describe how uselessly restrictive the UWP model was when they originally introduced it as "Metro-style apps" in Windows 8. Among the things it officially did not support included:
- Multiple monitors - Non-full screen views - Sideloading outside of the Store - Offline installation - Explicit threads - thread pool only - Aligned memory allocation - malloc only - Any C++ compiler other than MSVC - Support for any version of Windows other than Windows 8 - Running apps as administrator - Running more than one instance of an app at a time - Runtime shader compilation
If any ONE of these things was a blocker, you could not write a Metro style app. And yet Microsoft pushed this extremely hard -- including almost completely ending any maintenance of Win32 APIs. And despite the many relaxations and extensions, UWP is still largely useless today, and now even itself seems to be going into maintenance mode. All of which has done a lot of damage to the state of Windows desktop platform development.
As an example of how bizarre UWP is, for some reason every time they published a list of new APIs added to it, they converted the list of API identifiers to lowercase in the documentation:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/whats-new/wind...
It's relatively insignificant, but... why? Just one of many things that showed how immature UWP was.
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like I'm the only person in the world who would rather write ugly win32 jank for the rest of my days than ever having to touch an "elegant" or "well structured" Cocoa codebase. In win32 if you want a button you call a function and pass a hande, in the Apple world you first subclass 7 interfaces in some unreadable Smalltalk-wannabe syntax and pray you don't need to access the documentation. And of course they c…
This is patently false. To add a button to your UI, you open your window’s nib file Xcode/Interface Builder, click the plus button on the toolbar, and add a button. Then you control-drag from the button to File’s Owner and choose the method that you want to invoke when the button is clicked. Done.
And this already worked in OPENSTEP, like 30 years ago.
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#179Excellent summary of the stupid state of Windows native GUI app development after the complete lack of direction or coherence Microsoft has shown. Not to mention the irony of Visual Studio not having a GUI designer for anything except Windows Forms.
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#180Again, unless you have existing Windows 8/10 applications that were written against WinRT, UAP or UWP[0], that make use of WinUI 2.0, forget about touching anything related to WinUI 3.0 or WinAppSDK, stay away from the marketing. Exception being the few APIs that have been introduced in Win32 that instead of COM, actually depend on WinRT like the new MIDI 2.0 or Windows ML. Keep using Win32, MFC (yes it is in a bette…
In that light, it is troubling that Friday’s blog post [0] announced “moving core Windows experiences to the WinUI3 framework” as a measure to improve the quality of said experiences. [0] https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/03/20/our-com...
The only good thing to say about that is it removes the stupidity of using Electron (or the Microsoft Edge equivalent) for built-in Windows apps and the Start Menu. SMH.