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Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

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Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#151

Post by kmeisthax »

garganzol wrote: post #110

The UI strategy of the future may very well be HTML. It's widespread, standardized, sufficiently performant, and pretty rich. What's still missing is deeper integration with native OS concepts and programming languages other than JS. Frameworks like Electron are a step in that direction but they come with notable drawbacks. Applications often struggle with things that should feel natural like managing multiple OS-lev…

There's a competing webapp-wrapper framework that explicitly uses the platform's own browser, but developers don't like being at the mercy of whatever the OS ships...

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#152

Post by jeswin »

Microsoft's biggest mistake was .Net being a Java competitor when it should have just been like golang producing native binaries. Especially since .Net was realistically only going to succeed on x86/64 at that point (late 90s and 2000s). This shut the door on C# for consumer UIs, and people stuck to Visual Basic and MFC.

It took them more than 2 decades to finally support pure native binaries (via NativeAOT). And it's fantastic for servers on Linux.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#153

Post by manytimesaway »

judah wrote: post #63
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

The churn would have been much worse if Microsoft was rolling out successful GUI framework after GUI framework. As it is you can still write a Win32 app if that pleases you, or still write .NET (and damn that runtime download!) Microsoft has bought into ‘make a web app’ since 1988, they introduced AJAX, they got flexbox and grid into CSS and numerous HTML 5 features to support application UIs. They ‘frikin bought npm…

Your post is touching on a key question: why write a Windows-specific app? I'm a developer who has built and published several apps. I want the biggest possible audience for those apps. Why would I limit those apps to Windows? (Or even to any single platform/OS?) Web apps work everywhere. The web has grown increasingly powerful and capable. Why would I invest in a technology that can only run on a single OS? Doesn't…

> Web apps work everywhere. The web has grown increasingly powerful and capable. Why would I invest in a technology that can only run on a single OS? Doesn't make sense.

You mean the hypertext platform that has been shoehorned into Java's paradigm, suffering from the same boof-o-rama as Windows, and whose lowest common denominator to support must be Safari for iOS?

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#154

Post by WorldMaker »

rbanffy wrote: post #64
calvinmorrison wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the same time VB still works and runs, so they don't always rug pull.

They might have forgotten to pull that rug.

They did pull that rug, twice, in two different directions.

1) VB7 (VB.NET) entirely split the VB developer community.

2) VB6 IDE has not worked well and is entirely unsupported in every Windows after XP. It's generally recommend to build VB6 apps in an XP VM and XP being out of security support it's now a huge "Use at your own risk" and "Do your best to isolate the VM from ever having an internet connection". (Not to mention that installers like Install Shield that still understand VB6' super messy version of COM are generally also out of support and security support.)

It was alleged that Microsoft almost dropped the runtime components for VB6 in Windows 11. It starts to feel like only a matter of time before they do.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#156

Post by WorldMaker »

ack_complete wrote: post #87
hyperrail wrote: post #72

Both this blog post and the Steven Sinofsky response really set my blood boiling, because they both reek of retired-executive score settling, a kind of blame game that gets played out decades after the fact between ex-high-ranking people in hopes that whoever writes last is able to cement the conventional wisdom. People who play this corrosive game either refuse to believe that they are at fault for not changing what…

The most offensive part of the Sinofsky response is this part: > WinRT (2012) - it (or the embodiment in Windows 8) failed in the market but it also showed both the problem and potential solution to building for new markets while respecting the past I can't express how wrong this is. WinRT was the most destructive thing that the Windows team ever did to the OS. It drove a hard stake into Windows, splitting it in half…

I think for Sinofsky the "respecting the past" refers more to WinRT was/is still just Spicy COM under the hood. Most of the article as I read it is about how .NET was a mistake for Windows UI development and a return to (Spicy) COM its savior.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#157

Post by d--b »

> WPF shipped in late 2006. It was remarkable – XAML, hardware-accelerated rendering, real data binding. If Microsoft had made it the definitive answer and invested relentlessly, the story might have ended differently.

Er… The author perhaps never used it? WPF was the worst framework I ever used. It was unbearably verbose, brutally unforgiving, used 2-way bindings that created updating nightmares, ans not the least it was incredibly slow.

WinForms was not the best for sure, but at least you can get stuff done. It was for a long time the right answer to the question the author asked. .Net + WinForms worked well.

When WPF shipped was when the shit hit the fan.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#158

Post by donatj »

jeswin wrote: post #152

Microsoft's biggest mistake was .Net being a Java competitor when it should have just been like golang producing native binaries. Especially since .Net was realistically only going to succeed on x86/64 at that point (late 90s and 2000s). This shut the door on C# for consumer UIs, and people stuck to Visual Basic and MFC. It took them more than 2 decades to finally support pure native binaries (via NativeAOT). And it'…

The problem was in the early 2000s it was basically accepted x86 was a dead end whose days were numbered.

Itanium was the heir apparent but importantly basically vaporware. How do you develop software NOW and more importantly sell and ship software NOW that'll work on a CPU you don't have access to and for which good compilers don't really exist yet? I remind you in the days where online updates were a luxury at best.

Processor agnostic CIL/JIT code was the prescribed solution at the time. Java had lit the way, and it was the only "clear" path forward for better or worse.

Little did we know Itanium would implode, and x86-64 would rise and give 20+ more years of binary compatibility.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#159

Post by bad_haircut72 »

manytimesaway wrote: post #153
judah wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post is touching on a key question: why write a Windows-specific app? I'm a developer who has built and published several apps. I want the biggest possible audience for those apps. Why would I limit those apps to Windows? (Or even to any single platform/OS?) Web apps work everywhere. The web has grown increasingly powerful and capable. Why would I invest in a technology that can only run on a single OS? Doesn't…

> Web apps work everywhere. The web has grown increasingly powerful and capable. Why would I invest in a technology that can only run on a single OS? Doesn't make sense. You mean the hypertext platform that has been shoehorned into Java's paradigm, suffering from the same boof-o-rama as Windows, and whose lowest common denominator to support must be Safari for iOS?

still works everywhere? the snark doesnt get you firther than that

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#160

Post by bombcar »

rincebrain wrote: post #136
mwcampbell wrote: post #129

> WPF was good As someone who saw what impact WPF had on average users running average hardware in the late 2000s to early 2010s, I disagree. In 2011, my brother was in seminary, using an average Windows Vista-era laptop that he had been given in 2008. When he was home for Christmas in 2011, we were talking about his laptop, and he told me that the Logos Bible software ran sluggishly on that laptop. He said something…

I would argue that was less that WPF was the wrong life choice and more that Microsoft shouldn't have bent the knee to Intel's antitrust push to say their crap hardware was sufficient. [1] [1] - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/03/the-vista-capable-de...

Apple had been doing GPU-accelerated GUIs since the early NeXT days; it was certainly possible on hardware weaker than what Vista required.
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