Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 143 posts

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#111

Post by ClassyJacket »

013a wrote: post #58

Just 4 months ago they announced they were suspending development of OneNote Win32 in favor of just the UWP version [1] Moreover, they have (had?) an entire multi-year roadmap planned around UWP, including the eventual release of a version of windows which was supposed to substantially reduce day-to-day reliance on Win32 for lower powered devices, codenamed Project Polaris [2], in an attempt to compete with Chromeboo…

>If Microsoft can't even release their marquee apps on it, why should anyone else feel confident in developing on the platform?

Endemic at Microsoft. I believe the main reason the Xbox One Kinect - an impressive piece of hardware - failed, is that Microsoft themselves couldn't manage to make one big flagship game for it at launch. If Microsoft themselves are avoiding it, why on earth would third parties invest?

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#112

Post by pjmlp »

maxxxxx wrote: post #42
threeseed wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also Electron/Javascript. Skype/Teams are developed in it and they have invested a lot of effort into TypeScript.

Honestly, if I had to develop a new desktop app for Windows I would seriously think about Electron. It's frustrating that there is no premier desktop app framework for Windows anymore. UWP is too limited, WPF is pretty much deprecated. Win32 has a huge learning curve and finding devs would be very difficult. Pretty sad situation. Maybe their secret plan is to push people into writing web apps with ASP.NET? Event that…

I have been developing new WPF applications during the last couple of years.

Those customers were now thinking of eventually start moving into UWP after the Windows 10 migration was complete, so given this, they will continue using WPF.

Also Forms, WPF and EF 6 support are the major roadmap items for .NET Core 3.0

Node is no match against .NET or Java for those that care about performance.

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#113

Post by maxxxxx »

pjmlp wrote: post #110
maxxxxx wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing Winforms and several XAML frameworks (WPF, Silverlight, WinRT and UWP). Even if you use one of the XAML frameworks porting any app of decent size is really hard to almost impossible. I think trouble started with .NET. Since then there was a change in direction almost every 2-3 years. Edit: Forgot WinJS...

Because before the reorganization, .NET used to be part of DevTools, while C++ and related tooling was part of WinDev. So since .NET was introduced there has been an ongoing power struggle between the two camps regarding how the future of Windows development should look like. The whole Longhorn/Vista debacle was more a side effect of those political issues than actual technical problems. Likewise with lack of managem…

I guess the MS org chart is still accurate:

http://www.globalnerdy.com/2011/07/03/org-charts-of-the-big-...

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#114

Post by Const-me »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #104
Const-me wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They release a new framework every 2-3 years and developers are expected to adopt it. But then they drop support for that framework quickly and release a new incompatible one. Doesn't matter, as a developer you're free to pick whichever you like. You can run VB6 apps on Windows 10. A software I've made on my first job with MFC for NT4.0 still runs on Win10. WPF is awesome, I still pick it now in 2018 when I need co…

You can but it would be better for developers if you could rely on a framework being developed rather than frozen in time. I'm pretty sure there are no classes supporting touch in MFC.

> I'm pretty sure there are no classes supporting touch in MFC.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/mfc/reference/cwnd-clas...

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#115

Post by Const-me »

maxxxxx wrote: post #87
Const-me wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They release a new framework every 2-3 years and developers are expected to adopt it. But then they drop support for that framework quickly and release a new incompatible one. Doesn't matter, as a developer you're free to pick whichever you like. You can run VB6 apps on Windows 10. A software I've made on my first job with MFC for NT4.0 still runs on Win10. WPF is awesome, I still pick it now in 2018 when I need co…

I think it matters a lot. If I develop an application that's supposed to be in development for many years I want to use a framework that has a forward path to the latest OS features.

> a framework that has a forward path to the latest OS features.

Microsoft usually adds support of OS features into old frameworks. For example, they have added touch support into their 25+ years old MFC.

Technically speaking, WPF gets updated regularly with each release of .NET framework. For example, in 4.6.2 they have implemented per-monitor DPI scaling support.

As a developer, I like stable APIs, and frameworks which don’t break my code with version upgrades.

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#116

Post by dang »

bhauer wrote: post #78

The headline is misleading. Microsoft is suspending development of the UWP Office applications, which happen to be touch-friendly. However, the headline implies that the remaining Win32 versions do not have a touch-friendly mode, which is false. The Win32 versions can be switched between "mouse" and "touch" modes. In touch mode, the pointing targets are all much larger. But as with most user interfaces on modern Wind…

Ok, we've squeezed in UWP above.

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#117

Post by azinman2 »

cptskippy wrote: post #91
maxxxxx wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We aren't talking about .NET in general bit about desktop UI frameworks. If you started with ASP.NET MVC years ago you still are on the main platform that's in full development. With desktop development you have several frameworks that are either in support mode or not fully featured.

GDI, Win32, and XAML are the only ones that come to mind for me, am I missing some? 3 frameworks in 3 decades seems reasonable considering they all still work. The same can't be said for MacOS If you're referring to Silverlight, that was never a serious desktop UI framework. It was initially targeted as a Flash /Java killer but pivoted to cross platform desktop apps when it became clear that it would never be adopted…

What do you mean same can’t be said for macOS? Carbon and Cocoa. Cocoa has been around since 2001 (17 years), and is still going. Since 2007 UIKit has been around (11 years) and doesn’t seem as if it’s going anywhere either. I personally think Apple has the nicest UI frameworks to develop for, and the longevity is quite good. The frameworks (particularly UIKit) regularly get meaningful updates to make it modern, and now there’s an entire new modern language that’s 100% compatible while moving things forward.

Disclosure: I happen to work for Apple, but this was my previous opinion having spent many years using all the major frameworks/platforms out there.

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#118

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #20
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what is holding back Win32: there has not been any serious development of the desktop developer story since WPF in 2005 (WPF only received token updates since then, the last major update was in 2010 when they finally added a DataGrid control, lol) - but WPF is not well-suited for many types of software which have to fall-back on “pure” Win32 and the story there is nothing but depressing. Apple got it…

What's bad about GDI? (I used to do windows but have not been following, I remember that you need to do GetDC and ReleaseDC on a window handle to get the device context and then to release it - in pairs, else...)

It's a graphics API designed for early-1990s needs. It's missing things we expect today like 30-bit colour support and all-VRAM memory (GDI was hardware accelerated but they gimped it in Windows Vista to ensure compatibility with the DWM).

When working with Win32 it just isn't possible to avoid having to use GDI, for example dealing with painting to a window surface Win32 will give you a GDI device context by default - for example, similarly handling Win32 messages like WM_PAINT uses parts of the GDI API. Finally, each process on Windows has a limited number of GDI objects it can use as well. Oh, and using GDI/GDI+ in a service context (e.g. ASP.NET or a Windows Service, is not supported: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsui_team/2013/04/16/using-...)

Direct2D is nice - but setting it up in your code isn't easy - and Microsoft does not maintain an up-to-date C#/.NET library for Direct2D.

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#119

Post by thrower123 »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #118
MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's bad about GDI? (I used to do windows but have not been following, I remember that you need to do GetDC and ReleaseDC on a window handle to get the device context and then to release it - in pairs, else...)

It's a graphics API designed for early-1990s needs. It's missing things we expect today like 30-bit colour support and all-VRAM memory (GDI was hardware accelerated but they gimped it in Windows Vista to ensure compatibility with the DWM). When working with Win32 it just isn't possible to avoid having to use GDI, for example dealing with painting to a window surface Win32 will give you a GDI device context by default…

SharpDX and SlimDX are fantastic wrappers for Direct2D, last time I was doing anything with it. SharpDX is the more active of the two.

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#120

Post by slededit »

maxxxxx wrote: post #94
cptskippy wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDI, Win32, and XAML are the only ones that come to mind for me, am I missing some? 3 frameworks in 3 decades seems reasonable considering they all still work. The same can't be said for MacOS If you're referring to Silverlight, that was never a serious desktop UI framework. It was initially targeted as a Flash /Java killer but pivoted to cross platform desktop apps when it became clear that it would never be adopted…

You are missing Winforms and several XAML frameworks (WPF, Silverlight, WinRT and UWP). Even if you use one of the XAML frameworks porting any app of decent size is really hard to almost impossible. I think trouble started with .NET. Since then there was a change in direction almost every 2-3 years. Edit: Forgot WinJS...

Everything lives on top of win32. Even UWP is a wrapper around win32, if you look at the modules list you'll see gdi.dll in the list.

In a sense the rest of these frameworks are all just libraries. You can choose the one that makes your life easier but win32 will do the heavy lifting. Because of this its relatively easy for them to add support for new features to the various frameworks. They just wire up the win32 calls as necessary.

Post reply on HN