Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by tough » Sat, Aug 02, 2025, 4:16 PM UTC

bialpio wrote: post #105

michaelcampbell wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> passionate losers This is unduly meanspirited. Your passion projects are not even considered to probably the vast majority of the world; that doesn't make you a loser. I have zero interest in the Win11 UI, and am even on board with the cynical view that this is purely a bean counter cost savings for MS rather than some benevolent outreach. But I respect the people that take this on and want to keep it going.

> Your passion projects are not even considered to probably the vast majority of the world; that doesn't make you a loser. Not OP but I understood this as "contributing for free to a project owned by a corporation worth more money than you could realistically spend in a lifetime is what makes you a loser".

what if that contribution benefits me personally in any way whatsoever?

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

#112

Post by tough » Sat, Aug 02, 2025, 4:17 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #87

paavohtl wrote: post #59

I am worried about the future of native UI technologies on Windows. Traditionally at least the developers of operating systems have eaten their own dogfood and have at least tried to implement well-performing & visually consistent native applications to serve as an example to others. Windows 11 has largely done the opposite. Windows has had minimal but perfectly functional native email and calendar apps at least sinc…

From the WinUI community calls, I would assert all new employees have zero Windows experience and management doesn't care to give them proper skills. Too many questions that any Windows developer would know why the question was being asked, where they either couldn't answer or had puzzled looks on why the questions were being asked in first place. That is also a reason why now there are Webview2 instances all over th…

so microsoft gave up and the web won?

swift ui apps have some webkit views like the app store, music app etc

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

#113

Post by kbelder » Sat, Aug 02, 2025, 4:19 PM UTC

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.

I was going to ask about Win32. I haven't had to do it in a while, but if I had to write a desktop app in windows, that would be what I would reach for. It's still supported... is their any indication that it won't be for many years to come?

Also, it looks better, in my humble opinion. It's probably lacking features that I'm uninterested in.

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

#114

Post by daemin » Sat, Aug 02, 2025, 4:22 PM UTC

bloomca wrote: post #17

daemin wrote: post #15

Last I evaluated it WinUI3 was a terrible developer experience. The application had to be literally installed on the system to even debug it, which means you end up with a large number of useless start menu entries, not to mention registry entries and such. Another thing was that the example programs crashed when I clicked on a button. All I want is something simple to work with to make applications for Windows, and…

> The application had to be literally installed on the system to even debug it I think that's because you chose "packaged" application, these apps need to be installed so that capabilities are handled correctly. To be fair, macOS has the same issue, although they won't show in Launchpad, they still can be indexed by Spotlight.

I did try to develop an unpackaged test application but I gave up trying to implement it and just went with Win32 instead as I wanted make something rather than messing around with a UI framework.

These days if I were to switch from Win32 I might try some custom rendered framework which a lot of apps seem to use, or Qt.

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

#115

Post by bobajeff » Sat, Aug 02, 2025, 4:22 PM UTC

As someone reading the comments here and never made a real Windows app outside of a visual basic hello world a pretty long time ago. Why doesn't Microsoft just stop making these? They already own GitHub and vscode so why not just admit that electron/typescript is the Windows UI framework now?

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

#116

Post by AndroTux » Sat, Aug 02, 2025, 4:25 PM UTC

bobajeff wrote: post #115

As someone reading the comments here and never made a real Windows app outside of a visual basic hello world a pretty long time ago. Why doesn't Microsoft just stop making these? They already own GitHub and vscode so why not just admit that electron/typescript is the Windows UI framework now?

Because I don’t want to run even more browsers simultaneously than I already am.

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

#117

Post by bialpio » Sat, Aug 02, 2025, 4:34 PM UTC

tough wrote: post #111

bialpio wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your passion projects are not even considered to probably the vast majority of the world; that doesn't make you a loser. Not OP but I understood this as "contributing for free to a project owned by a corporation worth more money than you could realistically spend in a lifetime is what makes you a loser".

what if that contribution benefits me personally in any way whatsoever?

You need to ask OP, I don't know what they meant, just how I personally understood it.

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

#118

Post by 3036e4 » Sat, Aug 02, 2025, 4:34 PM UTC

1970-01-01 wrote: post #64

What we wanted: Win7 UI open source What we got: Win11 dumpster fire, free for everyone to fix

I would be fine with really any version as open source or at least one that was free-as-in-free-beer to make it possible to maintain virtual machines running old software without having to rely on dodgy downloaded versions... I'd even pay Microsoft something reasonable if they put them up on GOG or some similar site for a few $.

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

#119

Post by bob1029 » Sat, Aug 02, 2025, 4:36 PM UTC

For Windows UIs I've been getting into Win32/GDI/DirectDraw/etc.

Tools like CsWin32 and modern C# (ref returns) make working with these APIs a lot more approachable today. It used to be the case that you had to create a nasty C++ project to do any of this. Now you can just list the methods you need access to in your nativemethods.txt file and the codegen takes care of the rest.

Win32 is a lot lower level than other things you'd typically consider to be a "UI framework", but the important tradeoff is that it is also a lot harder for Microsoft to remove or screw with in any meaningful way. I cannot come up with something that has been more stable than these APIs. The web doesn't even come close if we are looking at the same timescales.

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

#120

Post by gyulai » Sat, Aug 02, 2025, 4:39 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #91

nine_k wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apache Windows when? More seriously, a desktop UI toolkit is hardly a moat by now, especially a Windows toolkit, Windows having 3-4 very different look-and-feels mixed and shipped with the official distribution. OTOH security and stability are things that Windows critically depend on to stay on the laptops and desktops in medical, governmental, and financial institutions, and on devices of executives.

This feels like Windows itself is no longer producing enough growth for Microsoft relative to its other efforts. Even the enterprise sales lock-in isn't compelling enough for the cloud/AI-centric future Microsoft envisions. So Microsoft is slowly pulling resources that it can instead invest into Azure and AI and other high-growth business units. I don't watch Windows too closely. Have there been any other signals of…

> Have there been any other signals of waning investment into Windows?

Wasn't there a story some while back about them crawling the web for PWAs and putting them on the Microsoft Store (or is it Windows store?) to make it into less of a ghost town? And if you go to their official website, browsing vaguely in the direction of UI development, you will see them advertising PWAs as first-class citizens of the Windows ecosystem. I also vaguely remember that Windows+Edge offers special APIs to PWAs for things like file system access and so forth that are unparalleled on other platforms.

I take this push for PWAs (combined with their own lack of dogfooding -- Office is not written with Win UI) as them basically throwing in the towel on Windows-native desktop software (outside of games, maybe).

But, to be fair, native desktop development has seen a lack of investment on all desktop platforms. JavaFX is a ghost town too.

All of that could change, depending on what happens next with Chrome, Bing, and Mozilla. -- The future of each of those seems to be hanging in the balance at the moment.

The web could become a mere implementation detail of the Google monopoly, rather than the open thing it is today. Couple that with a government-level push for digital sovereignty in the E.U. and other places (certainly China). Then, maybe, you will see renewed interest in desktop GUI apps.

On a side note: I think it's amazing what has happened in the open-source space with Rust-based UI frameworks (iced, egui, slint) and COSMIC. The future for cross-platform desktop UI development hasn't looked so bright, maybe since the introduction of Java Swing (was that in the early 00s?)