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Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework

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

#121

Post by MrZander »

bytefish wrote: post #98
pjmlp wrote: post #83

No one in Windows development community cares about WinUI, other than those with sunken costs that bought into the WinRT/UWP dream and now are stuck with a dead technology. Too many burned bridges since Windows 8 came out. If anything, this is Microsoft confirmation that they are unwilling to fix all the broken issues, and hoping the community will somehow still care.

This. Also DevExpress and Progress Telerik do not invest into their WinUI Controls at all, and that’s a sign they don’t buy into WinUI neither. WinForms and WPF are currently the only viable frameworks for Line of Business application. I have yet to see a WinUI3 application in the wild.

Very true. We just developed a brand new LOB desktop app and settled on sticking with WPF. WinUI has been dead for years imo.

On a side note, I still love WPF after working in it for 10 years. Maybe it's just familiarity, and it's a little verbose at times, but man it's a great framework when you know that you're doing.

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

#122

Post by mroche »

p_ing wrote: post #97
nine_k wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't be surprised if there is an effort to rewrite MSO in something like Dart and WASM, and make it independent from any native toolkits altogether. Yes, to reproduce all of the Excel power, and make it available everywhere as a premium plan of O365. Then Windows could pull a ChromeOS. The only place where a native UI is really needed is the lock / login screen; a tiny subset of any current UI toolkit would suffic…

Office is a completely separate team divorced from Windows proper. Unless Office deemed it wise to rewrite their UI, they're not going to do so (and it's a frankenstein of a Win32 UI). Office on Windows relies heavily on COM and other Win32-only libraries to function. I can't think of a valid reason to rewrite Office to that extent. They already have Office for the web and Mac Office; while not identical in features,…

> Outlook is the lone exception where that team decided to have Outlook for the web, Windows Outlook, and Mac Outlook be identical, so those are getting their rewrites with removal of Win32-specific features where applicable.

I wish they didn't. Outlook on macOS is abysmal nowadays and I still find myself resorting to the legacy view just to change some settings that both iterations can read but only one exposes.

I significantly prefer using Thunderbird or the web views for Gmail and Zoho Mail over any version of Outlook. Is the integration across O365 apps nice? Sure, but the platforms themselves are miserable to use.

In a similar vein, I was cautiously optimistic about Teams V2 for unifying the client. But then they completely dropped the Linux client for their PWA which does not have feature parity with the "native" platforms and has a significantly worse UX.

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

#123

Post by 9cb14c1ec0 »

appease7727 wrote: post #109
pjmlp wrote: post #83

No one in Windows development community cares about WinUI, other than those with sunken costs that bought into the WinRT/UWP dream and now are stuck with a dead technology. Too many burned bridges since Windows 8 came out. If anything, this is Microsoft confirmation that they are unwilling to fix all the broken issues, and hoping the community will somehow still care.

Honestly at this point who would seriously use any Microsoft UI framework? They've abandoned 100% of their previous UI frameworks unfinished when they get distracted by a new, shinier framework. Why use a busted incomplete framework missing basic features when there's entire ecosystems of open source cross-platform frameworks being actively maintained and which actually have all the features you need? Really this is…

I dunno, they are still doing doing bug fixes to Winforms.

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

#124

Post by shortrounddev2 »

bob1029 wrote: post #119

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 t…

I think windows needs a community effort to create an actually good framework for native development on windows. Unfortunately I just dont think such a community is big enough.

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

#125

Post by shortrounddev2 »

muhehe wrote: post #20

I already lost count how many UI frameworks are in windows. It looks like complete chaos and mess. I really wonder what they expect from open-sourcing it. Just to pretend how open they are? Or is there any real benefit to developers who target windows?

Maybe people can cannibalize some of the rendering code and extrapolate the controls to a better class library than they already have. Like a kind of winforms but using modern rendering APIs. I know you already can create such controls but they often end up being very verbose and just look like xaml but in C#

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

#127

Post by [deleted] »

gyulai wrote: post #120
echelon wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eco…

[deleted]

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

#128

Post by cshokie »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #45
qcnguy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WinRT came out of UWP I think. UWP was their first attempt to move beyond .NET

You have that backwards. WinRT is the managed languages runtime for Windows, introduced in Win8. Its sort of the replacement for COM/OLE but also defines the ABI dialect in a way that allows managed languages to call unmanaged code without an FFI penalty. UWP is built on WinRT, and acts as a fully managed app container, similarly to how phone apps exist on your phone. It allows WinRT apps to be deployed to any Micros…

WinRT is not the same thing as managed .NET code. There is no requirement that a UWP is .NET. There are many examples of unmanaged C++ UWPs, including the open source Windows Terminal.

WinRT is a mechanism to express APIs in a way that is amenable to cross-language usage. It is built on top of COM, and is not a replacement for COM.

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

#129

Post by dehrmann »

I wonder how much longer Microsoft stays committed to Windows as a whole. Windows is less than 10% of the company, users are migrating to phones, tablets, and Chromebooks (all of which can run Office), and with .NET on Linux, Windows servers are making less sense. It's a shrinking market.
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