141–150 of 308 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "bad thing" is that it's effectively getting abandoned, open sourcing it won't make any difference. It's not like external contributions will suddenly turn it into something usable, and they'll just have a skeleton crew maintaining it, like they do WinForms and WPF. People are tired of Microsoft and their ever growing graveyard of ill thought out, half-baked, "native" UI frameworks.
Native UI is effectively dead outside of Apple’s platforms, and even there it’s hanging on for dear life. HTML, CSS and JavaScript won the cross platform toolkit battle.
Microsoft is the bad one here, unfortunately.
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The answer to this question depends on the knowledge and quality of engineers working on the kernel and the overall Executive. These continue to evolve with more advanced technologies, like VBS or the future usermode endpoints for EDR and possibly anti-cheat, pushing those out of the kernel, which presumably requires kernel work. David Cutler is still there but working on other stuff, last I understood. That does lea…
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…
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…
If you understood the power struggles within Microsoft and the cut throat office politics, you’d understand. Orgs are fighting orgs trying to over throw one another.
That's most old large orgs who have been around for ~5 decades. Nothing special about Microsoft.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Qt and VCL/FireMonkey are pretty much alive, as 3rd party .NET like Avalonia and Uno. Apple is also doing just fine. It is Microsoft that went south, as Satya apparently sees no value on Windows. Note the drama on XBox, the console not the Microsoft Games Studios brand, as suffering from the same lack of interest from Microsoft's management.
Last time I looked into Uno, it seemed to me more like a mobile-first play (similar to Flutter), but maybe I missed something there.
Qt is still joined at the hips with C++, and I'm finding it hard to imagine that the next generation of developers will go in for C++ over alternatives like Rust. There is a QML/JavaScript story. But why, on earth, would you go there, if history hasn't forced your hand, as it did with the Web.
I hear good things about Avalonia, but: Why throw out the baby with the bathwater and build something "open" within a monopolist's walled garden.
> Apple is also doing just fine.
But "lack of investment" is still not entirely improper as a characterization of how they prioritize desktop versus mobile.
My big idea to fix WPF is to rebuild the data binding system to use the .NET compile-time code generation feature instead of run-time reflection. I think that would solve a lot of problems. For one, projects could do an actual AOT build of their applications (right now, you either need to rely on an installed .NET runtime or "publish" the project with a lot of .NET libraries included for self-extract, bloating the final file size). Code generation would probably improve performance quite a bit too, maybe open up the possibility to compile for cross-platform, introduce type safety for XAML bindings (rather than getting vague runtime binding errors), remove the need for so much class scaffolding, etc... I've thought about starting an open source project to do it myself, but seems like a pretty big task and I would essentially be starting a project to help with my other project which I already don't have enough time to work on...
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.
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.
> I have zero interest in the Win11 UI [...] As has the rest of the world, and we will just put it on the list of UI frameworks Microsoft did not completly implement, fully support or considering "the default". So we stay stuck with the status quo: There's no official UI for Windows, still.