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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

#151

Post by tough »

simonh wrote: post #133
tough wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so microsoft gave up and the web won? swift ui apps have some webkit views like the app store, music app etc

I think web views do make sense in situations where you’re presenting lots of remote content that may frequently change. After all that’s what the web is, and store content, and to an extent emails many of which are HTML anyway, are reasonable candidates.

yeah in that regard it seems that apple tastefully does so on apps where there's mostly remote roundtrips already like the app store or music app, so I agree that there makes sense to reuse the web infra

but swift ui apps are great and fast cause they're not electron monsters!

thankfully you can use safari webkit inside them, but that doesnt work cross-platform

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

#152

Post by fooker »

gyulai wrote: post #147
pjmlp wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Qt and VCL/FireMonkey are pretty much alive, as 3rd party .NET like Avalonia and Uno. 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…

> the next generation of developers

are not going to write code.

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

#153

Post by p_ing »

pjmlp wrote: post #137
p_ing wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Before Project Reunion came to be, Office team was starting to adopt UWP. See BUILD recordings from 2018, I think, where they demo the new UWP controls contributed by the team, similarly to what happened before with the ribbon on Windows 7. I would vouch they got as happy as the rest of us.

Those versions in the Office store are d.e.d. Except for OneNote for Windows 10 which is shortly on it's way out.

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

#154

Post by gyulai »

fooker wrote: post #152
gyulai wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Qt and VCL/FireMonkey are pretty much alive, as 3rd party .NET like Avalonia and Uno. 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…

> the next generation of developers are not going to write code.

...the amout of code we've been writing has increased with the progress of technology, just comparing what it was like to write desktop UIs with Delphi in the 90s versus the amount of code it takes for an equivalent app in 2025. Low-code and vibecoded software from the 2020s are going to be the unemployment insurance for all those greybeards who will still know how to code in the 2030s :-)

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

#155

Post by xcrunner529 »

fsloth wrote: post #141
dehrmann wrote: post #129

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.

I would guess Fortune 500 still runs on desktop windows? (Don’t know but this is just my guess).

Yep. Most any regular company is majority windows. It’s not exciting but why would they bother throwing that influence away.

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

#156

Post by S04dKHzrKT »

tekdude wrote: post #148

I kind of wish Microsoft would just continue development of WPF. I've used it for years for various projects, and there is a learning curve but I've since enjoyed working with it. XAML, data bindings, ViewModels... all of it I actually like. But, WPF needs a few improvements to really make it perfect. I tried several of Microsoft's newer frameworks and the open source ones (Avalonia, Uno), but I either couldn't get t…

Your second paragraph sounds like you're describing Avalonia. Avalonia has AOT, compile-time binding errors and cross-platform support. Maybe there have been some updates since you last tried it? I'm not very familiar with Avalonia or WPF though so maybe there's more to it than that.

[0]: https://docs.avaloniaui.net/docs/basics/data/data-binding/co...

[1]: https://github.com/kekekeks/XamlX

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

#157

Post by wolvesechoes »

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…

> I think it's amazing what has happened in the open-source space with Rust-based UI frameworks (iced, egui, slint) and COSMIC

Do you mean it is amazing how poor is an experience and how many features, widgets and controls they lack when compared with something like FPC/Lazarus and Qt?

Rust is a nice thing, but its UI ecosystem simply cannot even compare.

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

#158

Post by sirwhinesalot »

tough wrote: post #151
simonh wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think web views do make sense in situations where you’re presenting lots of remote content that may frequently change. After all that’s what the web is, and store content, and to an extent emails many of which are HTML anyway, are reasonable candidates.

yeah in that regard it seems that apple tastefully does so on apps where there's mostly remote roundtrips already like the app store or music app, so I agree that there makes sense to reuse the web infra but swift ui apps are great and fast cause they're not electron monsters! thankfully you can use safari webkit inside them, but that doesnt work cross-platform

SwiftUI apps are not great and they're not fast. A lot of Apple's new apps are considered rather poor. Theo has a video where some devs switched to a webview because the text rendering performed better!

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

#159

Post by zigzag312 »

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 want to be able to create self-contained GUI application that are relatively small and can be just copied and run on another computer. Installation should be an option, not a requirement. From my evaluation, WinUI3 doesn't offer that.

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

#160

Post by deaddodo »

badsectoracula wrote: post #49
madduci wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just go for MFC FTW, it is in feature freeze but I will last probably for the next 20 years yet.

You could also go for wxWidgets as it is kinda MFC-y but better and cross-platform, though like MFC you can combine it with Win32 API code (almost) seamlessly. Or go with Qt, though that doesn't use native controls.

QT uses native controls/widgets, it just polyfills when there is no good native option or if you use custom styling.
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