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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

#161

Post by deaddodo »

zigzag312 wrote: post #159
bloomca wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

WinUI3 offers that, it's just not the recommended way of building+deploying.

What you are looking for is "unpackaged, framework-dependent". This will build an application like an old-school WinAPI executable, one which expects the relevant DLLs to be installed on the host system (or distributed in the same directory).

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

#162

Post by seanmcdirmid »

pjmlp wrote: post #135
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

What to expect when new interns have no clue about Windows, have been educated with macOS and ChromeOS, and the design team carries Apple devices? Windows 98 introduced Active Desktop, and still, not as many webviews all over the place. MSHTML was the first Electron.

This was already a thing 20 years ago. Students weren’t have any experience with windows, it was something companies used, and today even that has gone away.

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

#163

Post by bytefish »

MrZander wrote: post #121
bytefish wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We also settled on WPF for a new LOB Desktop application, this validates the decision. If you combine WPF with the CommunityToolkit MVVM, it’s a very nice framework to develop with.

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

#164

Post by LexiMax »

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?

That is the self-interested feeling that Open Source preys on.

And I do mean "prey" with a negative connotation. One of the biggest perks of Open Source from a company's perspective is that you can get developers to work on your project for free without paying them. However, those same developers have very little say in the direction of your product, and any forking of your project would have to compete the economies of scale that come from being a company. The only downside is that you have to worry about being out-scaled by a bigger company, as the developers of ElasticSearch, Redis, Docker, and others found out first-hand.

This is distinct from Free Software, which has different dynamics that are much more friendly to mutual benefit, collaboration, and forking, especially if there's no CLA that pools all of the copyright into one corporate or non-profit entity. But then again, this sort of Free Software moralizing is expressly the reason why Open Source was created as an alternative in the first place. The OSI even used to admit as such on their website:

https://web.archive.org/web/20021001164015/http://www.openso...

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

#165

Post by 9029 »

perching_aix wrote: post #67
9029 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the source is a twitter meme?

Featuring a screencap of an MS engineer's talk from some React conference, yes.

The talk in question showcases a widget in the start menu that's using react native. Apart from the meme itself, I have not found indication of the start menu being a react native app. Every time this comes up it seems to always lead back to that meme.

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

#166

Post by fooker »

gyulai wrote: post #154
fooker wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 :-)

That’s wishful thinking. Just because things haven’t changed in the past doesn’t mean it won’t change in the future.

I don’t doubt that the amount of code will not reduce, it’ll just be easier and easier to get AI to fix it.

We are still less than two years into widespread use of this technology, and it’s surprising how good it is.

I am a ‘greybeard’ compiler guy and modern LLMs fix compiler bugs better than me, to a large extent. And it keeps slightly getting better every few weeks.

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

#167

Post by nine_k »

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,…

No, MSO should not be rewritten. It might be adapted to a more universal UI toolkit, if Win32 UI becomes problematic as is. COM is also not going to go anywhere, but I wonder if WASM-compiled components and native code-compiled components could interact via DCOM over the internet.

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

#168

Post by nine_k »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #157
gyulai wrote: post #120

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…

> 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.

Qt and Lazarus had much longer time to grow and mature, and Lazarus can also take a number of pages from the Delphi components book.

What's interesting is the speed at which Rust UI toolkits develop and maybe even mature.

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

#169

Post by perching_aix »

9029 wrote: post #165
perching_aix wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Featuring a screencap of an MS engineer's talk from some React conference, yes.

The talk in question showcases a widget in the start menu that's using react native. Apart from the meme itself, I have not found indication of the start menu being a react native app. Every time this comes up it seems to always lead back to that meme.

That'd be correct. See also the top comment in that thread that (evidently after I originally read that thread) also explained exactly this, and a sibling comment in this thread tree that also did so (more than two hours after I posted my original comment, meaning I was unable to amend or delete it).

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

#170

Post by [deleted] »

LexiMax wrote: post #164
tough wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That is the self-interested feeling that Open Source preys on. And I do mean "prey" with a negative connotation. One of the biggest perks of Open Source from a company's perspective is that you can get developers to work on your project for free without paying them. However, those same developers have very little say in the direction of your product, and any forking of your project would have to compete the economies…

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