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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

#171

Post by cyberax »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #48
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…

They already do, though. The big UI refresh in Win10 is all XAML, and the new Win11 taskbar (the one we all hate) is now a totally normal XAML app. WinUI 3's big changes (to get a 3.0 version number) is not with the XAML stack itself, but its new ability to be called by unmanaged apps as a normal UI toolkit, so it can finally be used by all apps. No more using Shell UI like we're writing Win 3.1 apps. And yes, some s…

> And yes, some stuff in Win11 still isn't WinUI, which is kind of annoying, but some of those dialogs hidden away in Windows are at least 20 years old, and probably would need to be entirely rewritten, not merely have their UI's updated.

And this is hard to do. These dialogs often are _dynamic_, with third-party settings rendered as ActiveX controls.

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

#172

Post by fsloth »

xcrunner529 wrote: post #155
fsloth wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup! Boring technologies are great.

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

#173

Post by pjmlp »

fooker wrote: post #166
gyulai wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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…

As compiler guy, how do you see direct machine code generation?

I firmly believe having LLMs generate code for current languages is a transition step, just like Assembly devs had to be convinced optimising compilers were generating the same kind of code they would write themselves.

They are not there yet, but the day will come.

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

#174

Post by pjmlp »

p_ing wrote: post #153
pjmlp wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, because of how UWP and Project Reunion went down, right after they started looking into it.

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

#175

Post by tekdude »

S04dKHzrKT wrote: post #156
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

Thanks, yes I'll probably have to give it another try some day. I might be confusing Avalonia and Uno, but I think I first attempted it a couple years ago, and then again last year. I remember spending a whole weekend trying to get it running but wasn't having success. Also, I was a bit turned off by how heavy the development environment was. I had to download and install a tool, then that installed more build tools and packages, and then there was also a "recommended" VS Code extension. With WPF, I've gotten used to writing XAML without a designer, so I can get by with just VSCode, the C# extension, and the .NET CLI.

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

#176

Post by duped »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #132
_mlbt wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They only won because developers stopped giving a shit about anything except their own ease of work. There's no such thing as a good UI built with web tech, so anyone who cares about the user's experience will use a native toolkit despite the difficulties. But very few do, turns out.

That's extremely uncharitable. I think slack and discord have pretty great UIs, and that's all "web tech." Figma just IPO'd at a $58 billion valuation - is that not proof their UI is good? If it wasn't good, no one would use it. VS code became the preeminent text editor and IDE over the last decade - all web tech.

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

#177

Post by dehrmann »

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).

Yes, but for how long? At some point, IT realizes everything's in the browser, and general-purpose computing is a security risk.

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

#178

Post by pjmlp »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #48
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…

They already do, though. The big UI refresh in Win10 is all XAML, and the new Win11 taskbar (the one we all hate) is now a totally normal XAML app. WinUI 3's big changes (to get a 3.0 version number) is not with the XAML stack itself, but its new ability to be called by unmanaged apps as a normal UI toolkit, so it can finally be used by all apps. No more using Shell UI like we're writing Win 3.1 apps. And yes, some s…

Lets not forget that after five years Project Reunion was announced, WinUI 3.0 is yet to achieve feature parity with the Visual Studio experience developing C# or C++ applications, or UWP components features.

The WinUI map component is a Webview2 instead of proper native component, Win2D is only a subset of the UWP one, ink is yet to be migrated, and lots of other issues.

Github repos are filled with thousands of issues, and they already did a cleanup a year ago where they simply closed enough tickets to bring it under 2000.

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

#179

Post by pjmlp »

DougN7 wrote: post #84
crinkly wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

MFC support is still in the latest Visual Studio, and it looks like ATL as well.

Which so much better tooling than XAML C++ with C++/WinRT, it is a tragedy.

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

#180

Post by pjmlp »

brokencode wrote: post #51
jiggawatts wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My analogy is every Microsoft UI framework was almost completed in the sense of someone being almost pregnant. A framework that has just one show-stopper missing feature or problem is... unusable. You can't embark on a large, complex application development journey if you even suspect that you'll be painted into a corner. For example, many of WPF-derived frameworks had atrocious performance, with fundamental mistakes…

I just have to wonder.. why after decades can Microsoft not get this right? I’d love to hear insider stories about what’s going on here.

From watching the community calls, long after I stopped caring, management doesn't seem to care to actually hire people that have Windows development background, many times they would ignore community questions or don't get where they were coming from.
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