Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework

neowin.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 308 posts

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

#201

Post by khmyznikov »

curt15 wrote: post #190
pjmlp wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the WinUI community calls, I would assert all new employees have zero Windows experience and management doesn't care to give them proper skills. Too many questions that any Windows developer would know why the question was being asked, where they either couldn't answer or had puzzled looks on why the questions were being asked in first place. That is also a reason why now there are Webview2 instances all over th…

Do Windows developers use Windows or Mac at work?

It's impossible to develop Windows without Windows... All dev tools and the repository ecosystem designed to work under Windows.

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

#202

Post by teyc »

pjmlp wrote: post #173
fooker wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LLMs’ design is around novelty and creativity. It was the missing left brain of computation. We should stick to traditional styles of computation for compilation.

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

#203

Post by cosmotic »

rs186 wrote: post #134
_fat_santa wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue I see with Windows 11's UI is they seem to focus too much on pushing new apps / features and not enough focus on catching up some of the older tools within Windows. Take for example the Control Panel which is a reskinned version of the same one that shipped with Windows 7. And I'm sure there are tools buried within the OS that probably date back to the 2000/XP days. Windows 11 looks great if you just look a…

You forgot our favourite windows 3.1 file dialog: https://youtu.be/r549Zn74Xg8

Yikes!

Though nothing from Apple in 1993 still runs.

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

#204

Post by bobmcnamara »

pjmlp wrote: post #136
appease7727 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Forms and WPF are still reasonable options.

GDI32 only works as well as it ever did.

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

#205

Post by bobmcnamara »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #125
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#

> Maybe people can cannibalize some of the rendering code and extrapolate the controls to a better class library than they already have.

This just sounds like another Microsoft UI stack

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

#209

Post by bobmcnamara »

specproc wrote: post #195

I get there are old people and stuff, but why should anyone consider Windows these days?

Desktop/Laptop market share:

Windows: 72% Mac: 15% Linux: 5% ChromeOS: 2%

Windows share has been on a downward trend for at least 15 years. But it's a gorilla.

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

#210

Post by badsectoracula »

deaddodo wrote: post #160
badsectoracula wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, it implements its own functionality. As an example consider one of the most basic controls which is available pretty much everywhere (i.e. no need for polyfill), the push button: the source code[0] for QPushButton clearly implements the behavior itself, it does not rely on any native button.

Compare with wxWidgets' equivalent to QPushButton, wxButton, where there is a backend-specific header[1] and implementation[2] where 99% of the wxButton functionality is there (there is a `btncmn.cpp` under `common` that is shared across backends but that has very little code itself).

[0] https://github.com/qt/qtbase/blob/dev/src/widgets/widgets/qp...

[1] https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/blob/master/include/w...

[2] https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/blob/master/src/msw/b...

Post reply on HN