Ironic that they're opening up all the new crappy stuff, but not the good old stuff like Win32. Maybe they're scared of WINE?
Some of the old stuff was purchased any may never be open sourced.
I highly doubt Win32 was purchased from a third party.
Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework
211–220 of 308 posts
Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework
#212Earlier 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’s great for you, but don’t underestimate the asymmetric value here. You’re giving them free labour, and they get _way more_ out of that than you do - especially in aggregate.
Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Rust is - by design - antithetical to pretty much every idea of rapid application development paradigm Delphi/VCL and to lesser extent Qt adhere to.
It doesn't matter how many of Rust UI toolkits there are. Consider that there are a lot of Rust game engines, and pretty much zero games written in it, because even C++ gives you better trade-offs in that particular space.
Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework
#214Earlier 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.
Sure, it took only what, 40 years of intensive hardware improvements* for assembly to move to the fringe? And we still reach out to it more often that I would like to because reasons?
Yep, I guess you can train an LLM on a bunch of binaries to get it to mimic a SotA compiler with some accuracy, which may or may not improve over time, but come on. Times where there were free performance increases are gone, and this is not the area where shipping any bullshit real fast will get you any sort of advantage.
* Which are unlikely to happen again in the foreseeable future.
Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework
#215I 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.
It is not really about Windows anymore.
But Windows is where most people run Office, including all the back-end implications like Exchange and all the "Power" stuff.
It is a lot more than 10% of Microsoft revenue really (just not directly).
I agree though that they do not really care about the platform anymore. In fact, they care less and less every day about everything that is not AI on Azure.
Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It will be a long time before Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, and Excel are not important enough to enterprises to justify the Microsoft subscription. And Visual Studio is still a huge part of the Microsoft capture strategy.
Microsoft is working on separating all of the above from Windows without losing too much control but it is going to take a while.
Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> The Win8/10 taskbar's code predates Avalon (the prototype/codename for WPF), and trying to change/fix it at all usually ended up breaking it. It's one of the few binaries on Windows that would not be recompiled to build a new release image in fear of breaking it. The taskbar that underwent a major redesign in Windows 7 (released after WPF)? Also, that binary is explorer.exe, surely it got rebuilt quite often for ne…
The taskbar exists in its own timeline, apparently. (Ex-)Microsoft engineers working in the UI/UX team for Windows itself have spoken about how much of a nightmare dealing with that thing was.
Also, the taskbar technically exists as a dll, not an exe, explorer.exe would link to it and run it if it was being ran as the UI shell. This is now split out to its own exe (Shell Experience Host iirc), and explorer.exe is now only File Explorer.
Since it exists as a dll, btw, this is how the Win10 taskbar injectors work, they just call the dll (which still ships in Win11) instead of letting Shell Experience Host do the Win11 thing.
The sane way of handling this, btw, is just use Shell Experience Host injectors to get the desired behaviors, such as using Windhawk and use m417z's taskbar height and icon size plugin (the third most popular Windhawk plugin); to match Vista/7 era small, set to height 32, icon size 16, taskbar button width 28.
Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have that backwards. WinRT is the managed languages runtime for Windows, introduced in Win8. Its sort of the replacement for COM/OLE but also defines the ABI dialect in a way that allows managed languages to call unmanaged code without an FFI penalty. UWP is built on WinRT, and acts as a fully managed app container, similarly to how phone apps exist on your phone. It allows WinRT apps to be deployed to any Micros…
WinRT is not the same thing as managed .NET code. There is no requirement that a UWP is .NET. There are many examples of unmanaged C++ UWPs, including the open source Windows Terminal. WinRT is a mechanism to express APIs in a way that is amenable to cross-language usage. It is built on top of COM, and is not a replacement for COM.
Windows Terminal is sort of a clusterfuck of multiple programs, only one of which is a UWP program (the actual visible WinUI shell that runs) which you're not allowed to do as a UWP-era Microsoft Store app, but they got internal permission to do that.
Its now a WinUI 3.x program, apparently, and now the Store no longer requires UWP programs, so WT now only needs to make the "ships inside of Windows release images" guys happy, which apparently is harder than making the UWP-era Store guys happy.
Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have that backwards. WinRT is the managed languages runtime for Windows, introduced in Win8. Its sort of the replacement for COM/OLE but also defines the ABI dialect in a way that allows managed languages to call unmanaged code without an FFI penalty. UWP is built on WinRT, and acts as a fully managed app container, similarly to how phone apps exist on your phone. It allows WinRT apps to be deployed to any Micros…
Yeah but I think when it was introduced it wasn't a thing you could use separate from the rest of UWP. What changed in Win10 was you could use WinRT APIs from regular Win32 apps too. They started breaking UWP up into independent pieces. Or not. I haven't thought about this stuff for years. Definitely possible I forgot the ordering of things.
UWP most certainly did not exist when WinRT came into existence. WinRT, itself, is also more or less the third version of this attempt: Managed C++ came first, then C++/CLI, then the WinRT era and C++/CX.
C++/CLI and C++/CX are semi-managed, you only need to use the extensions when interacting with WinRT, although you're free to write your entire app in that dialect.
Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework
#220Open source the mess and hope someone else picks up the tab.
I hope nobody contributes to this, MSFT is a multi billion dollar company and they can afford to fix it themselves.