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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

#261

Post by hulitu »

Timwi wrote: post #21
Springtime wrote: post #8

I hope this leads to having a native vertical taskbar, which has been absent in W11 despite being a taskbar feature dating back as early as Windows 98. Third-party tools have tried to reimplement it but it's either been by bastardizing the native W11 horizontal taskbar to be vertical (eg: Windhawk) or just restoring the old W10 taskbar code (eg: StartAllBack).

Nit-pick: Windows 95, actually. The vertical taskbar was an option in its very first version.

> Nit-pick: Windows 95, actually. The vertical taskbar was an option in its very first version.

Yes, but this was when computer were less capable. Now, you are not able to choose colors or fonts, the taskbar is fixed and the programs need at least 2 seconds to start. Terrific evolution.

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

#262

Post by LexiMax »

pjmlp wrote: post #87
paavohtl wrote: post #59

I am worried about the future of native UI technologies on Windows. Traditionally at least the developers of operating systems have eaten their own dogfood and have at least tried to implement well-performing & visually consistent native applications to serve as an example to others. Windows 11 has largely done the opposite. Windows has had minimal but perfectly functional native email and calendar apps at least sinc…

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…

> That is also a reason why now there are Webview2 instances all over the place on Windows 11.

I can't help but feel like there is a happy median between Native UI and WebUI that we haven't quite figured out yet.

In the gaming space there is this library called RMLUI that I have used in anger quite a bit. It gives you something that is shaped a lot like HTML and CSS, but with a built-in data binding layer, and a scripting layer that supports Lua by default but gives you the flexability to roll your own language and API. It also is a much lighter dependency than Chromium and V8.

It's missing a couple of features from vanilla HTML and CSS, but also has a bunch of unique featurea that make it far more useful in other ways. For example, it doesn't have CSS background images, but image decorators are so much more useful. And don't get me started on sprite sheets and theme media queries.

I can't help but think that something similarly shaped and designed more for general desktop use would blow the doors off of electron. My workstation has 32 gigs of RAM and yet it's often a half to three quarters full mostly because of Firefox, Discord, and Visual Studio Code instead of more lightweight apps like Visual Studio 2022.....which sounds crazy when you say it out loud.

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

#263

Post by hulitu »

bob1029 wrote: post #119

For Windows UIs I've been getting into Win32/GDI/DirectDraw/etc. Tools like CsWin32 and modern C# (ref returns) make working with these APIs a lot more approachable today. It used to be the case that you had to create a nasty C++ project to do any of this. Now you can just list the methods you need access to in your nativemethods.txt file and the codegen takes care of the rest. Win32 is a lot lower level than other t…

> Win32 is a lot lower level than other things you'd typically consider to be a "UI framework",

From a user's perspective, Win32 is high level. No other Windows toolkit is able to draw buttons or scrollbars properly.

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

#264

Post by LeFantome »

LexiMax wrote: post #262
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…

> That is also a reason why now there are Webview2 instances all over the place on Windows 11. I can't help but feel like there is a happy median between Native UI and WebUI that we haven't quite figured out yet. In the gaming space there is this library called RMLUI that I have used in anger quite a bit. It gives you something that is shaped a lot like HTML and CSS, but with a built-in data binding layer, and a scri…

Are you describing XAML?

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

#265

Post by LeFantome »

khmyznikov wrote: post #201
curt15 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, you can use Avalonia or UNO Platform on Linux or Mac and then deploy to Windows.

UNO Platform is basically WinUI.

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

#266

Post by LexiMax »

LeFantome wrote: post #264
LexiMax wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is also a reason why now there are Webview2 instances all over the place on Windows 11. I can't help but feel like there is a happy median between Native UI and WebUI that we haven't quite figured out yet. In the gaming space there is this library called RMLUI that I have used in anger quite a bit. It gives you something that is shaped a lot like HTML and CSS, but with a built-in data binding layer, and a scri…

Are you describing XAML?

Possibly? I was a web developer before I started delving into desktop development, so I don't really know a ton about XAML.

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

#267

Post by silon42 »

nine_k wrote: post #168
wolvesechoes wrote: post #157

Earlier 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.

IMO it's not ideal for Rust to have only Rust specific toolkits (at least they need to have other language bindings)

I've tried using Qt (non QML, using rust-qt) last week... initially things were looking fine (despite unsafe everywhere)... but I found quickly that I need unsupported things (deriving from C++ classes), and the project isn't really maintained anymore, so I'll need to so some low level work myself if I want to proceed.

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

#268

Post by esseph »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #258
esseph wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I promise you it has not "gone away" which is why Azure is so popular.

What does Azure have to do with windows these days?

Windows is still enforced and mandated on most corporate Fortune 100/500 companies computers.

Their "cloud lift" consists of putting vms into the cloud to run at 10x the cost. (Nothing else changed from The Old Ways)

And that's still where we are today for most enterprises.

That ecosystem has had them for 30+ years and shows no signs of going away anytime soon. If it doesn't have Active Directory and Office 365 or whatever they decided to call it today, they aren't interested.

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

#269

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

LexiMax wrote: post #266
LeFantome wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you describing XAML?

Possibly? I was a web developer before I started delving into desktop development, so I don't really know a ton about XAML.

I used XAML a bit at an old job

The coolest part was that it was baked into the .NET Framework installed on all newer Windows versions, so I could make a useful GUI app in like 30 KB.

Those were the days... I hated that job though.

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