Windows native app development is a mess • Hacker News Board

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#261

Post by jerhewet » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 8:40 PM UTC

Steve Gibson, Gibson Research.

https://www.grc.com/freepopular.htm

Just scroll down the page and look at the size of the completely self-contained executable programs. THIS is what Win32 is capable of. Something we always had with Win32 that was thrown away with .Net and C#.

And _please_ just spare me your opinions of how Steve Gibson "doesn't know anything about security". That's not what's important here. What's important is how freakin' small his full-on GUI stand-alone executables are.

EDIT: Just noticed this on his page.

Total Historical Count of files downloaded from this page: 52,292,601

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#262

Post by joe_mamba » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 8:40 PM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #227

I agree with all the comments here saying "stick with Win32" --- this is "a mess" that you can easily avoid. Speaking as a long-time Win32 programmer, the requirements for your app are doable in a few KB (yes, kilobytes --- my vague estimate is less than 8KB) standalone executable. This is how I arrived at that: Enumerating the machine’s displays and their bounds A few API calls. Probably a few hundred bytes. Placing…

IDK man, I wonder how TF did the creators of Winamp do it? Were they so much smarter than the programers of today? And Winamp 2.95 still works on WIndows 11 today.

IIRC Borland Delphi was the most popular tool back then for making Win32 apps since it was so easy to use.

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#263

Post by pjc50 » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 8:47 PM UTC

tsss wrote: post #58

cv5005 wrote: post #11

I'm an embedded programmer who occassionally needs to write various windows programs to interface with embedded devices (usually via serial port or usb), and I find it a breeze to write native gui programs in pure win32 and c++. Recently had to add a new feature to and old program that was last updated in the XP era and two things to note: 1. The program did not need to be updated to run on Vista, 7, 10 and 11, shit…

Honestly, your GUIs are too simple to be part of this conversation. Try writing something like Spotify in WinAPI and that's not even a complicated GUI either.

WinAmp was the win32 music player of choice, once upon a time.

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#264

Post by feznyng » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 8:48 PM UTC

themafia wrote: post #247

feznyng wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you make your win32 app look good to the average person?

If your application saves me time (is intuitive) or enables me to do tasks that I couldn't do before (is powerful) then I don't care one whit what it looks like. As long as it doesn't actively hurt my eyes to stare at you can do whatever you want.

Sure, if I'm building something for myself or fellow hobbyists this approach works (though in that case I'd prefer a good TUI/CLI). But if you're building an app for the average person, how it looks has a big effect on whether they choose it over an alternative.

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#265

Post by jerhewet » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 8:49 PM UTC

nozzlegear wrote: post #165

pjmlp wrote: post #144

Again, unless you have existing Windows 8/10 applications that were written against WinRT, UAP or UWP[0], that make use of WinUI 2.0, forget about touching anything related to WinUI 3.0 or WinAppSDK, stay away from the marketing. Exception being the few APIs that have been introduced in Win32 that instead of COM, actually depend on WinRT like the new MIDI 2.0 or Windows ML. Keep using Win32, MFC (yes it is in a bette…

Just wanted to add a shoutout to WinJS for posterity, with which I built a Windows 8 app that I had published to the Windows Store for a brief period of time. Then they open-sourced the UI part of WinJS and decided it was just a web framework instead of an officially supported method for building Windows apps iirc, which was the end of my foray into the Windows store. https://github.com/winjs/winjs

> for posterity

Anyone remember this one?

Microsoft Press: Learn Java Now (complete with J++ installation CD). https://www.amazon.com/dp/1572314281

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#266

Post by Rohansi » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 8:53 PM UTC

jitl wrote: post #257

Rohansi wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.NET versions are not fully backwards compatible. Would you like every Windows install to ship with over ten versions of the .NET runtime?

We would like it to be good. Whichever way to achieve goodness - either be backwards compat, or ship all the stable versions, I don't care but the current situation is silly. Apple gets flack for this and that, but their UI toolkit situation is lightyears ahead; you just pick the OS version you want to target in your app build settings and it will work that way for everyone.

100 MB per runtime, for everyone, and the majority of them are out of support. Is that really the good option? Why not the option the author dismissed: a 9 MB AOT-compiled executable which doesn't need a separate runtime?

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#267

Post by kelvinjps10 » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 8:54 PM UTC

I got burned out of windows development. I was building a desktop app and switched from WPF to UWP because I wanted the new fluent design widgets, but then Microsoft deprecated it towards WINDOWS UI but it didn't have the same features than wpf.

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#268

Post by dminik » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 8:56 PM UTC

NetMageSCW wrote: post #180

layer8 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that light, it is troubling that Friday’s blog post [0] announced “moving core Windows experiences to the WinUI3 framework” as a measure to improve the quality of said experiences. [0] https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/03/20/our-com...

The only good thing to say about that is it removes the stupidity of using Electron (or the Microsoft Edge equivalent) for built-in Windows apps and the Start Menu. SMH.

The start menu never was electron. It's react native desktop. So, nodejs creating and updating native (well, winui 3) controls.

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#269

Post by pjc50 » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 9:12 PM UTC

joe_mamba wrote: post #262

userbinator wrote: post #227

I agree with all the comments here saying "stick with Win32" --- this is "a mess" that you can easily avoid. Speaking as a long-time Win32 programmer, the requirements for your app are doable in a few KB (yes, kilobytes --- my vague estimate is less than 8KB) standalone executable. This is how I arrived at that: Enumerating the machine’s displays and their bounds A few API calls. Probably a few hundred bytes. Placing…

IDK man, I wonder how TF did the creators of Winamp do it? Were they so much smarter than the programers of today? And Winamp 2.95 still works on WIndows 11 today. IIRC Borland Delphi was the most popular tool back then for making Win32 apps since it was so easy to use.

https://github.com/alexfreud/winamp : does indeed look like classic Win32 in the files I randomly tried, although there's also a QT DLL and a whole load of other stuff on there.

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#270

Post by abcde666777 » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 9:16 PM UTC

One of the challenges with the older methodologies was getting the damned things to look good. I distinctly remember with WinForms having to use DevExpress to get the theming to look moderately modern.

Bit I still never bothered with the later approaches because it looked like I was going to lose out on speed and ease of development. WinForms may have looked ugly but you could bang things together pretty quickly.