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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

#291

Post by jasonvorhe »

Having had to setup some Windows systems for a client of mine, all I can say it that they've long abandoned all hope of ever shipping a somewhat coherent UI. It's just not going to happen. Lipstick upon lipstick on frankensteined pigs just aren't going to work. At some point they'll have to start from clean slate or else we'll see 1990s ui remnants leaking through into the 2040s. It's just not going to happen until they start bleeding market share on the desktop. iirc it took desktop linux ~10 years from 1 to 2% and 1 year from 3 to 4% so there's movement in the market.

DHH pushing desktop Linux for developers, Pewdiepie making videos about Linux and GrapheneOS, there's definitely an accelerationist argument to be made here.

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

#292

Post by CrimsonCape »

appease7727 wrote: post #257
pjmlp wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forms and WPF are still reasonable options.

Forms is still my go-to for quick one-off and disposable programs. But maily because it's simple and I have a big library of controls and extensions I've built over years to make Forms more complete. I've also tried WPF, but it's missing very basic controls that I just don't feel like recreating.

Can you give examples? I've been looking for some open-source project ideas...

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

#293

Post by CrimsonCape »

spookie wrote: post #256
crinkly wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still works fine. High DPI stuff is a dick but that’s about it.

Eh, high dpi has always been a mess given the hacks adobe and windows assumed in the past.

I implemented a WPF control to look like a winform control and ran into a issue of the vintage control looking perfect at an odd (9px by 9px) native pixel size that gets distorted by WPF when rendered at different scaling.

Visual Studio's + sign expanders have had this bug for years that was finally fixed by changing to a chevron shape in 2022. Clearly this problem bugged someone on the dev team hence the fix. =)

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

#294

Post by solid_fuel »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #282
Kerbiter wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, WPF is quite good to use, and WinForms approach to keeping UI as code is quite moronic. I would say WPF is where it should've stopped.

WPF sucks. I rather like expressing the UI in code. Having to deal with so much XML (XaML) is annoying as fuck.

The workflow on WPF was so much more painful than winforms, which had a decent WYSIWYG designer and solid integration with visual studio.

WPF in comparison was slow, memory hungry, and difficult to learn.

I tried 5 times to make a WPF application but it didn’t even have all the same basic controls that WinForms supported.

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

#295

Post by CrimsonCape »

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…

Yeah this entire discussion about these high level framework would be cooler to discuss the lower level APIs. As far as I know, the entirety of Windows rendering stack is built on either GDI or DirectX? With Win32 even being built on GDI?

It would be much cooler to discuss building a ground-up Windows UI stack as close to metal as possible which I guess would necessarily be using DirectX...

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

#296

Post by Quarrelsome »

LexiMax wrote: post #285
01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Everything I've ever heard about XAML from folks who have used it has been positive. Seems to me like the kind of thing that was forgotten about due to being joined at the hip with Microsoft, not necessarily because it was a bad idea.

I heard that the WPF code under the hood was jank, which might be part of why MS never went forward with it. From a developer perspective it was quite nice. I started in winform and I miss UI frameworks being obvious and straight forward. I have a rant about how to darken an image using HTML + css that despairs in how unintuitable and bodge-job the solution ends up being. WPF and WinForm were not like that, you draw what someone sees, inline, as they see it and that's quite nice.

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

#297

Post by Quarrelsome »

solid_fuel wrote: post #294
HumblyTossed wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WPF sucks. I rather like expressing the UI in code. Having to deal with so much XML (XaML) is annoying as fuck.

The workflow on WPF was so much more painful than winforms, which had a decent WYSIWYG designer and solid integration with visual studio. WPF in comparison was slow, memory hungry, and difficult to learn. I tried 5 times to make a WPF application but it didn’t even have all the same basic controls that WinForms supported.

nah WPF made way more sense than WinForm in its abstract design, as it supported flow/stack layout ideas instead of anchors like WinForm did. WinForm was much quicker to get started but had a fundamental flaw in that it couldn't really do transparency.

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

#299

Post by Quarrelsome »

_fat_santa wrote: post #95
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…

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…

last time I used Sql Server Management studio the "add database dialog" still had that poorly placed button that its had since its release.

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

#300

Post by solarkraft »

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…

FWIW, the start menu is a React Native app. I think that’s a pretty good compromise (I think the performance criticism is solvable, they just don’t care). Too bad RN isn’t that well supported on other platforms.
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