461–470 of 481 posts
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This isn't well-known, so I figured I'd mention it. Microsoft offers a service called Azure Artifact Signing (used to be called Trusted Signing) that manages code signing for you: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/artifact-s... It's $9.99/mo, and you don't need to worry about procuring or renewing code signing certs.
US and Canada residents only, sadly.
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Programmers and designers thinking the average person is a moron is one of the two reasons almost no good software is writren today.
What's the other reason?
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For what you describe, .NET + WinForms or WPF will work just fine. These days it can built self-contained executables, although they won't be small (but then again, when many websites have multiple megabytes of JS...). Or you can target .NET 4.8 - for something this simple I doubt there'd be much difference but then you can ship an .exe that measures in kilobytes, and the runtime is included with every version of Win…
You can build single-file executables for .NET 4, and I do, but there's no static linking, so you need to restrict yourself to assemblies that ship with the framework and whatever other prerequisites you're willing to install or assume will be installed. Two notable caveats: 1. Certain newer C# language features require runtime support that doesn't ship with older versions of .NET, which can include quite a few DLLs.…
Not out of the box, but there are ways to do it, e.g. ILMerge.
> so you may need to ship multiple executables
OP's baseline is native code tho, so they are already planning to do that.
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Way to go with anecdata to try and disentangle your feelings from reality. Come back when you have cold hard facts. With 27% of the market, they make twice as much money on their app store. https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/06/05/app-store-just-ha...
Making money does not equate to popularity. It only means their users are suckers for overpaying. $1000 for a monitor stand? $700 for 4 tiny wheels? Yet people pay these absurd prices for their niche over-hyped and over-priced hardware. "A fool and their money are soon parted."
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Making money does not equate to popularity. It only means their users are suckers for overpaying. $1000 for a monitor stand? $700 for 4 tiny wheels? Yet people pay these absurd prices for their niche over-hyped and over-priced hardware. "A fool and their money are soon parted."
Then how do you square that Apple has a billion worldwide users? They're all fools? Everybody who bought an iPhone is an idiot? There's no way an 900$ iPhone is a good purchase when the equivalent device that Samsung advertises as a competitor is over a thousand bucks?
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The sane alternative is macOS because there is one thing that Windows lacks; a community. Since 1984, there have been boutique developers who have spent their whole career working on macOS, making it better and living the dream of working on consumer software. When I look at the apps on Windows, all I see are abandoned projects and MVPs with a borderline malware financial structure.
Really? I've been a fulltime Linux user for years but there are tons of excellent Windows-only apps. Here are some that I miss: Directory Opus, ShareX, Wiztree, Everything, AltDrag, AutoHotkey, Paint.NET, irfanview, SumatraPDF. I'd add Keepass2 as well but fortunately KeepassXC is a thing. Those are all feature-filled (in the bloat-free good way) and they've all been around for over a decade (from memory). Most are f…
Also, I am pretty sure that SumatraPDF is available for Linux as well. I am not at a computer but I think it is in the AUR.
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Yeah, Win32 (Windows API) will be around for a long time one way or the other, and there is a ton of tooling and docs around it. Even for non-Windows usage it is to be considered in certain situations. > Don't be swayed by the propaganda. Especially if your application has essentially no untrusted input. Even without untrusted inputs, in 2026 one should think twice before selecting C++ for a new project. There are st…
I just had a look at two examples from that windows-rs repo. https://crates.io/crates/windows-sys https://crates.io/crates/windows Both seem to do the actual work in unsafe blocks, so I guess you could as well use C++, no? (only have limited Rust knowledge)
The first thing you want to ensure is that you avoid unsafe in YOUR code. That is, after all, where you are going to create your bugs.
Ideally, there is no unsafe code in the crates you use. If there is, at least there are more eyes on that code to catch problems. You can inspect and debug that code, and others can do it for you. Others may battle test it and stress it far more than you will.
And at least the unsafe code is isolated to a few areas in the supporting libraries. Less to inspect. Less to debug. Fewer places to introduce memory related regressions.
It does not at all follow that, given an unsafe block, we may just have well used C++.
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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.
> Were they so much smarter than the programers of today? Unironically the answer is yes. I've been watching this for at least 15 years. I think one inflection point is when everybody who was coming up became accustomed to GC languages. Within a decade of that trend starting, nobody could reason about memory anymore. With the AI boom we're going through another inflection point. When coding is synonymous with using a…
There is a certain amount of truth to that I think
I do not think anybody was “smarter”. There were smart and less smart people then and now.
But the “typical” practice changes. And that changes what you get. I think your “typical” programmer is more productive today in terms of what they can accomplish. But that work is going to be built at a higher level of abstraction and likely a lower level of run-time efficiency. As a percentage, fewer people understand or take into account the lower level details.
It is not just about new tech. After all, I can write all my code in RISC-V assembler. And I can manually allocate memory and manipulate pointers in C#. It is just not what people normally do these days.