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Windows native app development is a mess

domenic.me

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Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#471

Post by LeFantome »

userbinator wrote: post #279
feznyng wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Depends what you mean by "look good". The main function of the app being discussed here is to draw solid black rectangles on the screen. Don't forget the "average person", I'm assuming someone relying on software as a tool, doesn't care about the stuff "designers" seem to obsess over, and will actively hate if you break their workflow by doing things like adding useless padding that makes them scroll more or shows le…

I used to work in finance. Screens very densely packed with text is the preferred user interface.

We did a UI refresh at one point. It looked much nicer. People hated it. We had to hastily redesign it again and it looked far more like the original.

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#472

Post by LeFantome »

Onavo wrote: post #331
bloomca wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean conceptually or to match it? Native components are pretty much impossible to match without actually using the native framework which provides them, so you need WinUI/WPF. Win32 provides its own components which are basically Win95 style apps, and you can draw the components using some graphics APIs by yourself. The whole native development area is a mess exactly because making your own (decent) renderer is a…

But you are making false equivalence, the Win32 GUI API is decades out of date from modern UIs. I can use flutter and make a pixel perfect equivalent of the above UI in an hour, with the exact same responsiveness behavior on both windows tablets and desktop, and scales perfectly in high DPI displays. 3 hours if you want the toggle animation timing to be exactly the same. I came from the WinForms world so don't preten…

WinForms is Win32. There is just a managed API wrapper around it.

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#473

Post by jerhewet »

jeremycarter wrote: post #298
jerhewet wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for posterity Anyone remember this one? Microsoft Press: Learn Java Now (complete with J++ installation CD). https://www.amazon.com/dp/1572314281

The CD is available on Archive.org

I have the book (and CD) on my shelf above my machines in my home office. I vaguely recall buying this at Costco, around the same time I bought the 4 volume Microsoft Press C++ series (for dirt cheap, at the time) from Costco.

MS Press used to publish some amazing references. I have a LOT of 'em.

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#474

Post by p-t »

VerifiedReports wrote: post #290
alt227 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disable borders and design your app nicely with images to replace standard user input elements.

That sounds like a great way to make a mess. Look at Microsoft's own apps shunning proper File dialogs and instead presenting a giant, bizarre pane of mostly text and a few crudely-drawn boxes in order to save a file. You have no idea what you're looking at or where you are in the file system. Then there's the removal of title bars from Windows. You often have no idea what app you're looking at. Pull up a PDF in Acro…

> removal of title bars

they did what??? [i'm still on 10 because 11 won't run on my laptop </3]

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#475

Post by VerifiedReports »

p-t wrote: post #474
VerifiedReports wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a great way to make a mess. Look at Microsoft's own apps shunning proper File dialogs and instead presenting a giant, bizarre pane of mostly text and a few crudely-drawn boxes in order to save a file. You have no idea what you're looking at or where you are in the file system. Then there's the removal of title bars from Windows. You often have no idea what app you're looking at. Pull up a PDF in Acro…

> removal of title bars they did what??? [i'm still on 10 because 11 won't run on my laptop </3]

Yes. It's an absolute mess.

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#476

Post by smileybarry »

Klonoar wrote: post #446
smileybarry wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WinJS was a bit different, where your app was genuinely just a bundle of JavaScript and a UWP host process dealt with the rendering. (No Electron-esque to deliver with your app) Made for some tiny, succinct apps.

I am once again stating react-native-windows , the key part being native . It doesn't have anything to do with Electron.

This is why I said Electron-esque. I meant you didn't need a wrapper or renderer of some kind. You literally didn't bundle anything executable, your app was a ZIP of JS files & images that Windows spawned a host process for.

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#477

Post by ojeda »

blub wrote: post #401
ojeda wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A good rule of thumb for programming languages is to check what the general recommendation is on HN and do the opposite. Using win32 from Rust is nonsensical. This is the kind of use-one-tool-for-any-job Visual Basic 6 programmers used to have, except VB6 would have actually been much better than Rust at Windows programming.

My reply was about Win32 and typical C++ development. Obviously other projects may be best written in C# or other languages and frameworks.

Anyway, Microsoft is the one providing the Rust crate(s) I linked, and according to the releases it seems they are using them internally too. I do not see what is "nonsensical" about using them, and I have used them in the past just fine, just like I used Win32 from C++ in the past.

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#478

Post by ojeda »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #399
ojeda wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Even without untrusted inputs, in 2026 one should think twice before selecting C++ for a new project. Yes, you may be harmed by proper IDE and debugging experience via Visual Studio.

I like Visual Studio, and have used it for C++. And, yes, it would be great if they add native support for Rust.

But that would not make me pick C++ over Rust. Other requirements may.

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#480

Post by fsloth »

flohofwoe wrote: post #64
fsloth wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but different target market. CRUD apps are non-trivial. If Unity were to ship platform native replacement for WPF equivalent (hell or even winforms) it would become a really enticing app development platform.

> CRUD apps are non-trivial. Aren't these pretty much the most trivial UI apps possible? E.g. compared to other native apps like Photoshop, Blender, Visual Studio or Office, CRUD is mostly just about banging together custom UI frontend for a database. Unity's editor is implemented in its own (old) UI system, same with Godot, so in both engines it's possible to create 'traditional' non-game UI applications.

A professional GUI requires quite a lot.

A Unity expert can correct me, but IIRC (possibly wrongly) at least the following limitations apply:

For example Unity does not have accessibility features (screen readers etc) nor I don’t think it’s DPI aware. I would _guess_ it does not support platform fonts. Not sure if it supports non-latin font layouts like arabic. Etc etc.

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