[HN Gopher] Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework
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Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework
Author : bundie
Score : 172 points
Date : 2025-08-02 07:52 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.neowin.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.neowin.net)
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Seasons may come and go, but one thing will never change.
|
| Windows and an absolutely baffling array of UI frameworks with
| various pitfalls, uncertain futures, and no clear winners.
|
| (honorable mention to WinForms though.)
| politelemon wrote:
| And I still give them points for trying, a rarity among the
| tech giants.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| My analogy is every Microsoft UI framework was almost completed
| in the sense of someone being almost pregnant.
|
| A framework that has just _one_ show-stopper missing feature or
| problem is... unusable. You can 't embark on a large, complex
| application development journey if you even _suspect_ that you
| 'll be painted into a corner.
|
| For example, many of WPF-derived frameworks had _atrocious_
| performance, with fundamental mistakes in their design that
| made them incompatible with list virtualization. It wasn 't
| until they had to eat their own dogfood and use WPF for Visual
| Studio that they started fixing these issues.
|
| Win UI 3 meanwhile dropped all support for HDR, wide-gamut,
| etc... going _backwards_ to SDR sRGB only in an era where all
| mobile phone manufacturers were starting to standardise on OLED
| HDR displays. The logic behind this decision? Microsoft wanted
| a UI framework that is "mobile compatible"!
| brokencode wrote:
| I just have to wonder.. why after decades can Microsoft not
| get this right? I'd love to hear insider stories about what's
| going on here.
| pjmlp wrote:
| From watching the community calls, long after I stopped
| caring, management doesn't seem to care to actually hire
| people that have Windows development background, many times
| they would ignore community questions or don't get where
| they were coming from.
| bloomca wrote:
| I really hope they do and the rendering engine is decently
| decoupled, I'll give a try building a framework on top of it.
|
| I wish all platforms gave access to their rendering engine
| similar to DOM on the web, imo SwiftUI/WinUI (or WPF, but they
| are very similar) are not that good.
|
| Haven't built anything native on Linux, though, no idea how good
| those are.
| jamil7 wrote:
| What do you mean by access? APIs to program against or fully
| open sourcing the rendering engine? Because you can mix SwiftUI
| with a few different rendering frameworks at varying
| abstraction levels that it itself renders to (AppKit, UIKit,
| Core Graphics, Metal etc.)
| bloomca wrote:
| Basically I want an API available to build my own SwiftUI.
| Definitely not on the Core Graphics level :)
|
| But good point, I actually think AppKit might be a good
| abstraction level. I'll play with it a bit and see if I can
| abstract it behind a good component model.
| genter wrote:
| What's wrong with Skia? Chrome, Firefox, and OpenOffice all use
| it, and it works on Windows, Linux, MacOS, and Android.
| bloomca wrote:
| Nothing wrong with it, just want something a bit higher level
| and ideally with at least some native components/styles.
| incrudible wrote:
| It is a ton of C++ for what is essentially something that an
| OS like Windows/MacOS/Android/iOS or the browser would
| provide anyway. Apps that use it ship with a substantial
| minimum amount of bloat, e.g. Flutter for web.
| hyperbolablabla wrote:
| I'm sure it'll be really user friendly(!)
| feverzsj wrote:
| So, they gonna abandon it soon?
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| It was abandoned from birth.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| What "UI framework"? Windows is a Frankenstein's monster of
| different UI elements.
| bloomca wrote:
| Rendering engine + set of native components + APIs to make your
| own components.
|
| Windows definitely shot themselves in a foot with building
| multiple renderers while building them on top of each other.
| Disposal8433 wrote:
| I haven't used Windows for a long time but I'm sure they still
| have the moricons.dll of Windows 3.1 somewhere.
| qayxc wrote:
| PS C:\Windows> get-childitem -path . -include "moricons.dll"
| -recurse Directory: C:\Windows\System32
| Mode LastWriteTime Length Name
| ---- ------------- ------ ----
| -a--- 01.04.2024 09:22 12288
| moricons.dll Directory: C:\Windows\SysWOW64
| Mode LastWriteTime Length Name
| ---- ------------- ------ ----
| -a--- 01.04.2024 09:22 2560
| moricons.dll
|
| Yep.
| Springtime wrote:
| 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).
| wild_pointer wrote:
| How will making the UI framework open source lead to taskbar
| changes? For third party contributions in this area, they need
| to open source the taskbar, not the UI framework.
| Timwi wrote:
| Nit-pick: Windows 95, actually. The vertical taskbar was an
| option in its very first version.
| 0points wrote:
| The taskbar is a feature of explorer.exe.
|
| The news being discussed is not about explorer being open
| sourced.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Is the Windows team even using WinUI for the native Win11
| desktop UI? ;)
| madeofpalk wrote:
| It's confusing what _exactly_ 'WinUI' is, but does Explorer
| looks WinUI-ish. Parts of it at least.
| e4m2 wrote:
| Explorer uses XAML Islands. Parts of it are WinUI, while
| the rest is still Win32.
| perching_aix wrote:
| The Start Menu is apparently a React Native app, so I'm going
| to hazard a guess and just assume WinUI is built on top of
| React, and that the Start Menu at least is thus indeed built
| with WinUI. But it's also clear that some other parts aren't,
| so who knows what's what. I'm sure there are folks who spent
| time reverse engineering it all though who do.
| qcnguy wrote:
| WinUI is its own thing. The React Native stuff just shows
| that even Windows developers don't want to use WinUI.
| paavohtl wrote:
| The start menu is not a React Native app, but it's actually
| even worse. Only the recommended section (which is
| basically recently used files - plus probably
| advertisements in some scenarios) is. The rest of the start
| menu is WinUI, to my knowledge.
| ok_computer wrote:
| I cannot stand the latency using a local app. Same with
| rendering views of local file systems. Frontend
| reactivity as the expense of responsive performance is
| the problem with modern user interfaces in my opinion.
|
| Like I'm searching for an installed app. I don't need
| news articles about that and never expected a file system
| ui to be a web portal.
| 9029 wrote:
| > The Start Menu is apparently a React Native app
|
| What's the source for this?
| perching_aix wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124688
| 9029 wrote:
| So the source is a twitter meme?
| perching_aix wrote:
| Featuring a screencap of an MS engineer's talk from some
| React conference, yes.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| the talk is linked as well:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44125217
| 9029 wrote:
| The talk in question showcases a widget in the start menu
| that's using react native. Apart from the meme itself, I
| have not found indication of the start menu being a react
| native app. Every time this comes up it seems to always
| lead back to that meme.
| perching_aix wrote:
| That'd be correct. See also the top comment in that
| thread that (evidently after I originally read that
| thread) also explained exactly this, and a sibling
| comment in this thread tree that also did so (more than
| two hours after I posted my original comment, meaning I
| was unable to amend or delete it).
| daemin wrote:
| Last I evaluated it WinUI3 was a terrible developer experience.
| The application had to be literally installed on the system to
| even debug it, which means you end up with a large number of
| useless start menu entries, not to mention registry entries and
| such. Another thing was that the example programs crashed when I
| clicked on a button.
|
| All I want is something simple to work with to make applications
| for Windows, and so far I'm still using Win32 with WTL.
| bloomca wrote:
| > The application had to be literally installed on the system
| to even debug it
|
| I think that's because you chose "packaged" application, these
| apps need to be installed so that capabilities are handled
| correctly.
|
| To be fair, macOS has the same issue, although they won't show
| in Launchpad, they still can be indexed by Spotlight.
| daemin wrote:
| I did try to develop an unpackaged test application but I
| gave up trying to implement it and just went with Win32
| instead as I wanted make something rather than messing around
| with a UI framework.
|
| These days if I were to switch from Win32 I might try some
| custom rendered framework which a lot of apps seem to use, or
| Qt.
| zigzag312 wrote:
| I want to be able to create self-contained GUI application
| that are relatively small and can be just copied and run on
| another computer. Installation should be an option, not a
| requirement. From my evaluation, WinUI3 doesn't offer that.
| deaddodo wrote:
| WinUI3 offers that, it's just not the recommended way of
| building+deploying.
|
| What you are looking for is "unpackaged, framework-
| dependent". This will build an application like an old-
| school WinAPI executable, one which expects the relevant
| DLLs to be installed on the host system (or distributed in
| the same directory).
| zigzag312 wrote:
| Size of hello world app that includes relevant DLLs is
| over 150 MB. Which is almost like including a web engine.
|
| What I'm looking for is old-school AOT compiled
| executable where UI framework dependency is statically
| compiled and trimmed.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| open-sourcing it so they can get free labor.
|
| winui3 was abandoned the moment it was conceived.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| I feel like this should be called "open outsourcing"
| muhehe wrote:
| I already lost count how many UI frameworks are in windows. It
| looks like complete chaos and mess.
|
| I really wonder what they expect from open-sourcing it. Just to
| pretend how open they are? Or is there any real benefit to
| developers who target windows?
| flohofwoe wrote:
| They probably started something new and shiny (Now with AI!)
| and want to get rid of the old baggage without causing too much
| of a user revolt (all dozens of them) ;)
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/927/
| cheschire wrote:
| WinUI is an evolution of UWP which is an evolution of WinRT.
| WinUI has been around for years.
|
| MAUI is not exactly a competing product and is more about
| enabling cross platform UI development. Different intent.
|
| WinUI is actually ok tech. It's evolved over the years through
| a few iterations, now on WinUI 3.
|
| Im mostly with you though. Until they rebuild the entire OS in
| it, including all of the administrative controls and tools, I
| don't trust the longevity.
| qcnguy wrote:
| WinRT came out of UWP I think. UWP was their first attempt to
| move beyond .NET
| cheschire wrote:
| WinRT was windows 8. Remember the ARM-powered Surface RT
| had the same branding?
|
| UWP came along in windows 10.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| WinRT was introduced with windows 8, the WinRT APIs still
| exist in Windows 11.
| cheschire wrote:
| Yep! I was implying it was the same timeframe as windows
| 8, but I see where my wording could easily have been
| taken literally.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| You have that backwards. WinRT is the managed languages
| runtime for Windows, introduced in Win8. Its sort of the
| replacement for COM/OLE but also defines the ABI dialect in
| a way that allows managed languages to call unmanaged code
| without an FFI penalty.
|
| UWP is built on WinRT, and acts as a fully managed app
| container, similarly to how phone apps exist on your phone.
| It allows WinRT apps to be deployed to any Microsoft
| platform, Windows, XBox, Windows Phone, etc, but also
| Android and iOS, and also as PWA, and are guaranteed to run
| identically on any of those platforms. UWP apps must be
| written a fully managed language that runs on the CLR (ex:
| C# runs on the CLR, but C++/WinRT does not). UWP also uses
| the second generation of WinUI-family XAML UIs, which means
| all UWP apps use completely native UIs, instead of slow
| non-native Javascript shit in a web canvas.
|
| The WinUI family of XAML UIs started with WPF, and a
| slightly incompatible version of it also appeared in
| Silverlight (WPF = WinUI 1.0), then was brought to UWP (=
| WinUI 2.0), and is now its own stand alone thing that any
| app can use, managed or not, as 3.0.
|
| WinRT is not an attempt to move beyond .NET, instead it is
| their way of allowing .NET to natively call code, and make
| .NET languages first class in Windows.
| qcnguy wrote:
| Yeah but I think when it was introduced it wasn't a thing
| you could use separate from the rest of UWP. What changed
| in Win10 was you could use WinRT APIs from regular Win32
| apps too. They started breaking UWP up into independent
| pieces.
|
| Or not. I haven't thought about this stuff for years.
| Definitely possible I forgot the ordering of things.
| cshokie wrote:
| WinRT is not the same thing as managed .NET code. There
| is no requirement that a UWP is .NET. There are many
| examples of unmanaged C++ UWPs, including the open source
| Windows Terminal.
|
| WinRT is a mechanism to express APIs in a way that is
| amenable to cross-language usage. It is built on top of
| COM, and is not a replacement for COM.
| crinkly wrote:
| Still writing win32 stuff like it's 1995 here. We have bits
| of ATL/MFC hanging out which are throughly abandoned.
|
| I don't trust WinUI at all.
|
| I was surprised, when I spoke to a former colleague, to find
| that an internal tool I wrote 25 years ago is still being
| maintained. Win32 as well.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Software that solves an actual problem has the tendency to
| stick around, no matter how much time elapsed.
|
| Just remember, cobol is still in active use, today
| DougN7 wrote:
| MFC support is still in the latest Visual Studio, and it
| looks like ATL as well.
| dh2022 wrote:
| I was surprised to see ATL/MFC received security updates
| such as Spectre mitigation. So there is still some
| support for these 30 year old components.
| crinkly wrote:
| That's only because half office hangs off it. If it
| didn't they wouldn't have just left it.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Which so much better tooling than XAML C++ with
| C++/WinRT, it is a tragedy.
| crinkly wrote:
| It's in there because it's a cockroach. It is throughly
| abandoned though, frozen in time.
|
| You can observe this looking at the state of old outlook.
| kbelder wrote:
| I was going to ask about Win32. I haven't had to do it in a
| while, but if I had to write a desktop app in windows, that
| would be what I would reach for. It's still supported... is
| their any indication that it won't be for many years to
| come?
|
| Also, it looks better, in my humble opinion. It's probably
| lacking features that I'm uninterested in.
| crinkly wrote:
| Still works fine. High DPI stuff is a dick but that's
| about it.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| They already do, though. The big UI refresh in Win10 is all
| XAML, and the new Win11 taskbar (the one we all hate) is now
| a totally normal XAML app.
|
| WinUI 3's big changes (to get a 3.0 version number) is not
| with the XAML stack itself, but its new ability to be called
| by unmanaged apps as a normal UI toolkit, so it can finally
| be used by all apps. No more using Shell UI like we're
| writing Win 3.1 apps.
|
| And yes, some stuff in Win11 still isn't WinUI, which is kind
| of annoying, but some of those dialogs hidden away in Windows
| are at least 20 years old, and probably would need to be
| entirely rewritten, not merely have their UI's updated.
|
| Also, fun fact: The Win8/10 taskbar's code predates Avalon
| (the prototype/codename for WPF), and trying to change/fix it
| at all usually ended up breaking it. It's one of the few
| binaries on Windows that would not be recompiled to build a
| new release image in fear of breaking it. Rewriting the
| taskbar made sense, GETTING RID OF SMALL MODE DID NOT,
| GODDAMNIT MICROSOFT.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| > The Win8/10 taskbar's code predates Avalon (the
| prototype/codename for WPF), and trying to change/fix it at
| all usually ended up breaking it. It's one of the few
| binaries on Windows that would not be recompiled to build a
| new release image in fear of breaking it.
|
| The taskbar that underwent a major redesign in Windows 7
| (released after WPF)? Also, that binary is explorer.exe,
| surely it got rebuilt quite often for new ads. features,
| and fixes?
| noisem4ker wrote:
| Thanks for the informative comment.
|
| > small mode
|
| I recently noticed that they introduced an option for small
| icons. Not that it changes much, as the height of the bar
| stays the same, but hey. Personally I've been fine since
| they added back the option not to combine buttons unless
| full.
| cyberax wrote:
| > And yes, some stuff in Win11 still isn't WinUI, which is
| kind of annoying, but some of those dialogs hidden away in
| Windows are at least 20 years old, and probably would need
| to be entirely rewritten, not merely have their UI's
| updated.
|
| And this is hard to do. These dialogs often are _dynamic_,
| with third-party settings rendered as ActiveX controls.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Lets not forget that after five years Project Reunion was
| announced, WinUI 3.0 is yet to achieve feature parity with
| the Visual Studio experience developing C# or C++
| applications, or UWP components features.
|
| The WinUI map component is a Webview2 instead of proper
| native component, Win2D is only a subset of the UWP one,
| ink is yet to be migrated, and lots of other issues.
|
| Github repos are filled with thousands of issues, and they
| already did a cleanup a year ago where they simply closed
| enough tickets to bring it under 2000.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| I think only WinUI2 (deprecated) is an evolution of UWP (uses
| WinRT APIs). WinUI3 is something different.
| cheschire wrote:
| WinUI 3 still supports WinRT. It ALSO supports more. It's
| an evolution of WinUI 2, not just a simple version bump,
| but also not a completely new tech. It's probably a closer
| evolution to go from WinUI 2 to 3 than it was to go from
| Angular 1 to 2.
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/apps/winui/winui3/...
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/apps/develop/platf...
| tcfhgj wrote:
| > WinUI 3 still supports WinRT.
|
| I think this is completely independent. You can simply
| use WinRT APIs, because Win32 Apps can use them now.
| WinUI3 apps are win32 apps.
|
| > but also not a completely new tech.
|
| Not sure about this. UWP APIs work out of the box. For
| WinUI3 you need the Windows App SDK, and it is much
| slower and heavy than UWP (out of curiosity I created a
| very simple app and it was fast just a few dozen kbs big)
| pjmlp wrote:
| Hardly an evolution, that is how it is sold, reality is
| something else, trailing behind UWP with half the tooling.
| madduci wrote:
| Just go for MFC FTW, it is in feature freeze but I will last
| probably for the next 20 years yet.
| criddell wrote:
| MFC/Win32 + XAML Islands (through the Windows App SDK) is a
| pretty nice combination for stability and access to new
| features.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| You could also go for wxWidgets as it is kinda MFC-y but
| better and cross-platform, though like MFC you can combine it
| with Win32 API code (almost) seamlessly.
|
| Or go with Qt, though that doesn't use native controls.
| deaddodo wrote:
| QT uses native controls/widgets, it just polyfills when
| there is no good native option or if you use custom
| styling.
| deaddodo wrote:
| There are three UI frameworks in Windows, and only two actively
| used/developed.
|
| All the other "countless" frameworks are iterations of one of
| two lines: Win32/Native (WinAPI, MFC, WinRT, WinUI3, etc) and
| WPF/Managed (Avalon, WinUI2-3, etc). WinUI3 exists to bridge
| the gap.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Maybe people can cannibalize some of the rendering code and
| extrapolate the controls to a better class library than they
| already have. Like a kind of winforms but using modern
| rendering APIs. I know you already can create such controls but
| they often end up being very verbose and just look like xaml
| but in C#
| octo888 wrote:
| I genuinely thought a lot of these sibling comments were satire
| at first! The acronyms, the lengthy and confused explanations
| of versions, frameworks etc:
|
| > WinUI is an evolution of UWP which is an evolution of WinRT
|
| > WinUI 3
|
| > WinUI 3 still supports WinRT
|
| > XAML
|
| > Shell UI
|
| > Avalon
|
| > WPF
|
| > WPF = WinUI 1.0
|
| > Project Reunion
|
| > UWP
|
| > Win2D
|
| > ATL/MFC
|
| > Just go for MFC FTW
|
| > wxWidgets as it is kinda MFC-y
|
| > Or go with Qt
|
| > MFC/Win32 + XAML Islands
| elygre wrote:
| I won't benefit from this. At the same time, I cannot see a
| single bad thing about it, so I'm surprised about all the
| negative energy.
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| The "bad thing" is that it's effectively getting abandoned,
| open sourcing it won't make any difference.
|
| It's not like external contributions will suddenly turn it into
| something usable, and they'll just have a skeleton crew
| maintaining it, like they do WinForms and WPF.
|
| People are tired of Microsoft and their ever growing graveyard
| of ill thought out, half-baked, "native" UI frameworks.
| dlachausse wrote:
| Native UI is effectively dead outside of Apple's platforms,
| and even there it's hanging on for dear life. HTML, CSS and
| JavaScript won the cross platform toolkit battle.
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| Sadly yes. And all the platforms are to blame. Microsoft
| and their 1000 half-working frameworks made writing a
| wrapper that was any better than wxWidgets impossible.
|
| But also Apple "totally not deprecating" AppKit and pushing
| everyone to the mess that is SwiftUI, Gnome breaking
| backwards compatibility as a sport, and Qt messing around
| with QML, meant "native UI" became quicksand.
|
| Even going HTML, CSS and JavaScript wouldn't be too bad if
| the browser engines provided by the OSes were any good, but
| it took Microsoft giving up and switching to rebranded
| Chromium as a browser for Windows to provide a usable one
| in WebView 2.
|
| WebKitGTK is also terrible compared to the macOS version of
| WebKit, which hurts projects like Wails and Tauri. So
| everyone bundles a freaking copy of Chromium with their
| applications.
|
| I should have studied mechanical engineering.
| Sammi wrote:
| The most important thing the web standards get right is
| their insistence on never ever breaking backwards
| compatibility. HTML, CSS, and JS accumulate a lot of
| cruft, but they do move forward into the future without
| leaving anyone behind.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Flash was a web standard, albeit a closed one. Good luck
| opening a site with it today.
|
| The web has continually added and removed features. It is
| absolutely not perfectly backward compatible. It's not
| even close.
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| Flash was never a web standard, what are you talking
| about? It was a commercial browser plugin developed by
| Macromedia and later Adobe.
| kstrauser wrote:
| True, and at one point it had an installed base of like
| 90% of all browsers, and was incredibly common on all
| kinds of websites.
|
| I said it was a closed standard, and I stand by that.
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| > The most important thing the web standards get right is
| their insistence on never ever breaking backwards
| compatibility. HTML, CSS, and JS accumulate a lot of
| cruft, but they do move forward into the future without
| leaving anyone behind.
|
| This is the comment you originally responded to. Flash
| never had anything to do with web standards, which do
| indeed strive for backwards compatibility, it's why that
| classic space jam website still works.
|
| The comment was not that the "web" as a whole strives for
| backwards compatibility. If that were the case we would
| also be running ActiveX controls and Java web applets.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| On the Apple side of things, AppKit and UIKit work as
| well as they always did, and they've been less pushy
| about SwiftUI lately probably because they realized that
| the old toolkits aren't going away any time soon.
|
| For Qt, the hard-coupling of C++ or Python for Widgets
| and Quick being JS-centric haven't done it any favors.
| C++ and Python are fine, but not everybody wants to write
| either, and most people interested in writing JS are
| going to gravitate towards front end web stacks over
| anything else.
|
| I think that for a cross platform desktop UI toolkit to
| see any degree of long term success, a high degree of
| bindability is non-optional even if it's most capable
| when used with its native language. The toolkit needs to
| meet developers where they are, and that means being
| usable in the language of their choice.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| They only won because developers stopped giving a shit
| about anything except their own ease of work. There's no
| such thing as a good UI built with web tech, so anyone who
| cares about the user's experience will use a native toolkit
| despite the difficulties. But very few do, turns out.
| duped wrote:
| That's extremely uncharitable. I think slack and discord
| have pretty great UIs, and that's all "web tech." Figma
| just IPO'd at a $58 billion valuation - is that not proof
| their UI is good? If it wasn't good, no one would use it.
| VS code became the preeminent text editor and IDE over
| the last decade - all web tech.
| timeon wrote:
| Not sure about others but VS Code and Discord are slow
| and eating too much RAM for what they do.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Doing alright on Android as well, and third party on
| Windows for those willing to go with Qt,VCL, FireMonkey,
| Avalonia,...
|
| Microsoft is the bad one here, unfortunately.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Too many reboots since WinRT was introduced in Windows 8, many
| battle scars and lost wars, only people without WinRT
| experience can think anything positive about WinUI.
| rvba wrote:
| So will we be able to have more than 11 programs on the taskbar
| without them being compacted?
|
| Or a 2 row taskbar?
|
| So I can easily switch between my 40 windows open? What is good
| for productivity?
| ycuser2 wrote:
| And hopefully the customizable quick start bar... I lost hope
| in Windows but have to use it.
| Rochus wrote:
| How was it implemented? C#? C++?
| e4m2 wrote:
| C++
| cshokie wrote:
| The source is already available (albeit not buildable). See
| https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml
| zerr wrote:
| Even for Windows-only GUI software, it is much safer and sane to
| use cross-platform frameworks such as wxWidgets and Qt Widgets.
| orphea wrote:
| And if you're on .NET, something like Avalonia.
| wopwops wrote:
| Does this mean that we will be able to get the Quicklaunch
| toolbar back?
| arunc wrote:
| > Alignment with Microsoft Goals
|
| > We are being thoughtful about resourcing. This effort is
| happening alongside other critical responsibilities like
| security, platform stability, and support for existing products.
| Our current focus is on foundational work that unlocks value for
| contributors and increase transparency. We are aligning this work
| with Microsoft's broader business priorities to ensure long-term
| support and impact.
|
| I don't sense any benevolence in their words. They are just
| pulling off their resources and dumping the framework on the
| public, hoping passionate losers will contribute.
| paavohtl wrote:
| This is definitely corporate speak for "no guaranteed support,
| no planned further updates beyond critical security bugs, you
| are on your own".
| nine_k wrote:
| Apache Windows when?
|
| More seriously, a desktop UI toolkit is hardly a moat by now,
| _especially_ a Windows toolkit, Windows having 3-4 very
| different look-and-feels mixed and shipped with the official
| distribution.
|
| OTOH security and stability are things that Windows critically
| depend on to stay on the laptops and desktops in medical,
| governmental, and financial institutions, and on devices of
| executives.
| echelon wrote:
| This feels like Windows itself is no longer producing enough
| growth for Microsoft relative to its other efforts. Even the
| enterprise sales lock-in isn't compelling enough for the
| cloud/AI-centric future Microsoft envisions. So Microsoft is
| slowly pulling resources that it can instead invest into
| Azure and AI and other high-growth business units.
|
| I don't watch Windows too closely. Have there been any other
| signals of waning investment into Windows? Has Nadella or the
| other leadership admitted to this?
|
| Hasn't Microsoft also been pulling back from Xbox? IIRC,
| haven't they been trying to consolidate and use gaming to
| lionize Windows as a platform? After spending billions on
| multiple AAA studios? That would seem counter to a Windows
| pullback strategy. Is this a case of the left hand not
| talking to the right hand?
| gyulai wrote:
| > Have there been any other signals of waning investment
| into Windows?
|
| Wasn't there a story some while back about them crawling
| the web for PWAs and putting them on the Microsoft Store
| (or is it Windows store?) to make it into less of a ghost
| town? And if you go to their official website, browsing
| vaguely in the direction of UI development, you will see
| them advertising PWAs as first-class citizens of the
| Windows ecosystem. I also vaguely remember that
| Windows+Edge offers special APIs to PWAs for things like
| file system access and so forth that are unparalleled on
| other platforms.
|
| I take this push for PWAs (combined with their own lack of
| dogfooding -- Office is not written with Win UI) as them
| basically throwing in the towel on Windows-native desktop
| software (outside of games, maybe).
|
| But, to be fair, native desktop development has seen a lack
| of investment on all desktop platforms. JavaFX is a ghost
| town too.
|
| All of that could change, depending on what happens next
| with Chrome, Bing, and Mozilla. -- The future of each of
| those seems to be hanging in the balance at the moment.
|
| The web could become a mere implementation detail of the
| Google monopoly, rather than the open thing it is today.
| Couple that with a government-level push for digital
| sovereignty in the E.U. and other places (certainly China).
| Then, maybe, you will see renewed interest in desktop GUI
| apps.
|
| On a side note: I think it's amazing what has happened in
| the open-source space with Rust-based UI frameworks (iced,
| egui, slint) and COSMIC. The future for cross-platform
| desktop UI development hasn't looked so bright, maybe since
| the introduction of Java Swing (was that in the early 00s?)
| pjmlp wrote:
| Qt and VCL/FireMonkey are pretty much alive, as 3rd party
| .NET like Avalonia and Uno.
|
| Apple is also doing just fine.
|
| It is Microsoft that went south, as Satya apparently sees
| no value on Windows.
|
| Note the drama on XBox, the console not the Microsoft
| Games Studios brand, as suffering from the same lack of
| interest from Microsoft's management.
| gyulai wrote:
| > Qt and VCL/FireMonkey are pretty much alive, as 3rd
| party .NET like Avalonia and Uno.
|
| Last time I looked into Uno, it seemed to me more like a
| mobile-first play (similar to Flutter), but maybe I
| missed something there.
|
| Qt is still joined at the hips with C++, and I'm finding
| it hard to imagine that the next generation of developers
| will go in for C++ over alternatives like Rust. There is
| a QML/JavaScript story. But why, on earth, would you go
| there, if history hasn't forced your hand, as it did with
| the Web.
|
| I hear good things about Avalonia, but: Why throw out the
| baby with the bathwater and build something "open" within
| a monopolist's walled garden.
|
| > Apple is also doing just fine.
|
| But "lack of investment" is still not entirely improper
| as a characterization of how they prioritize desktop
| versus mobile.
| fooker wrote:
| > the next generation of developers
|
| are not going to write code.
| gyulai wrote:
| ...the amout of code we've been writing has increased
| with the progress of technology, just comparing what it
| was like to write desktop UIs with Delphi in the 90s
| versus the amount of code it takes for an equivalent app
| in 2025. Low-code and vibecoded software from the 2020s
| are going to be the unemployment insurance for all those
| greybeards who will still know how to code in the 2030s
| :-)
| fooker wrote:
| That's wishful thinking. Just because things haven't
| changed in the past doesn't mean it won't change in the
| future.
|
| I don't doubt that the amount of code will not reduce,
| it'll just be easier and easier to get AI to fix it.
|
| We are still less than two years into widespread use of
| this technology, and it's surprising how good it is.
|
| I am a 'greybeard' compiler guy and modern LLMs fix
| compiler bugs better than me, to a large extent. And it
| keeps slightly getting better every few weeks.
| pjmlp wrote:
| As compiler guy, how do you see direct machine code
| generation?
|
| I firmly believe having LLMs generate code for current
| languages is a transition step, just like Assembly devs
| had to be convinced optimising compilers were generating
| the same kind of code they would write themselves.
|
| They are not there yet, but the day will come.
| fooker wrote:
| Presumably this would need some advancements in formal
| verification to make sure the results are correct.
|
| But ignoring that for now, LLMs can already do better
| than modern compilers when it comes to optimizing code.
|
| It has become a neat way of finding opportunities to
| implement in a compiler.
|
| Give the LLM a compiler generated piece of assembly and
| it will sometimes spit out a slightly better version.
| Then you try and figure out if it's possible to implement
| it in the compiler. This works really well for blind
| spots in compilers like generating good vectorized code.
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| > 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.
| nine_k wrote:
| 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.
| tempodox wrote:
| > hoping passionate losers will contribute.
|
| Offloading the work to their victims. Maybe they will even make
| it usable again.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yeah, WinUI has been a disaster.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| > passionate losers
|
| This is unduly meanspirited. Your passion projects are not even
| considered to probably the vast majority of the world; that
| doesn't make you a loser.
|
| I have zero interest in the Win11 UI, and am even on board with
| the cynical view that this is purely a bean counter cost
| savings for MS rather than some benevolent outreach.
|
| But I respect the people that take this on and want to keep it
| going.
| bialpio wrote:
| > Your passion projects are not even considered to probably
| the vast majority of the world; that doesn't make you a
| loser.
|
| Not OP but I understood this as "contributing for free to a
| project owned by a corporation worth more money than you
| could realistically spend in a lifetime is what makes you a
| loser".
| tough wrote:
| what if that contribution benefits me personally in any way
| whatsoever?
| bialpio wrote:
| You need to ask OP, I don't know what they meant, just
| how I personally understood it.
| LexiMax wrote:
| That is the self-interested feeling that Open Source
| preys on.
|
| And I do mean "prey" with a negative connotation. One of
| the biggest perks of Open Source from a company's
| perspective is that you can get developers to work on
| your project for free without paying them. However, those
| same developers have very little say in the direction of
| your product, and any forking of your project would have
| to compete the economies of scale that come from being a
| company. The only downside is that you have to worry
| about being out-scaled by a bigger company, as the
| developers of ElasticSearch, Redis, Docker, and others
| found out first-hand.
|
| This is distinct from Free Software, which has different
| dynamics that are much more friendly to mutual benefit,
| collaboration, and forking, especially if there's no CLA
| that pools all of the copyright into one corporate or
| non-profit entity. But then again, this sort of Free
| Software moralizing is expressly the reason why Open
| Source was created as an alternative in the first place.
| The OSI even used to admit as such on their website:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20021001164015/http://www.ope
| nso...
| sheepscreek wrote:
| Thanks for calling it out. I get OPs passionate disdain for
| Microsoft but one must remember that the world is built on
| contributions from such people. Take the whole Linux and GNU
| ecosystem for example. We'd be lost without them.
|
| Maybe the biggest beneficiary will be AI/LLMs - which will
| become way better at creating Windows UX after this.
| chrisandchris wrote:
| > I have zero interest in the Win11 UI [...]
|
| As has the rest of the world, and we will just put it on the
| list of UI frameworks Microsoft did not completly implement,
| fully support or considering "the default".
|
| So we stay stuck with the status quo: There's no official UI
| for Windows, still.
| misnome wrote:
| I mean, Apple gets a lot of flak for changing things and
| deprecating old frameworks, but I've lost count of the
| number of post-win32 UI frameworks?
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Usually I get why companies release their UI frameworks. I've
| strongly considered using Atlassian's and AWS's frameworks in
| the past to build web apps because if it's good enough for
| Jira/AWS, it's probably good enough for my B2B saas app.
|
| But I personally don't know why anyone would reach for this
| framework. Maybe if you're building a Windows app and you want
| a very consistent look and for your app to feel "native", but
| aren't there better options out there for doing this already?
| paavohtl wrote:
| 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 since Windows
| 10 (could have been in 8, never used that). Windows 11 originally
| shipped with those apps, but they were removed in a later update
| and replaced with laggy webview wrappers that take seconds to
| start.
| nine_k wrote:
| I won't be surprised if there is an effort to rewrite MSO in
| something like Dart and WASM, and make it independent from any
| native toolkits altogether. Yes, to reproduce all of the Excel
| power, and make it available everywhere as a premium plan of
| O365.
|
| Then Windows could pull a ChromeOS. The only place where a
| native UI is really needed is the lock / login screen; a tiny
| subset of any current UI toolkit would suffice.
| p_ing wrote:
| Office is a completely separate team divorced from Windows
| proper. Unless Office deemed it wise to rewrite their UI,
| they're not going to do so (and it's a frankenstein of a
| Win32 UI).
|
| Office on Windows relies heavily on COM and other Win32-only
| libraries to function.
|
| I can't think of a valid reason to rewrite Office to that
| extent. They already have Office for the web and Mac Office;
| while not identical in features, they're often good enough
| outside of BI scenarios or highly complex Excel work.
|
| Outlook is the lone exception where that team decided to have
| Outlook for the web, Windows Outlook, and Mac Outlook be
| identical, so those are getting their rewrites with removal
| of Win32-specific features where applicable.
| mroche wrote:
| > Outlook is the lone exception where that team decided to
| have Outlook for the web, Windows Outlook, and Mac Outlook
| be identical, so those are getting their rewrites with
| removal of Win32-specific features where applicable.
|
| I wish they didn't. Outlook on macOS is abysmal nowadays
| and I still find myself resorting to the legacy view just
| to change some settings that both iterations can read but
| only one exposes.
|
| I significantly prefer using Thunderbird or the web views
| for Gmail and Zoho Mail over any version of Outlook. Is the
| integration across O365 apps nice? Sure, but the platforms
| themselves are miserable to use.
|
| In a similar vein, I was cautiously optimistic about Teams
| V2 for unifying the client. But then they completely
| dropped the Linux client for their PWA which does not have
| feature parity with the "native" platforms and has a
| significantly worse UX.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Before Project Reunion came to be, Office team was starting
| to adopt UWP.
|
| See BUILD recordings from 2018, I think, where they demo
| the new UWP controls contributed by the team, similarly to
| what happened before with the ribbon on Windows 7.
|
| I would vouch they got as happy as the rest of us.
| p_ing wrote:
| Those versions in the Office store are d.e.d. Except for
| OneNote for Windows 10 which is shortly on it's way out.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yes, because of how UWP and Project Reunion went down,
| right after they started looking into it.
| nine_k wrote:
| No, MSO should not be rewritten. It _might_ be adapted to a
| more universal UI toolkit, if Win32 UI becomes problematic
| as is. COM is also not going to go anywhere, but I wonder
| if WASM-compiled components and native code-compiled
| components could interact via DCOM over the internet.
| larodi wrote:
| It makes a lot of sense to wire COM and WASM in some
| smart way.
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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 the place on Windows 11.
| tough wrote:
| so microsoft gave up and the web won?
|
| swift ui apps have some webkit views like the app store,
| music app etc
| simonh wrote:
| I think web views do make sense in situations where you're
| presenting lots of remote content that may frequently
| change. After all that's what the web is, and store
| content, and to an extent emails many of which are HTML
| anyway, are reasonable candidates.
| tough wrote:
| yeah in that regard it seems that apple tastefully does
| so on apps where there's mostly remote roundtrips already
| like the app store or music app, so I agree that there
| makes sense to reuse the web infra
|
| but swift ui apps are great and fast cause they're not
| electron monsters!
|
| thankfully you can use safari webkit inside them, but
| that doesnt work cross-platform
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| SwiftUI apps are not great and they're not fast. A lot of
| Apple's new apps are considered rather poor. Theo has a
| video where some devs switched to a webview because the
| text rendering performed better!
| pjmlp wrote:
| What to expect when new interns have no clue about Windows,
| have been educated with macOS and ChromeOS, and the design
| team carries Apple devices?
|
| Windows 98 introduced Active Desktop, and still, not as
| many webviews all over the place.
|
| MSHTML was the first Electron.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| This was already a thing 20 years ago. Students weren't
| have any experience with windows, it was something
| companies used, and today even that has gone away.
| signal11 wrote:
| Yes, mshtml was insanely powerful. As an undergrad I was
| surprised how easy it was to build capable UIs with
| powerful visual effects[1] using mshtml and JS. Even for
| C++ Windows apps.
|
| It took a long time for this to become a cross-platform
| reality, but it did inspire me to ignore distractions
| like XAML and focus on the web.
|
| [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-
| versions/windows/...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, to be fair, Microsoft decided to kill the Windows API
| that everybody knew, and spent about a decade and half
| creating a replacement every few years that couldn't
| actually replace the original thing.
|
| It's hard to survive that. Honestly, I don't even know what
| the GP is talking about when they say the devs don't know
| "Windows".
| solid_fuel wrote:
| Yup. I remember 4 or 5 different frameworks that were
| supposed to be the future of native UI on windows, but
| each one after WinForms was harder to use, slower, and
| less capable than what came before.
| curt15 wrote:
| Do Windows developers use Windows or Mac at work?
| khmyznikov wrote:
| It's impossible to develop Windows without Windows... All
| dev tools and the repository ecosystem designed to work
| under Windows.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| 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 at the press photos and
| stay a "very happy path" while using it but as soon as you
| start digging deeper you realize it's like that meme of Homer
| Simpson with clips on his back.
| rs186 wrote:
| You forgot our favourite windows 3.1 file dialog:
|
| https://youtu.be/r549Zn74Xg8
| reactordev wrote:
| If you understood the power struggles within Microsoft and the
| cut throat office politics, you'd understand. Orgs are fighting
| orgs trying to over throw one another.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> the power struggles within Microsoft and the cut throat
| office politics_
|
| That's most old large orgs who have been around for ~5
| decades. Nothing special about Microsoft.
| reactordev wrote:
| It's as if it's taught in business school or something, how
| to throw colleagues under the bus. I've seen it at every
| large corporation except for one.
|
| My take on _why not ui?_ though is because they are so busy
| trying to justify saving their own skins. How could they
| possibly look outward into the future when they're busy
| recreating lord of the flies?
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| What we wanted: Win7 UI open source
|
| What we got: Win11 dumpster fire, free for everyone to fix
| 3036e4 wrote:
| I would be fine with really any version as open source or at
| least one that was free-as-in-free-beer to make it possible to
| maintain virtual machines running old software without having
| to rely on dodgy downloaded versions... I'd even pay Microsoft
| something reasonable if they put them up on GOG or some similar
| site for a few $.
| tomovo wrote:
| They need to feed it to all the LLMs to get help keeping it from
| falling apart.
|
| They could go back to Win32 + WinForms and everything would be
| fine.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Actual - and rather different - title (as borne out by reading
| the article):
|
| _Microsoft is taking steps to open-sourcing Windows 11 user
| interface framework_
| bluescrn wrote:
| If only they'd open source Windows Explorer and the taskbar/start
| menu, rather than resisting peoples attempts to customise them
| through other hackery.
| donutshop wrote:
| "We laid off most of the team despite record profits and need
| free labor to maintain what remains"
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Confused, the Win 11 UI framework, Electron, is already open
| source.
| pjmlp wrote:
| No one in Windows development community cares about WinUI, other
| than those with sunken costs that bought into the WinRT/UWP dream
| and now are stuck with a dead technology.
|
| Too many burned bridges since Windows 8 came out.
|
| If anything, this is Microsoft confirmation that they are
| unwilling to fix all the broken issues, and hoping the community
| will somehow still care.
| bytefish wrote:
| This. Also DevExpress and Progress Telerik do not invest into
| their WinUI Controls at all, and that's a sign they don't buy
| into WinUI neither.
|
| WinForms and WPF are currently the only viable frameworks for
| Line of Business application. I have yet to see a WinUI3
| application in the wild.
| MrZander wrote:
| Very true. We just developed a brand new LOB desktop app and
| settled on sticking with WPF. WinUI has been dead for years
| imo.
|
| On a side note, I still love WPF after working in it for 10
| years. Maybe it's just familiarity, and it's a little verbose
| at times, but man it's a great framework when you know that
| you're doing.
| bytefish wrote:
| We also settled on WPF for a new LOB Desktop application,
| this validates the decision. If you combine WPF with the
| CommunityToolkit MVVM, it's a very nice framework to
| develop with.
| appease7727 wrote:
| Honestly at this point who would seriously use _any_ Microsoft
| UI framework? They 've abandoned 100% of their previous UI
| frameworks unfinished when they get distracted by a new,
| shinier framework.
|
| Why use a busted incomplete framework missing basic features
| when there's entire ecosystems of open source cross-platform
| frameworks being _actively maintained_ and which actually have
| all the features you need?
|
| Really this is just another UWP destined to be forgotten and
| scorned.
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| I dunno, they are still doing doing bug fixes to Winforms.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Forms and WPF are still reasonable options.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| Could microsoft still build windows today?
| p_ing wrote:
| The answer to this question depends on the knowledge and
| quality of engineers working on the kernel and the overall
| Executive. These continue to evolve with more advanced
| technologies, like VBS or the future usermode endpoints for EDR
| and possibly anti-cheat, pushing those out of the kernel, which
| presumably requires kernel work.
|
| David Cutler is still there but working on other stuff, last I
| understood.
|
| That does lead to the question of 'would they do it the same
| way and/or follow the NT OS/2 spec' to get a functionally
| identical Windows today.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Ironically, from his latest interview, he mentioned working
| on Linux on Azure racks that are actually repurposed XBoxes.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Dumb question from somebody who doesn't do gui stuff: is this
| like a Window Manager, or more like GTK or QT or whatever?
| dagmx wrote:
| It's a UI framework like QtWidgets but closer to QML
| wslh wrote:
| Microsoft has a long history of releasing numerous UI frameworks:
| VB, MFC, WTL, Silverlight, WPF, WinForms, and others. Yet despite
| this abundance, many of the core components Microsoft used in its
| own applications were never available to developers. They rarely
| ate their own dog food, and desktop UI development relied on
| third party components. For the past two decades, native desktop
| UIs have steadily declined in favor of web-based components, so
| it's unclear what the real benefit of another native framework
| would be today.
| bobajeff wrote:
| As someone reading the comments here and never made a real
| Windows app outside of a visual basic hello world a pretty long
| time ago. Why doesn't Microsoft just stop making these? They
| already own GitHub and vscode so why not just admit that
| electron/typescript is the Windows UI framework now?
| AndroTux wrote:
| Because I don't want to run even more browsers simultaneously
| than I already am.
| tjaad wrote:
| Because Teams is slow again
| bob1029 wrote:
| 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 things you'd typically
| consider to be a "UI framework", but the important tradeoff is
| that it is also a lot harder for Microsoft to remove or screw
| with in any meaningful way. I cannot come up with something that
| has been more stable than these APIs. The web doesn't even come
| close if we are looking at the same timescales.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| I think windows needs a community effort to create an actually
| good framework for native development on windows. Unfortunately
| I just dont think such a community is big enough.
| pjmlp wrote:
| You still need C++ in many places, because of the COM rulez
| attitude within Windows team.
|
| Windows Runtime Components was a lost opportunity to level up
| the play field for .NET.
|
| As such, if you want to do something like a shell extension, or
| context menu extension, it is C++ as always, or having your
| little C++ stub that calls out into a .NET process.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I wonder how much longer Microsoft stays committed to Windows as
| a whole. Windows is less than 10% of the company, users are
| migrating to phones, tablets, and Chromebooks (all of which can
| run Office), and with .NET on Linux, Windows servers are making
| less sense. It's a shrinking market.
| fsloth wrote:
| I would guess Fortune 500 still runs on desktop windows? (Don't
| know but this is just my guess).
| xcrunner529 wrote:
| Yep. Most any regular company is majority windows. It's not
| exciting but why would they bother throwing that influence
| away.
| fsloth wrote:
| Yup! Boring technologies are great.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Yes, but for how long? At some point, IT realizes
| everything's in the browser, and general-purpose computing is
| a security risk.
| 9dev wrote:
| Not every company is a startup that only needs gmail and
| Figma, though. The ecosystem of LoB apps and device
| controller software is ginormous, and not going away any
| time soon.
| tekdude wrote:
| I kind of wish Microsoft would just continue development of WPF.
| I've used it for years for various projects, and there is a
| learning curve but I've since enjoyed working with it. XAML, data
| bindings, ViewModels... all of it I actually like. But, WPF needs
| a few improvements to really make it perfect. I tried several of
| Microsoft's newer frameworks and the open source ones (Avalonia,
| Uno), but I either couldn't get the sample projects to even build
| successfully on my machine, or I never got comfortable with
| development workflow, and went back to what I know.
|
| My big idea to fix WPF is to rebuild the data binding system to
| use the .NET compile-time code generation feature instead of run-
| time reflection. I think that would solve a lot of problems. For
| one, projects could do an actual AOT build of their applications
| (right now, you either need to rely on an installed .NET runtime
| or "publish" the project with a lot of .NET libraries included
| for self-extract, bloating the final file size). Code generation
| would probably improve performance quite a bit too, maybe open up
| the possibility to compile for cross-platform, introduce type
| safety for XAML bindings (rather than getting vague runtime
| binding errors), remove the need for so much class scaffolding,
| etc... I've thought about starting an open source project to do
| it myself, but seems like a pretty big task and I would
| essentially be starting a project to help with my other project
| which I already don't have enough time to work on...
| S04dKHzrKT wrote:
| Your second paragraph sounds like you're describing Avalonia.
| Avalonia has AOT, compile-time binding errors and cross-
| platform support. Maybe there have been some updates since you
| last tried it? I'm not very familiar with Avalonia or WPF
| though so maybe there's more to it than that.
|
| [0]: https://docs.avaloniaui.net/docs/basics/data/data-
| binding/co...
|
| [1]: https://github.com/kekekeks/XamlX
| tekdude wrote:
| Thanks, yes I'll probably have to give it another try some
| day. I might be confusing Avalonia and Uno, but I think I
| first attempted it a couple years ago, and then again last
| year. I remember spending a whole weekend trying to get it
| running but wasn't having success. Also, I was a bit turned
| off by how heavy the development environment was. I had to
| download and install a tool, then that installed more build
| tools and packages, and then there was also a "recommended"
| VS Code extension. With WPF, I've gotten used to writing XAML
| without a designer, so I can get by with just VSCode, the C#
| extension, and the .NET CLI.
| MrZander wrote:
| It would also allow for assembly trimming, which would be a
| huge boon if you are trying to do a self contained deployment.
| Right now you either do framework dependant or have like a
| 200MB+ deployment.
| eska wrote:
| Meanwhile a single developer makes performant native UIs in his
| first native program by actually learning how the OS and winapi
| work
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bUOOaXf9qIM
| userbinator wrote:
| Ironic that they're opening up all the new crappy stuff, but not
| the good old stuff like Win32.
|
| Maybe they're scared of WINE?
| specproc wrote:
| I get there are old people and stuff, but why should anyone
| consider Windows these days?
| daft_pink wrote:
| I want to spam them with pull requests every day to remove
| onedrive. (sarcasm)
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