4 ms·

What are the substantial benefits of getting onboard the UWP rain ? Will the platform code work faster.. will the deployment be faster ? what about the knowledg

What are the substantial benefits of getting onboard the UWP rain ? Will the platform code work faster.. will the deployment be faster ? what about the knowledge devs have gathered for decades. will the new way of doing things produce a more efficient and better running application ?

pjmlp 10y ago
For long time Windows developers like myself, the underlying model of WinRT is what the original .NET was supposed to be. It was called Ext-OS and based on an improved COM API, called COM+ Runtime. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/07/05/more-c-net-generics-research-project-history-the-msr-white-paper-from-mid-1999/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/07/05/more-c-net... So with C++/CX and .NET Native built on top of WinRT, Microsoft has gone full circle back to the original idea. Personally I enjoy developing UWP (started right away with the old Windows 8 model), because it offers me a modern OO API to Windows, similar to the OS APIs from Xerox PARC and ETHZ OSes. Also, sadly Microsoft torpedoed the whole WP eco-system, but the tooling is so much pleasant to use than Android's. I also welcome the container model to put some control into the mess that is installing Windows applications.
- wornohaulus 10y ago
  Any github Project or existing application developers.. who have successfully ported their libraries to UWP.. that you can point me to ? That would be damn awesome.. :)
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Not sure what exactly what you would like to know. There are lots of projects using C++/CX on Github. https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=C%2B%2B%2FCX https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=C%2B%2B%2FCX Edge HTML is UWP based. Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Quantum Break, and Forza Motorsport 6: Apex (Beta) are all UWP games.
  - Const-me 10y ago
    I recently did. https://github.com/Const-me/EsentSerialize https://github.com/Const-me/EsentSerialize
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  Do you use XAML? What do you think of it? I've never really been able to get my head around it - although my professional projects are mostly ASP.NET MVC and WebAPI so I've had no real pressing need to learn it. Am I the only one who still likes Windows Forms?
  - Const-me 10y ago
    When I don’t care about the UI design, just need some GUI that works — yes, I still like Windows Forms. When I have professionally-made UI design on input, and need to make GPU-rendered GUI — XAML is the best technology with the competitors far behind.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    It has the developer sanity that web development lacks with its Frankenstein mixture of HTML, CSS, JavaScript to make <div/> behave like native widgets. Have you ever tried to use any web design tool capable of matching Blend for UI design? XAML is what web could have become if XHTML and its sublanguages had been adopted properly.
- userbinator 10y ago
  I'm a "long time Windows developer" and personally my opinion seems like the exact opposite: I enjoy pure native Win32. All that new stuff never interested me much, and felt like too much added complexity and learning curve for little gain. MFC looked more like a bloated make-work scheme, I was very much not impressed when I tried playing around with .NET for the first time, and I can still discern clearly which apps I need to use daily are native and which are using .NET, simply by how long trivial operations take and how much memory they consume. It's better than Java, although that's not saying much...
  - daemin 10y ago
    I've found that WTL is a good level of abstraction for pure Win32 API. It's not free (in terms of size and speed costs) and does contain some kludges but you get an object oriented system to control the Win32 API.
thebigshane 10y ago
pjmlp seems to be an expert in a lot of this stuff but I'll throw in one other perspective: if you need to write a native app on Windows, yes, UWP is the way to go, certainly over MVC, WinForms and WPF. But it is tied to Windows... I doubt the performance improvements are significantly different. It's really about portability (Windows Store) and latest Windows features (start menu, menu bar, Cortana, ink, touch, high dpi) Also, I hear if you do have an exiting WinForms/WPF app, you should be able to upgrade it to UWP.
tdkl 10y ago
+1 app on MS App Store.

pjmlp 10y ago

For long time Windows developers like myself, the underlying model of WinRT is what the original .NET was supposed to be. It was called Ext-OS and based on an improved COM API, called COM+ Runtime. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/07/05/more-c-net-generics-research-project-history-the-msr-white-paper-from-mid-1999/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/07/05/more-c-net... So with C++/CX and .NET Native built on top of WinRT, Microsoft has gone full circle back to the original idea. Personally I enjoy developing UWP (started right away with the old Windows 8 model), because it offers me a modern OO API to Windows, similar to the OS APIs from Xerox PARC and ETHZ OSes. Also, sadly Microsoft torpedoed the whole WP eco-system, but the tooling is so much pleasant to use than Android's. I also welcome the container model to put some control into the mess that is installing Windows applications.

wornohaulus 10y ago
Any github Project or existing application developers.. who have successfully ported their libraries to UWP.. that you can point me to ? That would be damn awesome.. :)
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Not sure what exactly what you would like to know. There are lots of projects using C++/CX on Github. https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=C%2B%2B%2FCX https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=C%2B%2B%2FCX Edge HTML is UWP based. Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Quantum Break, and Forza Motorsport 6: Apex (Beta) are all UWP games.
- Const-me 10y ago
  I recently did. https://github.com/Const-me/EsentSerialize https://github.com/Const-me/EsentSerialize
voltagex_ 10y ago
Do you use XAML? What do you think of it? I've never really been able to get my head around it - although my professional projects are mostly ASP.NET MVC and WebAPI so I've had no real pressing need to learn it. Am I the only one who still likes Windows Forms?
- Const-me 10y ago
  When I don’t care about the UI design, just need some GUI that works — yes, I still like Windows Forms. When I have professionally-made UI design on input, and need to make GPU-rendered GUI — XAML is the best technology with the competitors far behind.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  It has the developer sanity that web development lacks with its Frankenstein mixture of HTML, CSS, JavaScript to make <div/> behave like native widgets. Have you ever tried to use any web design tool capable of matching Blend for UI design? XAML is what web could have become if XHTML and its sublanguages had been adopted properly.
userbinator 10y ago
I'm a "long time Windows developer" and personally my opinion seems like the exact opposite: I enjoy pure native Win32. All that new stuff never interested me much, and felt like too much added complexity and learning curve for little gain. MFC looked more like a bloated make-work scheme, I was very much not impressed when I tried playing around with .NET for the first time, and I can still discern clearly which apps I need to use daily are native and which are using .NET, simply by how long trivial operations take and how much memory they consume. It's better than Java, although that's not saying much...
- daemin 10y ago
  I've found that WTL is a good level of abstraction for pure Win32 API. It's not free (in terms of size and speed costs) and does contain some kludges but you get an object oriented system to control the Win32 API.

thebigshane 10y ago

pjmlp seems to be an expert in a lot of this stuff but I'll throw in one other perspective: if you need to write a native app on Windows, yes, UWP is the way to go, certainly over MVC, WinForms and WPF. But it is tied to Windows... I doubt the performance improvements are significantly different. It's really about portability (Windows Store) and latest Windows features (start menu, menu bar, Cortana, ink, touch, high dpi) Also, I hear if you do have an exiting WinForms/WPF app, you should be able to upgrade it to UWP.

tdkl 10y ago

+1 app on MS App Store.