4 ms·
I’ve noticed that no one has attempted to answer OP’s question: “why is it so hard?” If you were creating an OS and you wanted to ensure its success, one obvio
by clavicat 5y ago
I’ve noticed that no one has attempted to answer OP’s question: “why is it so hard?”
If you were creating an OS and you wanted to ensure its success, one obvious thing to do would be to make it as frictionless as possible to develop native software. Ideally, it would be as easy as importing the system library and typing one or two lines to create a new windowed instance. It could be made so easy that amateurs with no understanding of programming could write their own little programs like many do with Excel.
Instead, Microsoft seems to go out of its way to make GUI development as nightmarishly complicated and intimidating as possible. It has expressed zero interest in streamlining the existing clusterfuck and instead piles on more layers and paradigms and libraries that are then poorly maintained and abandoned for other fads. Microsoft itself does not seem to have a canonical way of developing programs. Visual Studio is a monstrous behemoth that becomes more obese with every release—the last time I tried to install it, it temporarily bricked my laptop because of some memory corruption bug.
Everything Microsoft touches suffers the same pathologies—nothing they do is ever excellent. Their products just manage to chug along in spite of all their defects. No sane person would ever think to design things this way, but this is how they turn out. Even the tiniest and most obvious improvements, like the recent updates to Notepad, literally takes decades to implement. The bar is set lower and lower in terms of performance because improvements in hardware almost make up for the shittiness in software.
Microsoft suffers from a complete absence of vision and responsibility. Ultimately, no one there owns any project—there is no one to blame when it turns out shitty, and there is no visionary leadership to coordinate their efforts and pick a direction. It is just aimless bureaucratic chaos.
- fuzzfactor 5y ago> Why is building Windows apps so complicated? This is by design. At the beginning PC's were not much different than Ataris or Commodore 64's, they still had built-in BASIC in the motherboard ROM so the OOBE was a ready-to-program personal computer for everyone. Not that everyone actually wants to program their own computer, but there wasn't much software anyway and if you wanted to do something imaginative you were going to have to program it yourself. And there was nothing standing in your way. Once MSDOS prevailed and Microsoft got more powerful, BASIC was removed which "differentiated" these serious business machines from the lesser "gaming" computers. PC's were so sophisticated they had so much more to offer than BASIC, and the few users who might want to code a bit would just have to jump through some of the same hoops as software companies, to select and prepare a special PC to be a Microsoft development environment. Absolute total push in the opposite direction from free BASIC everywhere by default. So from that point it was entirely intended to be the opposite of badda-bing-badda-boom.
- Narishma 5y agoBASIC was never removed from MSDOS. They continued shipping it with the OS at least until Windows 95 or 98.
- behringer 5y agoBy the way, if you want a truly simple and fun experience making GUI apps, check out PureBASIC.
- Vivtek 5y agoIt's been a very long time indeed since I developed Windows-targeted software, but this rings true from what I remember. It always seemed to me that Microsoft wanted to give you just enough tools to imagine doing what you wanted to do, but not quite enough support to get it done - thereby encouraging the growth of a consultancy industry to get their feet into more corporate doors. The tool dependency is a vendor lock-in strategy. "Just use the Microsoft tool" is always the answer. Weird.
- efdee 5y agoIn short, it's so hard because he doesn't have a clue what he's doing. He's just googling and doing whatever the first hit tells him. You could have started with Winforms nearly 20 years ago and you'd still be fine. You could have started with WPF about 10 years ago and you'd still be fine. Yes, MS tries a lot of new things, and a lot of them fail. But as for the things that don't fail out of the gate (Winforms, WPF, ...) you can stay relevant for literally decades. I've installed every version of VS since VS6 without a problem. If you have memory corruption bugs, I'm quite convinced you have something else to blame.
- vixalien 5y agoIs it my problem that I don't know how to run msbuild? I mean you've been building windows apps for years so it's easy for you but how tf am I supposed to know that I can't use nothing else other than VS to build a hello world Windows app?