5 ms·

And it never got that ecosystem because of inscrutable mismanagement so scatterbrained and perplexing that I can't wait for the insider-tells-all book about thi

And it never got that ecosystem because of inscrutable mismanagement so scatterbrained and perplexing that I can't wait for the insider-tells-all book about this post-iPhone period at Microsoft that I assume will arrive in a decade or two. Zune, Phone, Surface, Windows 8, Windows RT, Bing, Cortana, Continuum, Project Astoria, I'm sure I'm forgetting. Apple and Google execs must have been amused.

pjmlp 3y ago
If you watch the Windows UI community talks on YouTube, at least on public channels, whoever is in charge doesn't seem to grasp how much all those rewrites killed the ecosystem, and they keep asking people to invest into WinUI/WinAppSDK, which not only is yet another rewrite, the tooling is a joke versus UWP. No wonder that Windows developer community decided to ignore whatever is related to WinUI, and focus on the stable technologies from the past.
- Bootvis 3y ago
  Looking for some advice here. I’d be interested to develop simple GUI’s at work. I don’t have much experience of that. I have a license for VS2015 to maintain legacy VB and C++ but I think an upgrade could be arranged. I’m comfortable doing web dev but the browser remains limiting. In my situation, would learning native gui development be worthwhile or is it much easier to stick to websites and/or Electron?
  - tight-ship 3y ago
    Much easier to go with Electron. The choice is made for you. With native Windows, it's a dozen different solution and you waste timing playing future teller to imagine which one won't be abandoned in the future. At least with Electron you can reuse your skills with websites and it's pretty established now. Yes, it's not as fast but it's fast enough.
  - MattBDev 3y ago
    Using WinUI is really easy to do. Whether you're using WinUI 2.8 with UWP or WinUI 3. So native GUI development isn't difficult at all. XAML is similar to HTML in a lot of ways. If you have your mind set on web development and want a native GUI, you could go with React Native for Windows.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Yeah, if one wants to have fun debugging all the issues that are still open since Project Reunion was announced in 2020, with less capable tooling than .NET Native and C++/CX, specially fun having to deal with CsWinRT and C++/WinRT, the latter already in maintenance, stuck in C++17, as the team is now having fun with Rust/WinRT. At least Native AOT might support WinUI in .NET 9, something to look forward to, for anyone that still cares outside Redmond.
      - m_mueller 3y ago
        I think the alphabet soup thrown around in this thread alone is indicative for what‘s wrong with Microsoft‘s native user interface story…
        pjmlp 3y ago
        I can throw similar alphabet soups from other ecosystems, either one is in and gets them, or not.
        tonyedgecombe 3y ago
        Not really. Apple has a much more consistent story on UI frameworks.
        pjmlp 3y ago
        Not being around Mac OS long enough?
        3y ago
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    If on .NET, Windows Forms, WPF, or the community projects from Uno and Avalonia. For C++, you're better off with Qt, wxWidgets. You can use Visual Studio Community if the licence still fits your work, or in the case of Qt, Qt Creator alongside a recent VS or MinGW.
    - tonyedgecombe 3y ago
      >For C++, you're better off with Qt, wxWidgets. Only if you need cross platform.
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        You certainly never had the pleasure of using XAML C++, with C++/WinRT and IDL files, after the downgrade of using C++/CX. On the Microsoft tooling stack even MFC offers better development experience on Visual Studio. I left it out on purpose, because I doubt the OP would like to use MFC, and I wouldn't even recomend XAML C++ development experience to my enemies.
  - dancemethis 3y ago
    It's still worthwhile, and it will be for the foreseeable future. If you want to dabble in desktop with C#, Avalonia is the best way to go nowadays. I'm having a blast with it working on a couple of projects for my assigned client, and in a couple of personal toy projects.
  - Aleklart 3y ago
    The art of creating your own desktop GUI library is probably already lost, so react/electron will be the best option. In fact you don’t even need electron. Just make it a web service. People prefer web, they used to web.
    - benhurmarcel 3y ago
      It can be pretty hard to deploy a web app in a corporate environment. Just getting an instance on a server is an uphill battle. Easier to have people run a local app.
- livinglist 3y ago
  This was exactly why I gave up on .Net ecosystem. I learned c# as my first programming language, then I started playing around with winforms and then making utility apps for windows phone, everything was great except suddenly wp got killed and they released UWP afterwards, and then UWP got killed to make rooms for whatever came after it… all happened within span of 5 years, it’s really exhausting for developers especially knowing that something you spent time learning and working with probably gonna get dropped sometimes soon..
gardenhedge 3y ago
Isn't Bing now a competitor to Google? It's results are nearly as good and Bing Chat is available to users and will soon be rolled out to enterprises.
- Clamchop 3y ago
  Yes! Bing is finding its footing and is introducing nifty value-adds. But, that has taken a long time, during which it was mostly the butt of jokes. So, not saying all of these were abject failures and a few are still around and doing OK (Surface) or better (Bing). But, I'd argue that the projects were so rushed and reactionary that they were delivered compromised, embarrassed, and with too little direction and advocacy. Oh, and I'd like to add Microsoft Store to the list.
- diarrhea 3y ago
  My org forces ChatGPT to be used through Bing Chat when internal company data is involved. It’s an avalanche of popups, dialogues, links, “did you know”s, color and animations. Quite unpleasant to use compared to just vanilla ChatGPT, which offers a zen-like experience in comparison.
eichin 3y ago
Kin! lasted 48 days in the US, never launched at all in Europe (squarish smartphone for "the younger set".)
- raydev 3y ago
  This one is funny. There was enormous marketing buildup and they even did a full release event with media outlets posting live from the audience, Apple event style. A little more than a month later MS decided to cancel it. And to be fair, it wasn't that great of a product, but the fact that they burned through all of that development and a massive marketing rollout only to throw it in the trash a few weeks later.... just peak late-00s Microsoft.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

pjmlp 3y ago

If you watch the Windows UI community talks on YouTube, at least on public channels, whoever is in charge doesn't seem to grasp how much all those rewrites killed the ecosystem, and they keep asking people to invest into WinUI/WinAppSDK, which not only is yet another rewrite, the tooling is a joke versus UWP. No wonder that Windows developer community decided to ignore whatever is related to WinUI, and focus on the stable technologies from the past.

Bootvis 3y ago
Looking for some advice here. I’d be interested to develop simple GUI’s at work. I don’t have much experience of that. I have a license for VS2015 to maintain legacy VB and C++ but I think an upgrade could be arranged. I’m comfortable doing web dev but the browser remains limiting. In my situation, would learning native gui development be worthwhile or is it much easier to stick to websites and/or Electron?
- tight-ship 3y ago
  Much easier to go with Electron. The choice is made for you. With native Windows, it's a dozen different solution and you waste timing playing future teller to imagine which one won't be abandoned in the future. At least with Electron you can reuse your skills with websites and it's pretty established now. Yes, it's not as fast but it's fast enough.
- MattBDev 3y ago
  Using WinUI is really easy to do. Whether you're using WinUI 2.8 with UWP or WinUI 3. So native GUI development isn't difficult at all. XAML is similar to HTML in a lot of ways. If you have your mind set on web development and want a native GUI, you could go with React Native for Windows.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Yeah, if one wants to have fun debugging all the issues that are still open since Project Reunion was announced in 2020, with less capable tooling than .NET Native and C++/CX, specially fun having to deal with CsWinRT and C++/WinRT, the latter already in maintenance, stuck in C++17, as the team is now having fun with Rust/WinRT. At least Native AOT might support WinUI in .NET 9, something to look forward to, for anyone that still cares outside Redmond.
    - m_mueller 3y ago
      I think the alphabet soup thrown around in this thread alone is indicative for what‘s wrong with Microsoft‘s native user interface story…
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        I can throw similar alphabet soups from other ecosystems, either one is in and gets them, or not.
        tonyedgecombe 3y ago
        Not really. Apple has a much more consistent story on UI frameworks.
        pjmlp 3y ago
        Not being around Mac OS long enough?
        3y ago
- pjmlp 3y ago
  If on .NET, Windows Forms, WPF, or the community projects from Uno and Avalonia. For C++, you're better off with Qt, wxWidgets. You can use Visual Studio Community if the licence still fits your work, or in the case of Qt, Qt Creator alongside a recent VS or MinGW.
  - tonyedgecombe 3y ago
    >For C++, you're better off with Qt, wxWidgets. Only if you need cross platform.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      You certainly never had the pleasure of using XAML C++, with C++/WinRT and IDL files, after the downgrade of using C++/CX. On the Microsoft tooling stack even MFC offers better development experience on Visual Studio. I left it out on purpose, because I doubt the OP would like to use MFC, and I wouldn't even recomend XAML C++ development experience to my enemies.
- dancemethis 3y ago
  It's still worthwhile, and it will be for the foreseeable future. If you want to dabble in desktop with C#, Avalonia is the best way to go nowadays. I'm having a blast with it working on a couple of projects for my assigned client, and in a couple of personal toy projects.
- Aleklart 3y ago
  The art of creating your own desktop GUI library is probably already lost, so react/electron will be the best option. In fact you don’t even need electron. Just make it a web service. People prefer web, they used to web.
  - benhurmarcel 3y ago
    It can be pretty hard to deploy a web app in a corporate environment. Just getting an instance on a server is an uphill battle. Easier to have people run a local app.
livinglist 3y ago
This was exactly why I gave up on .Net ecosystem. I learned c# as my first programming language, then I started playing around with winforms and then making utility apps for windows phone, everything was great except suddenly wp got killed and they released UWP afterwards, and then UWP got killed to make rooms for whatever came after it… all happened within span of 5 years, it’s really exhausting for developers especially knowing that something you spent time learning and working with probably gonna get dropped sometimes soon..

gardenhedge 3y ago

Isn't Bing now a competitor to Google? It's results are nearly as good and Bing Chat is available to users and will soon be rolled out to enterprises.

Clamchop 3y ago
Yes! Bing is finding its footing and is introducing nifty value-adds. But, that has taken a long time, during which it was mostly the butt of jokes. So, not saying all of these were abject failures and a few are still around and doing OK (Surface) or better (Bing). But, I'd argue that the projects were so rushed and reactionary that they were delivered compromised, embarrassed, and with too little direction and advocacy. Oh, and I'd like to add Microsoft Store to the list.
diarrhea 3y ago
My org forces ChatGPT to be used through Bing Chat when internal company data is involved. It’s an avalanche of popups, dialogues, links, “did you know”s, color and animations. Quite unpleasant to use compared to just vanilla ChatGPT, which offers a zen-like experience in comparison.

eichin 3y ago

Kin! lasted 48 days in the US, never launched at all in Europe (squarish smartphone for "the younger set".)

raydev 3y ago
This one is funny. There was enormous marketing buildup and they even did a full release event with media outlets posting live from the audience, Apple event style. A little more than a month later MS decided to cancel it. And to be fair, it wasn't that great of a product, but the fact that they burned through all of that development and a massive marketing rollout only to throw it in the trash a few weeks later.... just peak late-00s Microsoft.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]