8 ms·

> Microsoft says it will be able to “more agilely develop and optimize” the Copilot experience as a result of these changes Can't help but see this as anything

> Microsoft says it will be able to “more agilely develop and optimize” the Copilot experience as a result of these changes Can't help but see this as anything other than "The team working on it doesn't know how to code native applications on our OS"

Rinzler89 2y ago
Judging by the modern Windows apps, that seems true as most of them (ClipChamp, Weather, News, etc) are just web apps with an Edge wrapper similar to Electron apps. I'd get it if they were meant to be cross platform apps, but they're not. Crazy they couldn't have bothered to write native windows apps in .NET/C# for something that's obviously meant to be Windows exclusive. The community writes way better Windows apps (Sumatra, Notepad++, etc) than Microsoft does internally. Microsoft has no cohesive product vision for the OS and just seems to let various groups slap random low quality shit to the OS, based on some internal power struggles their managers win in the org I assume. It's ironic that low quality slop like those and ads ship by default with the OS, but the truly useful and high quality utilities they write like PowerToys, do not. They lost the plot on their core audience after Windows 7 and sloppy implementations of "AI" like Copilot+ and Recall won't bring them back, on the contrary, it convinces people to GTFO to Linux ASAP.
- mathverse 2y ago
  It's absolutely crazy they dont have an internal toolkit a la QT that allows them to create performant multiplatform apps. It's really mind boggling. Even their OneDrive uses just QT.
  - neonsunset 2y ago
    They do, there is just no top-down initiative that says "use WinUI with C# or lose your job, make sure to throw out React Native and WebView2 by the end of this quarter". That would at least cover Windows. Or they could force everyone adopt MAUI internally instead, despite its flaws (if you dogfood something heavily, bugs get fixed fast). I find it funny that, unlike OneDrive, iCloud desktop client uses WinUI. But I'm not holding my breath and think that whoever could make this reality was pushed out of the relevant teams or the org as a whole by the time W11 shipped - just look how they killed great OneNote UWP variant. Salvaging the situation would be an improbable miracle.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      In this regard, as already discussed before, it what saddens me that Apple and Google are more willing to double down on their UI stacks, Android and iDevices, than Microsoft. If one of them was at the steering wheel of Longhorn, it would most likely been shipped with its .NET based architecture, improved in later releases, and everyone that wasn't into it, could have looked for a job elsewhere.
    - victor106 2y ago
      about WinUI from https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/ > At this time, there are two generations of WinUI: WinUI 2 for UWP and WinUI in the Windows App SDK (WinUI 3). While both can be used in production-ready apps on Windows 10 and later, each have different development targets. In the Microsoft land it's always utterly confusing to get started. You are always left guessing what choice to make.
      - neonsunset 2y ago
        Seems pretty straightforward to just follow these? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/winui3/desktop-winui3-app-with-basic-interop https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/winui3/... (not very pretty) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/windows-dotnet-maui/walkthrough-first-app https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/windows-dotne... (better) In either case, my comment did not concern regular users but MSFT themselves.
        pjmlp 2y ago
        What those things don't tell, is what is still UWP and is yet to be made available on Win32 land. They also don't tell designer isn't around, like on Forms/WPF/UWP, or how bad the C++ development story is. Forms, WPF and ironically MFC, are the only ones with good tooling, and feature coverage.
      - Rinzler89 2y ago
        >In the Microsoft land it's always utterly confusing to get started. You are always left guessing what choice to make. Not it isn't. What you're pointing out is the PRO of Windows, not a CON. It's why backwards compatibility works so well. If you have a super old app you're still developing, you can keep using that old UI stack, no need to rewrite it on a newer one just for ti to be compatible with the latest Windows release. I feel like most people complainant about the different UI stacks supported by Windows, are not Windows developers but just enjoy pointing it out as if it bothers them somehow through sheer existence even though they never wrote any Windows apps.
  - vitorgrs 2y ago
    As far I know, OneDrive doesn't use QT anymore on Windows. It's web iirc (the ui part) + WinUI.
- skywhopper 2y ago
  I suspect they forgot the value of internal training on their own platform’s tech and they just hire folks from outside and let them run wild, and all they know how to do is React, so that’s basically what we get.
- bromuro 2y ago
  There was a time they were pushing React for building Windows apps - wasn’t Skype moved to React after their aquisition?
- the_snooze 2y ago
  >It's ironic that low quality slop like those and ads ship by default with the OS... it convinces people to GTFO to Linux ASAP. It certainly convinced me. Steam Proton runs pretty much all the games I enjoy (mainly indies), and I can quarantine Windows in a VM for MS Office, as well as keep a full Windows installation on a separate disk if I really need it (rarely). The crap that's made its way into mainline Windows makes me feel like my computer isn't serving me anymore.
hotstickyballs 2y ago
Windows development is death
kotaKat 2y ago
I'll take it. It makes it easier for me to fully gut out of my system if it's a few links to a crappy PWA instead of being fully hooked into the OS.
joenot443 2y ago
My understanding is that it takes orders of magnitude longer to develop native Windows applications than it does to develop webapps. I think that your suspicion is right and that some PM along the way was able to make the business case that we could ship 75% of the product using 10% of the engineering resources. It's a drag, though, because as everyone will immediately see, having a shortcut on your keyboard to open glorified GPT-4 isn't really a killer feature.
- usef- 2y ago
  > takes orders of magnitude longer to develop native Windows applications than it does to develop webapps. That seems extremely far-fetched to me. If it's for economic reasons, I think it's more likely related to availability of developers with webapp experience vs native experience.
  - skywhopper 2y ago
    Which they could easily solve if they invested in training new hires on their own internal tech, but I suspect that’s long been cut to the bone. So if you can only rely on what skills people have when they join, you’re going to dilute any proprietary tech you have.
  - joenot443 2y ago
    It's precisely for economic reasons, hiring a qualified team being the long tail here. I assure you guys that it's much, much easier finding a team of decent web devs than a team of decent Windows devs. Is that really so far-fetched?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - usef- 2y ago
      I assume you're right, but it's still quite absurd. Apple has recently released applications written natively in WinUI (iCloud for Windows). So Apple can more easily hire/train WinUI developers than Microsoft? I'd accept the "difficulty" excuse from a company like Walmart. But we're talking about a (relatively) small number of built-in mini applications here, inside a tech-specialised company that created, maintains and presumably promotes this native framework.
ChrisLTD 2y ago
The old sidebar experience was also a web view, so I don’t think anything has meaningfully changed except for the delivery mechanism.
cageface 2y ago
Desktop software APIs are in a generally dire state right now. SwiftUI on Mac also feels like a neglected stepchild. After evaluating a bunch of them I was somewhat astonished to conclude that Flutter was the best option, at least for my purposes.
vitorgrs 2y ago
If only they knew how to build web apps. Like, I honestly hate web apps. But there is some that is really good, like the new Threads.net app... Meanwhile, MSFT web apps are horrible. They kill native apps, like Mail and classic Outlook, and are replacing with the horrible new Web Outlook. Copilot on Android is also horrible, Bing, etc. They don't know how to build web apps either.

Rinzler89 2y ago

Judging by the modern Windows apps, that seems true as most of them (ClipChamp, Weather, News, etc) are just web apps with an Edge wrapper similar to Electron apps. I'd get it if they were meant to be cross platform apps, but they're not. Crazy they couldn't have bothered to write native windows apps in .NET/C# for something that's obviously meant to be Windows exclusive. The community writes way better Windows apps (Sumatra, Notepad++, etc) than Microsoft does internally. Microsoft has no cohesive product vision for the OS and just seems to let various groups slap random low quality shit to the OS, based on some internal power struggles their managers win in the org I assume. It's ironic that low quality slop like those and ads ship by default with the OS, but the truly useful and high quality utilities they write like PowerToys, do not. They lost the plot on their core audience after Windows 7 and sloppy implementations of "AI" like Copilot+ and Recall won't bring them back, on the contrary, it convinces people to GTFO to Linux ASAP.

mathverse 2y ago
It's absolutely crazy they dont have an internal toolkit a la QT that allows them to create performant multiplatform apps. It's really mind boggling. Even their OneDrive uses just QT.
- neonsunset 2y ago
  They do, there is just no top-down initiative that says "use WinUI with C# or lose your job, make sure to throw out React Native and WebView2 by the end of this quarter". That would at least cover Windows. Or they could force everyone adopt MAUI internally instead, despite its flaws (if you dogfood something heavily, bugs get fixed fast). I find it funny that, unlike OneDrive, iCloud desktop client uses WinUI. But I'm not holding my breath and think that whoever could make this reality was pushed out of the relevant teams or the org as a whole by the time W11 shipped - just look how they killed great OneNote UWP variant. Salvaging the situation would be an improbable miracle.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    In this regard, as already discussed before, it what saddens me that Apple and Google are more willing to double down on their UI stacks, Android and iDevices, than Microsoft. If one of them was at the steering wheel of Longhorn, it would most likely been shipped with its .NET based architecture, improved in later releases, and everyone that wasn't into it, could have looked for a job elsewhere.
  - victor106 2y ago
    about WinUI from https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/ > At this time, there are two generations of WinUI: WinUI 2 for UWP and WinUI in the Windows App SDK (WinUI 3). While both can be used in production-ready apps on Windows 10 and later, each have different development targets. In the Microsoft land it's always utterly confusing to get started. You are always left guessing what choice to make.
    - neonsunset 2y ago
      Seems pretty straightforward to just follow these? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/winui3/desktop-winui3-app-with-basic-interop https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/winui3/... (not very pretty) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/windows-dotnet-maui/walkthrough-first-app https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/windows-dotne... (better) In either case, my comment did not concern regular users but MSFT themselves.
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        What those things don't tell, is what is still UWP and is yet to be made available on Win32 land. They also don't tell designer isn't around, like on Forms/WPF/UWP, or how bad the C++ development story is. Forms, WPF and ironically MFC, are the only ones with good tooling, and feature coverage.
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      >In the Microsoft land it's always utterly confusing to get started. You are always left guessing what choice to make. Not it isn't. What you're pointing out is the PRO of Windows, not a CON. It's why backwards compatibility works so well. If you have a super old app you're still developing, you can keep using that old UI stack, no need to rewrite it on a newer one just for ti to be compatible with the latest Windows release. I feel like most people complainant about the different UI stacks supported by Windows, are not Windows developers but just enjoy pointing it out as if it bothers them somehow through sheer existence even though they never wrote any Windows apps.
- vitorgrs 2y ago
  As far I know, OneDrive doesn't use QT anymore on Windows. It's web iirc (the ui part) + WinUI.
skywhopper 2y ago
I suspect they forgot the value of internal training on their own platform’s tech and they just hire folks from outside and let them run wild, and all they know how to do is React, so that’s basically what we get.
bromuro 2y ago
There was a time they were pushing React for building Windows apps - wasn’t Skype moved to React after their aquisition?
the_snooze 2y ago
>It's ironic that low quality slop like those and ads ship by default with the OS... it convinces people to GTFO to Linux ASAP. It certainly convinced me. Steam Proton runs pretty much all the games I enjoy (mainly indies), and I can quarantine Windows in a VM for MS Office, as well as keep a full Windows installation on a separate disk if I really need it (rarely). The crap that's made its way into mainline Windows makes me feel like my computer isn't serving me anymore.

hotstickyballs 2y ago

Windows development is death

kotaKat 2y ago

I'll take it. It makes it easier for me to fully gut out of my system if it's a few links to a crappy PWA instead of being fully hooked into the OS.

joenot443 2y ago

My understanding is that it takes orders of magnitude longer to develop native Windows applications than it does to develop webapps. I think that your suspicion is right and that some PM along the way was able to make the business case that we could ship 75% of the product using 10% of the engineering resources. It's a drag, though, because as everyone will immediately see, having a shortcut on your keyboard to open glorified GPT-4 isn't really a killer feature.

usef- 2y ago
> takes orders of magnitude longer to develop native Windows applications than it does to develop webapps. That seems extremely far-fetched to me. If it's for economic reasons, I think it's more likely related to availability of developers with webapp experience vs native experience.
- skywhopper 2y ago
  Which they could easily solve if they invested in training new hires on their own internal tech, but I suspect that’s long been cut to the bone. So if you can only rely on what skills people have when they join, you’re going to dilute any proprietary tech you have.
- joenot443 2y ago
  It's precisely for economic reasons, hiring a qualified team being the long tail here. I assure you guys that it's much, much easier finding a team of decent web devs than a team of decent Windows devs. Is that really so far-fetched?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - usef- 2y ago
    I assume you're right, but it's still quite absurd. Apple has recently released applications written natively in WinUI (iCloud for Windows). So Apple can more easily hire/train WinUI developers than Microsoft? I'd accept the "difficulty" excuse from a company like Walmart. But we're talking about a (relatively) small number of built-in mini applications here, inside a tech-specialised company that created, maintains and presumably promotes this native framework.

ChrisLTD 2y ago

The old sidebar experience was also a web view, so I don’t think anything has meaningfully changed except for the delivery mechanism.

cageface 2y ago

Desktop software APIs are in a generally dire state right now. SwiftUI on Mac also feels like a neglected stepchild. After evaluating a bunch of them I was somewhat astonished to conclude that Flutter was the best option, at least for my purposes.

vitorgrs 2y ago

If only they knew how to build web apps. Like, I honestly hate web apps. But there is some that is really good, like the new Threads.net app... Meanwhile, MSFT web apps are horrible. They kill native apps, like Mail and classic Outlook, and are replacing with the horrible new Web Outlook. Copilot on Android is also horrible, Bing, etc. They don't know how to build web apps either.