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> We realize this may come as a shock and disappointment to our contributors but we simply do not have the expertise or resources within the organization to con
by 7bit 1y ago
> We realize this may come as a shock and disappointment to our contributors but we simply do not have the expertise or resources within the organization to continue to maintain this project.
Resources ... Okay. What truly comes as a shock is the fact that Microsoft says they don't have expertise to continue this project. I mean, who is building Windows then? It's the same building blocks, no?!
- whatever1 1y agoThey pretty much say that the company gutted their team to the point they cannot support the project anymore. Given the latest layoff rounds there is also good chance that indeed they fired the people who had the expertise on this.
- generalpf 1y agoWho would want to work on this thing? It hasn't been a standard part of Windows for at least a decade.
- jujube3 1y ago> I mean, who is building Windows then? Armies of H1Bs frantically copying and pasting from Stack Overflow until something compiles.
- userbinator 1y agoThese days it's more likely to be AI, possibly Microsoft's own Copilot.
- luckman212 1y agoI (very) badly want to believe this couldn't possibly be true—but sadly, if I had to guess, I'd bet money that it is.
- zifpanachr23 1y agoMy theory: every (I'm exaggerating, more like most) systems programmer in the company was told to join Azure or get cut. Then outsourcing or something. It's been obvious that they don't have many experienced people left to work on native windows stuff for a while now. The constant churn in the platform apis and everything getting turned into a web app was the sign.
- pjmlp 1y agoYou see this on the surviving team keeping up WinUI 3.0 / WinAppSDK. It is quite obvious from whoever takes place on community calls, or that still answers on endless Github discussions, that their background isn't Windows development. You see this by them usually not understanding what the framework is still missing from MFC, Forms, WPF, both in features, and Visual Studio tooling. All the key figures from Windows 8 days regarding WinRT, left for Amazon, Google, or internally to Azure and AI groups.
- munchler 1y agoGiven the use of the singular pronoun “I” in the readme, I suspect that this was a one-person project within Microsoft, and that person is no longer available.
- eek2121 1y agoWin16/Win32 is going the way of the dinosaur. Many of those devs have retired or moved on. I am personally a huge fan of win32. I was even a ReactOS contributor at one point because of this. That being said, it wasn’t scalable without major changes. Thankfully most win32 apps still work on Windows.
- pjmlp 1y agoUnfortunately, that means Windows XP, as most of the new OS APIs since then are COM based, and the team keeps making it harder than it should be, as all efforts to improve its usability tend to die out after whoever championed them in first place moves into something else. It is like Windows Development team has something against nice tooling for COM, only man with hard bear are supposed to handle it. /s