[frik]

Delphi and VB4-6 used to be the RAD tools. (RAD = rapid application developed) One could drag and drop controls and create an GUI application in WYSIWYG-style. Then in 1999 when Microsoft abdomen VB for their new dotNet vision, MSFT was about to be split up, etc Web took over and Dreamweaver (and Frontpage) offered a similar IDE experience for HTML4 with a tables and PHP (or ASP, etc). To this day VB6 has the easiest to use RAD IDE, no other newer IDE allows one to create GUIs that fast. Nowadays XCode has a good GUI tool. Traditional Windows applications are out of fashion for many years. Only Win32/64 games are made, everything else is crosspatform electron JS apps or legacy apps that get a yearly minor update. Android and iOS apps thrive, and SaaS web apps too. And on Windows UWP hasn't got traction, it's like a failed experiment - I use zero UWP apps, 1% dotNetFramework4 apps and 99% WinAPI C++ based apps.

[WorldMaker]

You don't use the Start Menu in Windows 10 or the Settings application or the calculator or the WiFi menu or the Action Center or ...? UWP apps are more ubiquitous than you think they are in Windows 10. Zero times visited the Windows Store to directly install apps? Sure, that's possible. Actually using Zero UWP apps? Increasingly unlikely.

UWP isn't a failed experiment by most measures, and you may not directly notice the API transition in many major Windows components from Win32 to UWP, but it's happening.

For what it is worth, the RAD experience for UWP is pretty good and if you want to make a not-very-well-architected "VB6-ish code behind" app with Visual Studio RAD tools, you can knock it out in about the time it would have taken you in VB6.

[frik]

I have tried Win10, but all these new UWP based parts tacked on Win7 shell are so laggy. I mean click on start button, it takes several noticeable milliseconds to show up, the same for the windows clock pop up (calendar), etc. even the calc has now a loading screen and animation. And even though these UWP parts like the start menu are coded in C++ for the UWP API, they are like 100 times slower than the old C++ WinAPI based applications. I know, I had a discussion with the MSFT startmenu devs over here on HN in a thread several months ago - it's a lot less responsive than what could be done with a WebView control and HTML and CSS yet it's even solver than both a webview and a native C++ WinAPI implementation - sucks. I stay with Win7, which is superb and doesn't suck.

[pjmlp]

UWP might not get traction among HN crowd, but it is surely getting traction at heavy Windows shops.