I wonder what the overall adoption rates are for UWP. As someone who's written Windows software since the 90s, I can't shake the feeling that Microsoft just churns out completely new development stacks every few years.
This is exactly what is holding back Win32: there has not been any serious development of the desktop developer story since WPF in 2005 (WPF only received token updates since then, the last major update was in 2010 when they finally added a DataGrid control, lol) - but WPF is not well-suited for many types of software which have to fall-back on “pure” Win32 and the story there is nothing but depressing.
Apple got it right with Cocoa (nee Nextstep) - it’s something they have been gradually building on with incremental improvements, continuously forwards and upwards - whereas Microsoft has been launching new, short-lived and incompatible (and incomplete) platforms for the past 15 years: WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, Jupiter (Win 8.1), UWP (Win10), etc. The story is so bad Microsoft’s own flagship software has to build their own UI frameworks (Office has its own, Windows Media Center had some arcane prototype of WPF, even the Windows 10 Start Menu uses some UI+Graphics framework that’s not exposed to third-party developers).
Win32 needs some serious work - not least because Win32 is “infected” with GDI which has its own issues. WinRT was nice but nowhere near sufficient.
> The story is so bad Microsoft’s own flagship software has to build their own UI frameworks
I think this might be the other way round: if they're not eating their own dogfood, it's much easier for the UI framework to come adrift from actual use cases.
It's really telling that in Windows 8/10 they "modernised" some, but not all, of the control panel UI. It's basically random as to whether a setting you need will be in a Metro-flavoured window or a Win32-flavoured one.
To me, the trouble with everything after WinForms is that it lacks a really compelling reason to upgrade. It's not easier to develop for and it's not nicer to use, and on many desktop systems the font rendering is much uglier in the new system. It does perform better at high DPI, but (catch-22) few people use high DPI windows systems because it's not well supported by even the OS let alone the applications.
"It's really telling that in Windows 8/10 they "modernised" some, but not all, of the control panel UI. It's basically random as to whether a setting you need will be in a Metro-flavoured window or a Win32-flavoured one."
That's really infuriating. Makes me wonder what all these devs they have are doing the whole day.
"To me, the trouble with everything after WinForms is that it lacks a really compelling reason to upgrade. It's not easier to develop for and it's not nicer to use, and on many desktop systems the font rendering is much uglier in the new system. It does perform better at high DPI, but (catch-22) few people use high DPI windows systems because it's not well supported by even the OS let alone the applications. "
WPF had great potential and I think they could have made it a wonderful environment if they had kept improving it. Clean up XAML syntax (maybe something like they with ASP.NET and Razor) , simplify data binding syntax and debugging, make MVVM first class citizen and it would be great. Instead they (almost) stopped development of WPF and cranked out a series of half baked successors like WinRT, Silverlight and UWP.
MVVM is great if you want to unit test all your UI code but who wants to do that.
For me the whole thing was cumbersome and nowhere near as productive as WinForms. Not only that but problems it purported to solve like high-dpi support still had issues.
I do Windows development since 3.0, currently maintaining a couple of Forms and WPF applications, the Forms are the hardest to maintain due event handling spaghetti code instead of proper MVVM with data binding, no use of Table/StackLayout components and still do background handling in BackgroundWorker classes.
How is the Visual Studio WPF designer these days? I worked on a WPF app around 5 years ago, and the form designer in Visual Studio was appalingly slow and quite buggy.
I also wasn't a big fan of XAML - no matter how much time I spent using it, it mostly seemed more difficult and awkward to get components where you wanted them than with WinForms.
The majority had stopped at (right before) WPF it seems
> In fact, at a recent conference I was at with a large group of C# consultants. When the audience was polled on which desktop UIs their clients were using, the vast majority were WinForms, a small group was WPF, and almost no one was UWP
It's actually kind of impressive how much transitional stuff Apple has introduced and then removed with Mac OS X and how right many of their decisions turned out. I guess Cocoa itself was an extension of the legacy NextStep API too. They also had Classic for running old Mac apps directly in OSX and later Rosetta for running PowerPC binaries on Intel (I guess the same tech was used for the 32->64 bit transition). So many technologies have been smoothly deprecated and removed over the years by Apple.
I don’t think you really can compare Apple’s and Microsoft’s situation here. Think of the extreme bigger amount of software that was written for Windows including all that custom made business software for small companies. Apple was always in the situation that a lot of their 3rd party developers were also „fans“, who are more willing to keep up with their transitions, where however most the Microsoft tech developers were just doing their job and want to keep their stuff only running with the least amount of work necessary.
Sure they do. It’s on mobile. While MS isn’t going anywhere in the Enterprise, anyone who is focused on the desktop when it comes to MS development instead of web, cloud, or even cross platform mobile development is headed down a dead end.
Yes and no. They've taken down the documentation, but there's still a number of (non-GUI, non-kernel) Carbon APIs that are still not deprecated (as of 10.11, at least), and still allowed in the Mac App Store.
I'm using AHGotoPage() because NSHelpManager has no equivalent and nobody has been able to explain to me how to make that class do a similar task reliably. (In hindsight, AppleHelp is such a disaster that I should have just avoided it entirely, as almost every other app does.) MAS reviewers have given me grief over many things my app does, but never any Carbon calls.
The last time I saw any Carbon APIs deprecated was 10.8, I think (6 years ago).
What's bad about GDI? (I used to do windows but have not been following, I remember that you need to do GetDC and ReleaseDC on a window handle to get the device context and then to release it - in pairs, else...)
It's a graphics API designed for early-1990s needs. It's missing things we expect today like 30-bit colour support and all-VRAM memory (GDI was hardware accelerated but they gimped it in Windows Vista to ensure compatibility with the DWM).
When working with Win32 it just isn't possible to avoid having to use GDI, for example dealing with painting to a window surface Win32 will give you a GDI device context by default - for example, similarly handling Win32 messages like WM_PAINT uses parts of the GDI API. Finally, each process on Windows has a limited number of GDI objects it can use as well. Oh, and using GDI/GDI+ in a service context (e.g. ASP.NET or a Windows Service, is not supported: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsui_team/2013/04/16/using-...)
Direct2D is nice - but setting it up in your code isn't easy - and Microsoft does not maintain an up-to-date C#/.NET library for Direct2D.
> The story is so bad Microsoft’s own flagship software has to build their own UI frameworks
The story is so bad because the Microsoft units making flagship desktop apps aren't productizing their UI frameworks (not suggesting that this is their choice), instead leaving the firm with public UI framework offerings not tightly grounded in that kind of use experience.
Good frameworks don't lead to internal flagship use, internal flagship use leads to good frameworks through tight feedback between real-world use and framework development.
> As someone who's written Windows software since the 90s, I can't shake the feeling that Microsoft just churns out completely new development stacks every few years.
That's the theme behind one of Joel Spolsky's old essays, Fire And Motion:
"Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features. Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don’t have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP. The companies who stumble are the ones who spend too much time reading tea leaves to figure out the future direction of Microsoft."
Win32 is a lower portability risk than UWP. Genuinely that’s what I’ve heard people say. Most of the UI and event stuff can be moved to wx or equivalent in a few months and deployed on other platforms.
UWP and you’re up shit creek.
Most companies are on the fence with running away from windows. It moved too fast, costs too much money to keep up with and has too much friction.
Take a look on the windows store for the massive uptake. Not. Half of it is still win32 and the rest is written by MSFT, crapware or abandoned.
Everything is in a right state despite the marketing to the contrary.
Like everyone else, the biggest difference is that Microsoft keeps the old tech around, while most other companies are willing to loose customers that don't want to move into the new stacks.
On one side it is a big reason why they have achieved their market size on the desktop, on the other side we reach this kind of situations where new tech improved tech like Singularity, Midori, Longhorn or now UWP gets thrown into the garbage can in the name of backwards compatibility. Quite sad.
Microsoft shot themselves in the foot with UWP. It's actually pretty nice to write apps with it (in my personal opinion, anyway). But UWP only supports Windows 10.
Very few commercial products are able to drop Windows 7 support (and like, literally zero enterprise products can drop Windows 7 support).
So, no matter how nice UWP gets, most companies that would still be willing to write a native Windows app are 5+ years out from being allowed to adopt it, entirely because of how Microsoft chose to release it.
"Very few commercial products are able to drop Windows 7 support (and like, literally zero enterprise products can drop Windows 7 support)."
You would be suicidial if you based any product you want to sell to business on UWP. Not only doesn't it Win 7 or 8 but I don't see in what way UWP is better than WPF.
UWP is great if you are exclusively deploying to brand new Windows 10 Embedded devices. (I think this is now called "Windows IoT Core" or something similar). That's what I've been using it for, and that's worked well. It carries a nice side benefit that our sales team all has Windows 10 Pro laptops, and UWP 'just works' there too for sales demos, presentations, and such.
But I agree, selling UWP apps to businesses for traditional desktop use is ridiculously difficult.
> I don't see in what way UWP is better than WPF.
For a long time, UWP was the only way to get a working WebView (one based off of Edge instead of IE). But I think they fixed that and backported Edge to WPF a few months ago. (EDIT: they did kind of fix that - https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2018/05/09/modern-webvie... )
"UWP is great if you are exclusively deploying to brand new Windows 10 Embedded devices. (I think this is now called "Windows IoT Core" or something similar). That's what I've been using it for, and that's worked well. It carries a nice side benefit that our sales team all has Windows 10 Pro laptops, and UWP 'just works' there too for sales demos, presentations, and such."
This would be a great thing for us. But we already have a huge investment into WPF. How do we get this to UWP?
One way that it is better are the visual layer and accelerated composition engine.
Naturally this matters little to those enterprises doing plain CRUD applications with default L&F.
One big improvement in UWP is that Visual C++ finally merits the name Visual, although it still fails short of C++ Builder's RAD tooling.
And overall the sandbox model, however from the last Build it appears that Redstone will get an improved sandbox for Win32 apps as well, alongside MSIX support.
Exactly. One of the biggest reasons why Carbon (and Mac OS X) succeeded is that Carbon apps also ran on OS 8/9. Big apps like Acrobat, Final Cut Pro, Mozilla, and many others were able to use Carbon and run on OS 9 and X.
WinForms will out live UWP, WFP and pretty much everything else Microsoft develops in terms of GUI frameworks. It works for the vast majority of programs that businesses need, it's easy to use and so far it's been the best investment in terms of learning a "framework".
If Microsoft want's to move forward, they need to consider moving new stuff into WinForms and expand that with the features of UWP, WPF, XAML and other technologies they've tried to introduce over the years.
"If Microsoft want's to move forward, they need to consider moving new stuff into WinForms and expand that with the features of UWP, WPF, XAML and other technologies they've tried to introduce over the years. "
They could have done this 10-15 years ago. It's too late now.
Honestly, if I had to develop a new desktop app for Windows I would seriously think about Electron. It's frustrating that there is no premier desktop app framework for Windows anymore. UWP is too limited, WPF is pretty much deprecated. Win32 has a huge learning curve and finding devs would be very difficult. Pretty sad situation.
Maybe their secret plan is to push people into writing web apps with ASP.NET? Event that doesn't work because a lot of people will use Node instead.
I have been developing new WPF applications during the last couple of years.
Those customers were now thinking of eventually start moving into UWP after the Windows 10 migration was complete, so given this, they will continue using WPF.
Also Forms, WPF and EF 6 support are the major roadmap items for .NET Core 3.0
Node is no match against .NET or Java for those that care about performance.
True. A while ago I looked into Qt and one problem was that there weren't too many 3rd party components on the market. For WPF and Winforms you can buy extremely powerful components like data grids and tree views (I have been using Developer Express) but I didn't find any for qt.
I’m not sure if it’s true but it seems to me like they replaced their own client with an alternative one they bought from another company, which has parts written in Qt.
I don't even know how to use UWP. I'm learning Rust and writing some applications using WinAPI is my plan. WinAPI usage seems to be fairly straightforward. But I have no idea how to write UWP application with Rust.
Apple got it right with Cocoa (nee Nextstep) - it’s something they have been gradually building on with incremental improvements, continuously forwards and upwards - whereas Microsoft has been launching new, short-lived and incompatible (and incomplete) platforms for the past 15 years: WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, Jupiter (Win 8.1), UWP (Win10), etc. The story is so bad Microsoft’s own flagship software has to build their own UI frameworks (Office has its own, Windows Media Center had some arcane prototype of WPF, even the Windows 10 Start Menu uses some UI+Graphics framework that’s not exposed to third-party developers).
Win32 needs some serious work - not least because Win32 is “infected” with GDI which has its own issues. WinRT was nice but nowhere near sufficient.