[donor20]

Agreed - I will note however how badly Microsoft has bungled this same story on Windows itself. They went from a very high productive and unified development story in mfc/winforms to a super fragmented space.

I am getting going with WPF. (But that was then followed by maybe Silverlight? Then HTML with bindings?). Now we have been told that UWP is the big future (basically Windows Phone framework?). Gah! XAML? I mean, we went from a drag and drop unified and simple and extendable dev experience that was actually fast to develop into this GUI nightmare - all produced by ONE company with total command and control over their developers.

It tells you something that google web browser is almost a more stable and targetable platform than the native Windows platform (chromium / electron). I mean, that is desparation right there. At least someone was smart enough at microsoft to just give up on IE even on their own platform!

If QT had a bit of a simpler onboarding flow or linux was more unified I think there actually is an opportunity to actually be a good standard for line of business apps that want snappy responsiveness etc. But I just can't believe how badly Microsoft has screwed up their GUI story for the developers they claim to care so much about.

[gmueckl]

I think you forgot ASP.net, Blazor, Xamarin.Forms and MAUI. UI development with .NET is just incredibly fragmented.

If Qt had a good bridge to C#, they could probably get a lot of marketshare on .NET while this confusion lasts.

[pjmlp]

Add C++/WinRT to the mix, which dropped the productivity features of C++/CX, with the team that managed to kill it telling us to just wait for ISO C++ to catch up, while dealing with IDL files pre-.NET style.

Naturally the reception has been less than stellar and they are finally acknowledging that waiting isn't not an option and something is being discussed, however don't expect any improvements in 2020.

[donor20]

Haha! So true!

My thoughts exactly on QT! A good bridge to C# and a good "get a button on a page that triggers "onClick" quickstart workflow" and they'd be in a great position.

There is a lot of confusion on their site between QT creator, Design Studio, bindings, etc etc - so simplifying all that would be great.

They could target C# and (maybe) python (since it already is developed) for the windows story.

[madhadron]

This puzzles me as well. Win32 is fine. If you download Dolphin Smalltalk or Corman Lisp or Free Pascal/Lazarus, they're still targeting Win32 for GUIs. Especially since, with Wine, Win32 GUIs are effectively cross platform.

[donor20]

What boggles the mind is the insane peoplepower they have poured into the redo redo redo here. They spin up huge documents on MSDN, platform toolkits etc.

Instead of trying to chase every random idea out there if they'd just gone deep on Win32 (now effectively x-platform) I think they could have gone a LOT further / faster. The new setups are also super complex and feel a lot more brittle by the time you build out all the toolchain.

Maybe my memory is going, but powering up VS and doing stuff was quick on windows in the past, now it's GB's of junk to just say hello world.

[fomine3]

IMO replacing Win32 is needed but they do that too many times.