[nerdywordy]

We have a Windows POS app for mines, quarries, sand and gravel, etc.

When we broke ground on this version Microsoft was hardcore pushing UWP. We were building for the future so we built our app within the constraints of UWP with the expectation that it would grow with Microsoft’s vision…

Fool me once, as they say. UWP is dead.

We are currently redeveloping the entire thing with a series of Win32 base classes and intend to layer on a WPF front end for now. WinUI is early and promising. But so was UWP.

Long term we’re exploring outside the box UI options like running a local server and popping a browser. C# and .NET are very powerful. But the fractured landscape for desktop development gives little hope for the future.

If your goal is to build a rich UI, then you may have to suffer through learning whichever flavor of XAML you decide to go for. But if your goal is to interact with local hardware functionality I’d probably steer clear and use WinForms, a browser interface, or a console interface.

[nyuszika7h]

> Long term we’re exploring outside the box UI options like running a local server and popping a browser.

So... basically Electron?

[nerdywordy]

Sort of. But not an embedded browser. And .NET instead of JS.

There are some promising developments with Blazor and .NET MAUI. But it all seems too speculative to build on at this point.

[nyuszika7h]

> .NET instead of JS

If you don't use JS, wouldn't that mean reloading the whole page for every action? Or do you still use some minimal JS to improve the experience?

[sto_hristo]

Some of MS own apps are written on Electron. Think about that when considering their awesome native UI frameworks

[dt3ft]

Which ones?

[d_tr]

VS Code and Skype are the two I know about.

[Riverheart]

Teams and Azure Data Studio.

[sto_hristo]

Also their entire office suite is migrating to an webapp. I use it at work and it's quite impressive even though it has issues and is inferior to native. But hey, it's only the beginning and can be used on every platform without the need to install. Web tech is awesome.

[jmnicolas]

I'm mainly on WPF, so I might say something wrong, but I think adjusting your UWP app for WinUI would be a breeze compared to redeveloping everything with Win32.

[flohofwoe]

Only up to WinUI 2 apparently, WinUI 3 doesn't support UWP anymore:

https://microsoft.github.io/microsoft-ui-xaml/about.html

[petilon]

> UWP is dead.

Why do you think UWP is dead? Please post links.

[flohofwoe]

If UWP would be alive, Microsoft wouldn't advice on how to migrate away from it:

https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2021/10/19/uwp-mig...

Also apparently WinUI3 won't get UWP support at all:

https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/02/uwp_microsoft_winui3/

Nobody at Microsoft is going to come out and admit that UWP is dead, but it's easy to read between the lines.