[_bent]

macOS is the only OS you can write native applications for. On Linux there are with GTK and QT two different GUI frameworks that could be considered native on some distros. And on Windows there are so many different frameworks and approaches used by MS for the shell that even a Webview could be considered native

[pjmlp]

Win32 is the native way, MFC and Windows Forms build on top Win32, UWP is also native as thin layer above Win32 and COM (with some extras).

WPF is managed, only uses a bit of Win32 and DirectX 9, everything else is rendered by itself.

[_bent]

According to Microsoft WinUi3 and WinUi2 are also native https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/

[pjmlp]

Naturally, they build on top of UWP.

There are some details on what that exactly means, but I am on the go for lengthy comments.

[aryonoco]

None of which is used by for example the Office team, which maintains their own UI Framework just for Office.

Which itself is not used by Teams, which uses electron/WebView2, even though Teams is part of Office.

And let’s not forget about MAUI, which has its own components and UI library, which as far as I know is not used by anyone at Microsoft.

And I’ve heard from people at Microsoft that the future story of .NET UI framework is “Blazor WASM”. Is that considered native? Probably not. But I’d argue it should be considered “first party”.

Let’s be honest, Microsoft’s UI framework landscape is a mess.

[pjmlp]

Moving goalposts, the point was what are the native APIs.

Office framework would not exist without Win32, and usually it is made available on Win32, e.g. ribbon as common control.

Xamarin was never used at Microsoft, how to expect the rewrite to go any better. This acquisition was a mess, almost everything from Xamarin is gone.

Again, not a native API.

Blazor only matters for Web applications and PWAs, unless Windows turns into ChromeOS there is nothing native about it.

[aryonoco]

Blazor is only for web applications, until you run into Blazor Hybrid, which doesn’t produce web applications!

[rafram]

On macOS you now have to account for SwiftUI, which sometimes uses AppKit views and sometimes uses its own renderer. Kind of similar to UWP.

[nicoburns]

iOS and Android definitely have native toolkits too.