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Comment by resoluteteeth | Hacker News Reader

It's not just one announcement; they keep changing their mind about what the future of the windows API is. WinRT is the final nail in the coffin. Now with WinRT on one side being tied to Windows Store apps and .net/WPF on the other side being limited to normal desktop applications, who in their right mind would devote time to building an app in either?

In particular, if you're making enterprise software, for example, and aren't interested in the Windows Store, what can you do except throw up your hands in the air and switch to the web.

Even if you're determined to make a desktop app application, at this point WPF seems even more likely to become problematic in the future than the Win32 API!

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I am also burnt out on them. Winforms, Silverlight, WPF, WinRT now UWP. Just wait for the next change of mind. We have gone web even for internal stuff that would have been web based before.

If I absolutely needed a desktop app I would either go Qt or write my own simple win32 wrapper.

WinRT isn't tied to store apps. You can use most of it just fine from .NET/C++ desktop apps. (not the XAML bits obviously)

https://www.nuget.org/packages/UwpDesktop/

I don't even understand the naming. Wasn't WinRT supposed to be the ARM version of Windows 8? Thus the Surface RT product? Which is now pretty much dead?

.NET runs on both, just not 100% API compatible.

Mac OS X and iOS aren't also 100% compatible, neither are ChromeOS and Android.

I thought the ChromeOS/Android thing wasn't true anymore; that Android apps will soon run without any porting nescessary for ChromeOS.

They will run inside a container with API redirections to ChromeOS syscalls.

I consider that as an attack on General Purpose Computation by the likes of Apple and Google.

What are some examples of well-known desktop applications written for .net? Recent versions of Visual Studio are the only ones I know of, and those are only well-known to developers.

You make .Net store app, and then distribute it how you want? Thought that was obvious.

You can create your own business store if you want, or you distribute the app through a file.

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