Let me make it easy for you, if you want it to look and feel native on Windows 11, use WinUI 3.
ChatGPT gives a decent summary of the history of all that:
https://chat.openai.com/share/6478dcdd-98d3-449a-84be-be5666...
ChatGPT gives a decent summary of the history of all that:
https://chat.openai.com/share/6478dcdd-98d3-449a-84be-be5666...
My own personal outsider take on this is that there are really only three eras that need to be considered:
- "HWND era": win16/win32 classic UI aka "WinForms". This extends all the way up to ActiveX. Microsoft get to dictate the platform without real competition.
- XAML era: the second system. Classic WinForms doesn't handle high-DPI displays or GPU rendering; it relies on pixel positioning and lets you draw directly on the framebuffer. WPF is the reaction to this.
- Phone era: suddenly there is real competition and users start using a lot of non-Microsoft platforms. Microsoft launch their own phone, complete with new sandboxed APIs that don't correspond to Win32 at all. This is ultimately a market failure. But Microsoft have invested too much in UWP.
At this point, the winning stacks globally are, in order: web (including Electron), iOS, Android. Nobody wants to do native Windows applications that aren't games if they can possibly help it. Even Microsoft start building web-on-desktop apps like Teams.
So the only thing Microsoft can do is salvage operations on UWP APIs and XAML-related techs to try to make it usable to desktop developers by getting out of the sandbox.
I had thought XAML was it and was ahead of the game, but it's kind of a different approach.
All the new ones define their declarative UI as inline source code.
I remember a while back there was contraversy that MS wanted people to write Windows apps for store in TypeScript. What happened to that?