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Comment by Genbox | Hacker News Reader

I love the low level .NET stuff Michael Strehovsky makes. Microsoft has built a feature-rich and easy-to-use environment, but it makes .NET developers think there is only one way to use it: create csproj and call dotnet build.

But underneath the covers, there is an extremely powerful compiler (Roslyn) and build-system (msbuild). Combine that with the flexibility of C# and you can develop pretty much anything.

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Don't forget the Win32 API which allows to create a window and run an event loop with a handful of simple function calls (even in C# apparently). Then compare that to the APIs that came after (like UWP and WinUI) and shudder in horror.

Win32 and WinUI serve different purposes, they aren’t meant to replace one another. Win32 is simple but also really low level. It’s great to get a window handler and handle low level events but building a modern graphical UI requires at minimum a layout system, that’s where WinUI comes handy.

Also you can now mix Win32 with WinUI via the concept of XAML island. It’s not perfect but you don’t have to be blocked in one world or the other.

Though I personally prefer dealing with WPF via AvaloniaUI, styling with winUI is often too frustrating…

https://www.avaloniaui.net/

They were in the days of WinRT/UAP/UWP, but that backfired, and with the mismanagemt no one cares about WinUI 3.0 anyway.

Hence why there is even documentation on how to migrate, now legacy.

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2014/07/24/introd...

"Roadmap for Windows Runtime apps using C++"

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...

"Win32 and COM APIs for UWP apps"

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/win32-and-com/win32-an...

Specially the subsection "Alternatives to Win32 and COM API".

Thanks pjmlp, you’re always adding great context to windows related discussion. I appreciate!

You're welcome, it helps that the documentation is still around.

There is stuff from SGI and HP-UX that I can no longer back my comments, as those pages are no longer available on the Web.

We know the other ways, in fact stuff like NGEN have been a CLI set of commands since the early days.

However .NET (alongside Java), has a culture of great tooling, we only do stones and sticks programming when there is no way around it.

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