Can't help but see this as anything other than "The team working on it doesn't know how to code native applications on our OS"
I'd get it if they were meant to be cross platform apps, but they're not. Crazy they couldn't have bothered to write native windows apps in .NET/C# for something that's obviously meant to be Windows exclusive. The community writes way better Windows apps (Sumatra, Notepad++, etc) than Microsoft does internally.
Microsoft has no cohesive product vision for the OS and just seems to let various groups slap random low quality shit to the OS, based on some internal power struggles their managers win in the org I assume. It's ironic that low quality slop like those and ads ship by default with the OS, but the truly useful and high quality utilities they write like PowerToys, do not.
They lost the plot on their core audience after Windows 7 and sloppy implementations of "AI" like Copilot+ and Recall won't bring them back, on the contrary, it convinces people to GTFO to Linux ASAP.
Even their OneDrive uses just QT.
I find it funny that, unlike OneDrive, iCloud desktop client uses WinUI.
But I'm not holding my breath and think that whoever could make this reality was pushed out of the relevant teams or the org as a whole by the time W11 shipped - just look how they killed great OneNote UWP variant. Salvaging the situation would be an improbable miracle.
If one of them was at the steering wheel of Longhorn, it would most likely been shipped with its .NET based architecture, improved in later releases, and everyone that wasn't into it, could have looked for a job elsewhere.
from https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/
> At this time, there are two generations of WinUI: WinUI 2 for UWP and WinUI in the Windows App SDK (WinUI 3). While both can be used in production-ready apps on Windows 10 and later, each have different development targets.
In the Microsoft land it's always utterly confusing to get started. You are always left guessing what choice to make.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/winui3/... (not very pretty)
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/windows-dotne... (better)
In either case, my comment did not concern regular users but MSFT themselves.
They also don't tell designer isn't around, like on Forms/WPF/UWP, or how bad the C++ development story is.
Forms, WPF and ironically MFC, are the only ones with good tooling, and feature coverage.
Not it isn't. What you're pointing out is the PRO of Windows, not a CON. It's why backwards compatibility works so well. If you have a super old app you're still developing, you can keep using that old UI stack, no need to rewrite it on a newer one just for ti to be compatible with the latest Windows release.
I feel like most people complainant about the different UI stacks supported by Windows, are not Windows developers but just enjoy pointing it out as if it bothers them somehow through sheer existence even though they never wrote any Windows apps.
There is seldom anyone of us that went through that, and will advise anyone to use WinUI 3.0, unless they themselves have a sunken cost into UWP, and need a way out.
Quite easy to find out in the endless discussions on the related Github repos.
>Quite easy to find out in the endless discussions on the related Github repos.
People on the internet complain about anything. How many discussions are there about Gnome's file picker?
And worse of all, in the end, those of us doing WinRT advocacy, were the ones answering for Microsoft's missteps in customer meetings.
Too many hard feelings to let it go just like that.
It certainly convinced me. Steam Proton runs pretty much all the games I enjoy (mainly indies), and I can quarantine Windows in a VM for MS Office, as well as keep a full Windows installation on a separate disk if I really need it (rarely).
The crap that's made its way into mainline Windows makes me feel like my computer isn't serving me anymore.
It's a drag, though, because as everyone will immediately see, having a shortcut on your keyboard to open glorified GPT-4 isn't really a killer feature.
That seems extremely far-fetched to me. If it's for economic reasons, I think it's more likely related to availability of developers with webapp experience vs native experience.
I'd accept the "difficulty" excuse from a company like Walmart. But we're talking about a (relatively) small number of built-in mini applications here, inside a tech-specialised company that created, maintains and presumably promotes this native framework.
If you know what you are doing, not at all. That being said the technologies are quite different and not all skills are transferrable. If you're an experienced web developer, then transferring to writing Windows apps takes a bit of getting used to. Once you've wrapped your head around C#, Visual Studio and WPF or WinUI3, and embraced the Window Way, it's actually a quite productive environment.
What I suspect we might be seeing is that Windows has so thoroughly lost the developer mindshare battle, that not even Microsoft can find experienced Windows devs to hire, and most of their new developers have a web first programming background and have never used any of the Windows GUI frameworks.
In the world which 99% of software teams live in though, the former skillset is far, far rarer than the React/node/Vue etc. toolkit which is a dime a dozen these days. If a fresh team wants to from 0 to functioning product, I still stand by that they'll get it out the door _much_ faster using some agreed upon webstack than they would doing it the Windows Way. Hence the "orders of magnitude" phrasing which others are having trouble with.
Like, I honestly hate web apps. But there is some that is really good, like the new Threads.net app...
Meanwhile, MSFT web apps are horrible. They kill native apps, like Mail and classic Outlook, and are replacing with the horrible new Web Outlook.
Copilot on Android is also horrible, Bing, etc. They don't know how to build web apps either.
After evaluating a bunch of them I was somewhat astonished to conclude that Flutter was the best option, at least for my purposes.