Comment by maxxxxx
8 years ago
That's a very charitable explanation that I find hard to accept. I think it's more that MS .Net development is organized in way that it's easy to do new stuff but hard to maintain an effort long time. In other areas they are able to make progress without breaking everything all the time. C# has stayed backwards compatible while still moving forward quickly. SQL server doesn't release a new version every 2 years that breaks old stuff.
Somehow they seem to lack leadership.
Keep in mind that .NET Core is almost the same .NET runtime/framework (little-f) that powers UWP. It's been a huge hurdle across the board, web and desktop alike. I'm sure if the .NET team had had a magic wand to shrink the .NET Framework (cap-f) down to a smaller size and remove all the legacy Win32 code without breaking so much compatibility they would have.
It's easy to say in hindsight that they should have tried for something like what .NET Standard 2.0 is today earlier, but I, at least, can't blame them for attempting to try to clean house and remove terrible dev experiences like AppDomains and DataTable. Those APIs are terrible and should have died.
But again they have no upgrade path. They just produce something new and expect everyone to jump on board. My expectation is that UWP will last 2-3 years and then they will have something else that does the same but in a different way and UWP is in maintenance mode.
You may be confused. .NET Standard 2.0 support for UWP means the upgrade path is (finally) here today. Start a UWP project in VS 2017.4, make sure the project targets the Fall Creator's Update (the Windows 10 feature update to be released at the end of this month), and from that UWP app you can now add a reference to almost anything on NuGet you want. .NET Standard 2.0 support means that if it ran on the .NET Framework 4.x, it likely runs on UWP now (with rarer but obvious exceptions like using old WPF or WinForms libraries, some of which will still "work" as no-ops not actually doing anything).
Again, I'm not sure how much clearer of an upgrade path you could want? If you have a WPF app today, everything but the XAML will work in Fall Creators Update UWP. The XAML may even be trivial to convert to UWP XAML, they are related like family.
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