Comment by cheschire
4 days ago
I've tried each iteration of UI paradigm they've tried since WinRT and never really had any significant problems with any of them. WinRT, UWP, WinUI, MAUI...
But then they aren't even willing to invest the time to dogfood their own products and fully replace the windows UI. Really doesn't inspire confidence.
I suspect they also made a bad bet by going so hard on blazor without putting more support behind WASM itself. Now that's stalled out with WASM's own failure to reach critical mass.
Microsoft has zero vision in the UI space. It’s crazy that there isn’t there a single, obvious solution for developing Windows applications in 2025.
I agree that it seems they’ve made some bad bets and now are bogged down supporting half a dozen different frameworks with different limitations and tradeoffs.
They keep trying to reinvent the wheel, but it doesn’t seem like they’ve ever really meaningfully improved on WPF.
At least there is Avalonia for an open source, cross platform WPF alternative. It seems like the sanest way of making desktop applications with C# currently.
That would be a first, not having significant problems.
As someone that was deeply invested into WinRT since Windows 8, and went back into distributed systems and Web after all the disappointment regarding how managemetn handled it.
Everyone on the Windows development ecosystem has had enough from the multiple reboots and tool changes, UWP never being as good as WPF, WinUI iterations even worse, the team now went radio silent, the last community call was a disaster,...
Sorry, to be clear I meant no significant problems with the tech.
Sure, it was opinionated tech, but that would’ve been ok if they had stuck with it like C# itself and fleshed it out more, which only would’ve happened had they implemented the entire OS in it. The fact that they couldn’t is in my mind the exact reason the tech failed.
I agree with your point of view, this was the second coming of Longhorn, WinRT was after all pushed by the same folks that killed the Longhorn effort, those on Windows team that sided with Steven Sinofsky, using COM in Vista as future foundation for .NET ideas in Longhorn.
The Hilo tutorial for Windows 7 remarks regarding C++ are quite telling of their point of view, on which programming language one should be using,
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/announcing-hilo/
"The rich user experience of Windows 7 is best accessed through a powerful, flexible language, and that means C++: by using C++ you can access the raw power of the APIs for Windows 7."
From https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/msdn10/f...
Joe Duffy has some remarks on how even with Midori running Asia Bing infrastructure, and proving workloads in front of the Windows team, the reception to it was rather cold.
https://youtu.be/CuD7SCqHB7k?t=921&si=r8a0nScB4fcrxxIu
Eventually he left MSR and created Pulumin on top of Go.
Meanwhile Apple/NeXT and Google, decided to push languages like Objective-C, Swift, Java, Kotlin, over classical C and C++, proving the point that change is possible if management is willing to support the team, even if that is a very long run.
See Apple's Metal Swift bindings, versus Microsoft's Agility SDK for DirectX.