Comment by WorldMaker
10 days ago
WindowsAppSDK (and its direct predecessor) was installed only by the OS in Windows 8 and early Windows 10 and everybody hated the OS updating it and needing to know things like which specific Windows 10 update a user was on to access features. It's a mess either way it is installed.
> A sane person might ask why not just use Qt (smaller distribution!) or Electron (about the same size) at that point, since they're cross platform and you can easily get fluent themes that look the same as WinUI3?
The "good news" about this tool is that it is partly for making it easier to use WinUI3 from Electron, so that you can have both large distributions at the same time.
I remember the problems with the WinRT APIs being tied to specific Windows versions (still are, just a smaller surface area, so less of an issue). With the old service pack model it wouldn't be an issue but with constant OS releases it was too much churn.
I thought they had solved the worst problem with WinUI2, a bit like the compatibility library in Android, so you only had to bundle the more "volatile" bits while still delegating most things to the OS.
But then they went and threw all that out the windows (pun intended) with WinUI3 which even has its own separate implementation of DirectWrite for some god forsaken reason.
Unlike the DirectX redistributables of old it's not even backwards compatible so you can't tell people "just download the WinAppSDK runtime", they have to install the specific version you used when developing your app.
You get that download "for free" if you use a .appx, but with a regular installer you're on your own. Even the way apps link to the WindowsAppSDK is a mess with a weird bootstrapping process.
Not worth the headache.
> own separate implementation of DirectWrite for some god forsaken reason.
That reason I sort of understand: The Cold War that DirectX can't be bothered to support WinRT directly is fascinating from outside, and also just really, really stupid. DirectX is ancient COM. WinRT is essentially modern COM 3.0. But if DirectX supported WinRT's version of COM then "Oh No, those idiot and dirty C# and JS developers could use it directly" and where would the games industry be without excuses to force college graduates to use only the one true C++ like Stroustrup intended? /facepalm
For a library called DirectX they seem to really love being IndirectX. Someone in the Windows Division should have forced them onto the right path sooner, but Windows is too busy being in either the Azure or AI divisions these days to actually care about being a consistent OS and DirectX slipped into being protected by Xbox in ways that are backwards to how things were meant to work. (Xbox was supposed to be the way to encourage more software developed with DirectX not to protect more software developers from using DirectX directly.) That xkcd comic of Microsoft being a bunch of disconnected orgs in a Mexican standoff seems to apply here (directly).