> Dead silence. One person suggested WPF. Another said WinUI 3. A third asked if they should just use Electron. The meeting went sideways and we never did answer the question.
Yes they really do a great job at mimicking awful human writing of that horrendous style, whatever it's called. Post-TED NPR style bougie blogging let's say.
Dead silence. Here's what 3 people said (the opposite of silence). Then the meeting went sideways (also the opposite of silence).
The silence is the story.
The problem is that they just could not commit to anything for more than 2 years after Win32.
They had something reasonably good in WinRT. They should have stuck to that. But Nadella came in, said Azure Cloud is the future and abandoned the Windows platform.
Having spent some time kicking around the Delphi space I got quite into WPF in 2007ish. By 2010 I had not just sworn off it, I'd sworn off Windows entirely. The constant stream of rug-pulls as one bit of MS managed to pull off a political heist over another and - oh no - yet another "latest and greatest" technology was effectively deprecated within 18 months of launch, invalidating all the effort you put in to staying up to date just became a pointless treadmill.
Fortunately Rails was taking off at that point so it was fairly easy to change horses and just ignore it.
The churn would have been much worse if Microsoft was rolling out successful GUI framework after GUI framework. As it is you can still write a Win32 app if that pleases you, or still write .NET (and damn that runtime download!)
Microsoft has bought into ‘make a web app’ since 1988, they introduced AJAX, they got flexbox and grid into CSS and numerous HTML 5 features to support application UIs. They ‘frikin bought npm!. I use Windows every day but I almost exclusively develop cross-platform systems based on the WWW, Java, Python, etc. Whenever I have developed with .NET it has been for a cross-platform front-end like Silverlight or Unity/itch.io.
I can’t say I have a desire to make a native Windows GUI app when I could make a web app: like if it worth doing from my computer isn’t it worth doing it on my iPad from anywhere with Tailscale? For all the complaints about modern JavaScript it gives you the pieces to make a very pleasant world in terms of DX and UX and you certainly don’t need to ship an Electron runtime for many applications.
He still visits Microsoft occasionally. A friend showed me a picture of him visiting Microsoft in Beijing a few months ago (he was excited about BillG visiting). So my guess is that he still has an interest in Microsoft products.
I couldn’t know, but generally speaking, older billionaires don’t typically interact with the world in the same way most of us do (well, those without a social media addiction anyway). The device is someone else’s problem.
If he doesn't use Windows, you won't hear about it. And if you hear that he uses Windows, it might not be true. He loses nothing by denying it. If it worked for his friendship with Epstein, it will work here.
I blame "Impact". That's what you are graded on at Microsoft. Every performance review ('Connect'), every stock award, every promotion run: did this person have that magical impact.
Ostensibly, grading by impact is fine: they want people who make a positive difference. In reality, it means that creating is better than finishing. Now add in the cold realities that at any given time in Microsoft, some groups are on the up and some on the down. What's a great way for a group to regain some status? Launch something. Jazz it up for the Build or Ignite crowd. Get some dev evangelist to talk about it. Then get on the job board and slide over to another team ASAP. You're a High Impact person. Who wouldn't be happy to have you?
I used the more recent Petzold examples to successfully bind DirectWrite to Direct3D, but yeah it’s been a crapshoot otherwise. Still have the Windows Programming (5e?) bible around here somewhere. Took awhile to grind through it. I dread modern-day windows programming it seems like every OS release some new API is going to overtake the others. I moved on.
I disagree. KDE and Gnome both have pretty consistent UI strategies. You may or may not like them but they have clear identities and design guidelines and follow them.
Well, Edge is Chromium. They need to maintain a hard fork, not just a reskin with a bunch of Microsoft webpages and adware. Chromium basically allocates a window and completely draws everything inside using DirectX APIs including menus.
Nobody really has. Apple comes the closest but they keep rug pulling it in weird ways.
Windows and Mac in the 90s had very consistent GUIs with such consistency in things like keyboard shortcuts that apps could easily be learned. The term “intuitive” was king in the realm of UI design.
I'm planing on switching over to QubesOS - way more secure (especially considering rogue LLM-agents) and visually not much worse from windows ... maybe even more cohesive.
I'm not sure I can take such an article seriously if it doesn't mention that the WinRT/UWP/WinUI stack is also based on XAML, and that a fundamental design goal of WinRT was to let people use either C++ or C# according to taste.
Also, the AI smell in this article is just too much.
> Dead silence. One person suggested WPF. Another said WinUI 3. A third asked if they should just use Electron. The meeting went sideways and we never did answer the question.
> That silence is the story.
These LLMs are just awful at writing.
I felt fatigued after the second paragraph. All these LLM tropes chained together are horrible to read.
Yes they really do a great job at mimicking awful human writing of that horrendous style, whatever it's called. Post-TED NPR style bougie blogging let's say.
that part really didn’t make sense to me. This is true for all desktop platforms.
I agree, although I was talking about:
WHAT SILENCE?He immediately said they never did make a decision, so probably that indecision.
Having said that, this article feels like AI slop to me. Couldn’t get through it.
Just have a look at the final picture if you're unsure if it's slop
The problem is that they just could not commit to anything for more than 2 years after Win32.
They had something reasonably good in WinRT. They should have stuck to that. But Nadella came in, said Azure Cloud is the future and abandoned the Windows platform.
Having spent some time kicking around the Delphi space I got quite into WPF in 2007ish. By 2010 I had not just sworn off it, I'd sworn off Windows entirely. The constant stream of rug-pulls as one bit of MS managed to pull off a political heist over another and - oh no - yet another "latest and greatest" technology was effectively deprecated within 18 months of launch, invalidating all the effort you put in to staying up to date just became a pointless treadmill.
Fortunately Rails was taking off at that point so it was fairly easy to change horses and just ignore it.
If I'm writing Windows desktop GUIs I still stick to WPF. Might be Stockholm syndrome but I quite like it.
I don't see the reason to use any of the new ms ui frameworks. Especially if ms themselves don't even really use them.
As far as I know visual studio is still a WPF project so I'm not super worried about it no longer working.
WPF looks much nicer. Personally I find it hard as hell to debug.
Winforms just work, and have a well defined set of behaviors. It does not matter that they do not look as nice for most people.
Microsoft had a lot of great talent suffering from a lack of leadership and coherent vision. They foreshadowed everything wrong with Big Tech today.
Steven Sinofsky wrote this piece a couple of weeks ago about the same topic:
https://x.com/stevesi/status/2036921223150440542
This barely mentions Windows Forms, which is the cleanest and fastest way to code Windows GUI apps.
A few years ago, I wanted to prototype something quick and I wrote it in Windows Forms over C# (all code, no visual editor).
Winforms is a Win32 API wrapper, so on the same level as MFC, not a separate UI framework.
The churn would have been much worse if Microsoft was rolling out successful GUI framework after GUI framework. As it is you can still write a Win32 app if that pleases you, or still write .NET (and damn that runtime download!)
Microsoft has bought into ‘make a web app’ since 1988, they introduced AJAX, they got flexbox and grid into CSS and numerous HTML 5 features to support application UIs. They ‘frikin bought npm!. I use Windows every day but I almost exclusively develop cross-platform systems based on the WWW, Java, Python, etc. Whenever I have developed with .NET it has been for a cross-platform front-end like Silverlight or Unity/itch.io.
I can’t say I have a desire to make a native Windows GUI app when I could make a web app: like if it worth doing from my computer isn’t it worth doing it on my iPad from anywhere with Tailscale? For all the complaints about modern JavaScript it gives you the pieces to make a very pleasant world in terms of DX and UX and you certainly don’t need to ship an Electron runtime for many applications.
Microsoft GUI development is a mess. They don't seem to care. Just look at the mishmash of different GUI styles in Windows 11.
Thankfully I have been mostly insulated from it by sticking to Qt and C++ for the last 25 years.
Given how bad windows has become since windows 7, I’ve been wondering. Does Bill Gates still use Windows? Does he put up with the horribleness?
I think Bill pretty much chilled out since he stepped down?
Yeah of course. He has nothing to do with Microsoft operations or strategy. But does he still use the products?
He still visits Microsoft occasionally. A friend showed me a picture of him visiting Microsoft in Beijing a few months ago (he was excited about BillG visiting). So my guess is that he still has an interest in Microsoft products.
I couldn’t know, but generally speaking, older billionaires don’t typically interact with the world in the same way most of us do (well, those without a social media addiction anyway). The device is someone else’s problem.
If he doesn't use Windows, you won't hear about it. And if you hear that he uses Windows, it might not be true. He loses nothing by denying it. If it worked for his friendship with Epstein, it will work here.
I blame "Impact". That's what you are graded on at Microsoft. Every performance review ('Connect'), every stock award, every promotion run: did this person have that magical impact.
Ostensibly, grading by impact is fine: they want people who make a positive difference. In reality, it means that creating is better than finishing. Now add in the cold realities that at any given time in Microsoft, some groups are on the up and some on the down. What's a great way for a group to regain some status? Launch something. Jazz it up for the Build or Ignite crowd. Get some dev evangelist to talk about it. Then get on the job board and slide over to another team ASAP. You're a High Impact person. Who wouldn't be happy to have you?
I used the more recent Petzold examples to successfully bind DirectWrite to Direct3D, but yeah it’s been a crapshoot otherwise. Still have the Windows Programming (5e?) bible around here somewhere. Took awhile to grind through it. I dread modern-day windows programming it seems like every OS release some new API is going to overtake the others. I moved on.
This is what happens when one's performance is measured by "impact".
This is a problem with all the OSes.
I disagree. KDE and Gnome both have pretty consistent UI strategies. You may or may not like them but they have clear identities and design guidelines and follow them.
So the windows team hates .NET, so they use react webviews and put them in explorer and start menu???
They use react native
As of today, I only use 2 solutions for Windows GUI :
- windows forms in .net
- flutter
All the rest always presents itself with a sheer aura of "It was a great idea but we couldn't finish it".
Without ever discussing with anyone from MS about it, I think they stopped improving/working on this because of electron.
Any web developer can build a good enough website and a good enough desktop app with electron.
Case in point after Edge updated this morning:
https://imgur.com/a/dWp5Ohj
Did they even try to make it look like the new context menus?
Well, Edge is Chromium. They need to maintain a hard fork, not just a reskin with a bunch of Microsoft webpages and adware. Chromium basically allocates a window and completely draws everything inside using DirectX APIs including menus.
The writing style was really poor. Too many words saying too few things.
I think that is an insult to MS Bob
Today i still use C# with Windows.Forms. All my old knowledge is still usefull. People know how to use a Windows.Forms program.
It’s great, some vendors have fantastic component libraries for reasonable prices.
Unreal that MS bet the farm in Windows on so many other turds instead of boring old WinForms/Win32.
That illustration at the end of the article is quite something.
Quite some slop
Has it become unreasonable to use an image editor for anything? At least to stamp some readable text on top of your slop??
Nobody really has. Apple comes the closest but they keep rug pulling it in weird ways.
Windows and Mac in the 90s had very consistent GUIs with such consistency in things like keyboard shortcuts that apps could easily be learned. The term “intuitive” was king in the realm of UI design.
Then the web hit and all that died.
Not nobody. KDE has a functional and consistent GUI.
I'm planing on switching over to QubesOS - way more secure (especially considering rogue LLM-agents) and visually not much worse from windows ... maybe even more cohesive.
It’s web. Just use electron or Tauri.
I'm not sure I can take such an article seriously if it doesn't mention that the WinRT/UWP/WinUI stack is also based on XAML, and that a fundamental design goal of WinRT was to let people use either C++ or C# according to taste.
Also, the AI smell in this article is just too much.