From the WinUI community calls, I would assert all new employees have zero Windows experience and management doesn't care to give them proper skills.
Too many questions that any Windows developer would know why the question was being asked, where they either couldn't answer or had puzzled looks on why the questions were being asked in first place.
That is also a reason why now there are Webview2 instances all over the place on Windows 11.
> That is also a reason why now there are Webview2 instances all over the place on Windows 11.
I can't help but feel like there is a happy median between Native UI and WebUI that we haven't quite figured out yet.
In the gaming space there is this library called RMLUI that I have used in anger quite a bit. It gives you something that is shaped a lot like HTML and CSS, but with a built-in data binding layer, and a scripting layer that supports Lua by default but gives you the flexability to roll your own language and API. It also is a much lighter dependency than Chromium and V8.
It's missing a couple of features from vanilla HTML and CSS, but also has a bunch of unique featurea that make it far more useful in other ways. For example, it doesn't have CSS background images, but image decorators are so much more useful. And don't get me started on sprite sheets and theme media queries.
I can't help but think that something similarly shaped and designed more for general desktop use would blow the doors off of electron. My workstation has 32 gigs of RAM and yet it's often a half to three quarters full mostly because of Firefox, Discord, and Visual Studio Code instead of more lightweight apps like Visual Studio 2022.....which sounds crazy when you say it out loud.
FWIW, the start menu is a React Native app. I think that’s a pretty good compromise (I think the performance criticism is solvable, they just don’t care). Too bad RN isn’t that well supported on other platforms.
Are you describing XAML?
Possibly? I was a web developer before I started delving into desktop development, so I don't really know a ton about XAML.
I used XAML a bit at an old job
The coolest part was that it was baked into the .NET Framework installed on all newer Windows versions, so I could make a useful GUI app in like 30 KB.
Those were the days... I hated that job though.
Everything I've ever heard about XAML from folks who have used it has been positive.
Seems to me like the kind of thing that was forgotten about due to being joined at the hip with Microsoft, not necessarily because it was a bad idea.
I heard that the WPF code under the hood was jank, which might be part of why MS never went forward with it. From a developer perspective it was quite nice. I started in winform and I miss UI frameworks being obvious and straight forward. I have a rant about how to darken an image using HTML + css that despairs in how unintuitable and bodge-job the solution ends up being. WPF and WinForm were not like that, you draw what someone sees, inline, as they see it and that's quite nice.
I dislike some superficial things about it (and some less superficial things about WPF), but a lot of the ideas around how properties are set are pretty cool to me!
Also how (IIRC) it’s compiled to pretty standard .NET view code (“partial”) you could extend in other parts of the app.
I’m still happy to have left it behind for the aforementioned, ecosystem & tooling reasons.
RMLUI looks neat! closest I've seen to an open source sciter alternative.
so microsoft gave up and the web won?
swift ui apps have some webkit views like the app store, music app etc
Well, to be fair, Microsoft decided to kill the Windows API that everybody knew, and spent about a decade and half creating a replacement every few years that couldn't actually replace the original thing.
It's hard to survive that. Honestly, I don't even know what the GP is talking about when they say the devs don't know "Windows".
Yup. I remember 4 or 5 different frameworks that were supposed to be the future of native UI on windows, but each one after WinForms was harder to use, slower, and less capable than what came before.
I disagree, WPF is quite good to use, and WinForms approach to keeping UI as code is quite moronic. I would say WPF is where it should've stopped.
WPF sucks. I rather like expressing the UI in code. Having to deal with so much XML (XaML) is annoying as fuck.
The workflow on WPF was so much more painful than winforms, which had a decent WYSIWYG designer and solid integration with visual studio.
WPF in comparison was slow, memory hungry, and difficult to learn.
I tried 5 times to make a WPF application but it didn’t even have all the same basic controls that WinForms supported.
nah WPF made way more sense than WinForm in its abstract design, as it supported flow/stack layout ideas instead of anchors like WinForm did. WinForm was much quicker to get started but had a fundamental flaw in that it couldn't really do transparency.
>and spent about a decade and half creating a replacement
I often feels modern Apple is the same. I mean we are 10 years into Swift, 6 years into Swift UI.
And it feels they are still in beta.
And yet it feels more polished than WinUI, that is how bad it has gotten.
What to expect when new interns have no clue about Windows, have been educated with macOS and ChromeOS, and the design team carries Apple devices?
Windows 98 introduced Active Desktop, and still, not as many webviews all over the place.
MSHTML was the first Electron.
Yes, mshtml was insanely powerful. As an undergrad I was surprised how easy it was to build capable UIs with powerful visual effects[1] using mshtml and JS. Even for C++ Windows apps.
It took a long time for this to become a cross-platform reality, but it did inspire me to ignore distractions like XAML and focus on the web.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...
This was already a thing 20 years ago. Students weren’t have any experience with windows, it was something companies used, and today even that has gone away.
I promise you it has not "gone away" which is why Azure is so popular.
What does Azure have to do with windows these days?
Windows is still enforced and mandated on most corporate Fortune 100/500 companies computers.
Their "cloud lift" consists of putting vms into the cloud to run at 10x the cost. (Nothing else changed from The Old Ways)
And that's still where we are today for most enterprises.
That ecosystem has had them for 30+ years and shows no signs of going away anytime soon. If it doesn't have Active Directory and Office 365 or whatever they decided to call it today, they aren't interested.
Still not seeing the connection to Azure.
Wasn't AD like one big security flaw after another?
I think web views do make sense in situations where you’re presenting lots of remote content that may frequently change. After all that’s what the web is, and store content, and to an extent emails many of which are HTML anyway, are reasonable candidates.
yeah in that regard it seems that apple tastefully does so on apps where there's mostly remote roundtrips already like the app store or music app, so I agree that there makes sense to reuse the web infra
but swift ui apps are great and fast cause they're not electron monsters!
thankfully you can use safari webkit inside them, but that doesnt work cross-platform
SwiftUI apps are not great and they're not fast. A lot of Apple's new apps are considered rather poor. Theo has a video where some devs switched to a webview because the text rendering performed better!
Do Windows developers use Windows or Mac at work?
Naturally they use Windows, Microsoft designers apparently not any longer.
It's impossible to develop Windows without Windows... All dev tools and the repository ecosystem designed to work under Windows.
Well, you can use Avalonia or UNO Platform on Linux or Mac and then deploy to Windows.
UNO Platform is basically WinUI.
Mostly agreed... I'd love to see MS just ditch MAUI and/or otherwise buy out UNO or Avalonia and create a cross-platform XAML based UI library that works everywhere (including Linux). As far as Linux goes, they could just go with Gnome/GTK for underlying support... not sure if QT's license would be compatible at this point, MS mostly uses MIT for modern FLOSS.
Bonus points if it worked with C, C++ and Rust for those that want it in addition to .Net (C#).
I honestly think there's still too many old guard managers/exec at Microsoft to let that legitimately happen though. They're too busy trying to wrangle every last penny of value out of every Windows user along the way.