It has been a mess for 15 years and Microsoft keeps making it worse by adding new frameworks without retiring the old ones. Win32, WPF, WinUI, MAUI. Nobody knows which one to pick.

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Smalltalker-80 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, and the hubris sting-of-death was UWP. They tried to make Windows into a mobile OS, severely restricting the alowed actions of programs, including strict certification to be able to run them (elsewhere). Of course nobody went for this and UWP died a quiet death. Recently there are signs that MS is trying to go back to making products that users actualle want (Win11 reverts). We'll see...

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ack_complete 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's hard to describe how uselessly restrictive the UWP model was when they originally introduced it as "Metro-style apps" in Windows 8. Among the things it officially did not support included:

- Multiple monitors - Non-full screen views - Sideloading outside of the Store - Offline installation - Explicit threads - thread pool only - Aligned memory allocation - malloc only - Any C++ compiler other than MSVC - Support for any version of Windows other than Windows 8 - Running apps as administrator - Running more than one instance of an app at a time - Runtime shader compilation

If any ONE of these things was a blocker, you could not write a Metro style app. And yet Microsoft pushed this extremely hard -- including almost completely ending any maintenance of Win32 APIs. And despite the many relaxations and extensions, UWP is still largely useless today, and now even itself seems to be going into maintenance mode. All of which has done a lot of damage to the state of Windows desktop platform development.

As an example of how bizarre UWP is, for some reason every time they published a list of new APIs added to it, they converted the list of API identifiers to lowercase in the documentation:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/whats-new/wind...

It's relatively insignificant, but... why? Just one of many things that showed how immature UWP was.

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anonymars 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> They tried to make Windows into a mobile OS, severely restricting the alowed actions of program

They already had Silverlight! For Windows Phone 7. Then they killed that off too and expected the "plethora" of WP7 apps to be rebuilt for WP8 (requiring the beloved Windows 8 desktop OS for this task). Then they again expected developers to throw that away in favor of UWP for Windows 10, which unified the desktop and phone OSes. By then it was too late.

Old apps still ran on the newer OSes but the SDKs became dead-ends.

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pdpi 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> (Win11 reverts).

I must've missed that one. What did they revert?

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lpcvoid 8 hours ago | parent [-]

It doesn't matter - what Microslop says and what they do are traditionally very distinct things.

But in case you want to read yourself: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/03/20/our-com...

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Traubenfuchs 8 hours ago | parent [-]

"File explorer launch experience" -hard to tell if this is satire…

	▲	Smalltalker-80 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I did mean these, very recent promises (vaporware at this moment), without satire. https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/03/20/our-com...

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hrmtst93837 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Picking a stack for native Windows UI is like rolling dice, except sometimes you get bitten by COM for fun. If you care at all about backwards compatibility or deploying outside the MS Store you basically end up circling back to Win32 APIs much as the frameworks would love for you to pretend otherwise. Ironically, the 'official' docs now reads like a half-hearted apology for the last decade of churn.

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mschuster91 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> without retiring the old ones

They'd lose too much enterprise software that's not being maintained any longer but still is business critical.

You can still run most programs from the Windows 95 era unmodified on a modern Windows 11 machine and a lot of things is relying on that under the hood.