It’s been a long time since I had to touch Windows development. If I had to do it over again, I would use React Native for Windows UI where possible and low-level Win32-React Native module bridges for user space code.

The last time I had to do Windows development was about 15 years ago. I used a library called WTL (I think a couple comments here mention it). I couldn’t use any of the newer stuff that Windows 8-10 were pushing because it needed backward compatibility. It seemed way less bloated than MFC, but not as annoying to use as ATL or rawdogging Win32 APIs.

Ironically, I was developing a Win32 app to build a cloud bridge to a Rails app (talking to Quickbooks COM API which was hell on Earth, with XML and XML definitions) on Mac, using VMware on Mac to talk to Quickbooks Windows. I was so annoyed with Win32 development I used the Chrome Embedded Framework library to build the UI for the Win32 app so I wouldn’t have to wrestle WTL for UI and just have browser-based views to drive UI.

I think it was very tempting to drop C/C++ development for .NET code, but I didn’t want to drop off user adoption by requesting users to download a huge .NET runtime if their computer didn’t already have it.

This was when I was building Levion, a Quickbooks Windows to Cloud Rails app…