Microsoft's UWP = Unwanted Windows Platform?

Yes, big disappointment how everything was managed.<p>For me, .NET Native and C++&#x2F;CX felt great, one was what .NET should have been all along, and the other finally felt like Microsoft was catching up with C++ Builder 25 years later.<p>The Windows team with their politics, bombed both of them, they let .NET Native lose compatibility with regular .NET improvements, while a team managed to kill C++&#x2F;CX with C++&#x2F;WinRT, with the caveat that the tooling for C++&#x2F;WinRT feels like using Visual C++ 6.0 with ATL 3.0, four years after their introduction.<p>The github repositories are full of endless bug tickets and improvement requests for WinUI 3.0, WinUI 2.x on UWP, lack of VS tooling for C++&#x2F;WinRT, lack of bindings for .NET that require developers to write their own boilerplate bindings,....<p>It is depressing to have advocated this, and now they clearly show not getting it, proven by a discussion I had today how lowlevel App SDK is for .NET devs versus what is available on Apple and Google platforms for managed languages.<p>Forms, WPF and MFC are really the technologies to play safe on Windows native applications, anything else is getting ready for another rewrite.<p>Those doing C++ on Windows, maybe adopt Qt or C++ Builder, or just stay with MFC even if it sounds awful to use it in 2021, unless you enjoy editing IDL files without VS support for your XAML bindings, and then manually merge the generated C++ code into the existing project.

I&#x27;m probably the only person who started learning UWP in 2020; when the pandemic hit and I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands, I spent months building a UWP application for my own use.<p>I think this is the right call on Microsoft&#x27;s part. UWP has been semi-abandoned for a while now and it&#x27;s nice to get some clarity on its future (or lack thereof).<p>UWP had many pain points (the .NET Native compiler, installation, filesystem access, sandboxing, longstanding XAML limitations), but it wasn&#x27;t all bad. You can tell that the Windows team spent a <i>lot</i> of effort trying to make UWP&#x2F;WinRT&#x2F;WinUI successful, and it&#x27;s a little sad that most developers never got to see the good parts of UWP. Among other things, UWP made it remarkably easy to build interfaces that &quot;just work&quot; with both touch input and keyboard+mouse.<p>It&#x27;s unfortunate that UWP was hobbled from the start with so many restrictions. I think it would have seen much more adoption if it had been built with an escape hatch from the draconian distribution+sandboxing requirements.

One of the biggest problems developing for Windows is the way code signing works and Microsoft&#x27;s SmartScreen. I see tons of web apps where I think they&#x27;d make more sense as a desktop app and I prefer both JavaFX and Microsoft&#x27;s platforms over web development, but the web wins for everything in my mind because it&#x27;s an open platform that no one can take away from me.<p>The way AppGet worked where I could click a button on a webpage and launch an app was something that I really liked. Microsoft could make a better version of that by allowing domain validated code signing for sandboxed apps. Of course, they&#x27;d need to give up control over curation for it to be any good and I&#x27;d be surprised if they&#x27;d do that.

Not disappointed or surprised at all. Microsoft routinely promote new frameworks promising the world, and then drop it years later after the faithful have spent $ millions investing in the new platform. I still remember Microsoft trying to convince the world to rewrite billions of lies of C++ in C#. And then after a number of years suddenly doing a 180 and making C++ high priority again. I highly recommend ignoring pretty much everything Microsoft hypes and instead look at what is still working well and being supported 10 years after it was introduced.

UWP is obsolete, because desktop applications are obsolete.<p>The Fortune 100 company I currently work for had UWP application for some internal needs. The main pain point was that it was distributed to some private instance of Microsoft AppStore, which meant every time we released new version it had to undergo certification process, and then it would take days to actually push it to user&#x27;s laptops.<p>We rewrote the app as the Angular web application, and never looked back. Now every time we deploy the new version all users get the update immediately.

Now if we could just get them to drop the .NET nonsense, things could then possibly return to being as stable as NT4 used to be.