Microsoft Edit

Unfortunately, the new Edit isn't safe from such decisions.

While Satya might have made the change Microsoft <3 FOSS, the Gates/Balmer era was much better towards Windows developers.

Now we have a schizophrenia of Web and Desktop frameworks, and themselves hardly use them, what used to be a comfortable VS wizard, or plugin, now is e.g. a CLI tool that dumps an Excel file, showing that newer blood has hardly any Windows development culture, or their upper management.

I don't know how many people don't know this, but now you actually can't release app on Windows without it showing your warning while installing unless you sign it with EV certificates, which cost upwards of 500$ for a year.

As you may have guessed, this simply pushes out smaller devs. This used to NOT be like this. It should NOT be like this.

I would highly recommend looking into Azure code signing. It is confusing to set up. But comes with instant reputation and ”only” costs 10$ a month.

EV certificates has always felt like an utter scam and extortion to me. At least now there is an alternative.

There are currently no ideal native app development frameworks on Windows. WinForms is the closest thing

Good. This might suck for opensource devs, but for normies that might get a random exe link this is good. I've gotten numerous phone calls from relatives when they try to run some unrecognized app, most of the time is benign, but on few occasions it was something malicious.

I'm so glad to hear that from someone unprompted. I tried WPF and it was a million times harder to use than WinForms, and I couldn't even be bothered to try out MAUI (although I accept it as an apology for WPF lol). I'm still using a WinForms application every day (Git Extensions) and have been able to contribute to it not least because it's the good old familiar WinForms.

This is not to say that WinForms isn't without its problems. I often wonder what it could be like if all the effort of making WPF and MAUI had gone into maintaining, modernizing and improving it.

I think that the native GUI development APIs provided by OS vendors need a kind of "headless" implementation first, where you can build UI in pure code like winforms, and then they should offer a framework on top of that. I, personally, hate XAML. It's stricter than HTML/CSS and very opinionated about how to organize your application. I feel that XAML frameworks should have a common Winforms-like API behind them that you can switch to any time you want. But I've found that using the C# code-behind APIs manually for WPF, UWP, MAUI, etc, is far more verbose than Winforms was.

My only major problem with winforms is that it's still using GDI under the hood which, despite what many people believe, is actually still primarily software-rendered. If they could just swap out Winforms for Direct2D under the hood (or at least allow a client hint at startup to say "prefer Direct2D") it would really bring new life to Winforms, I think.

I would also like a C++ native GUI API that's more modern than MFC

Agreed it is the easiest, however it is also possible to use WPF on the same style as Forms, with more features, no need to go crazy with MVVM, stay with plain code behind.

Having said this, from 3rd parties, Avalonia is probably the best option.

While I think Uno is great as well, they lose a bit by betting on WinUI as foundation on Windows, and that has been only disappointment after disappointment since Project Reunion.

It's a heavy tax to protect the ignorant. I hear things like this and think how I've been using a computer for nearly 4 decades and it's never once happened to me. Maybe those types of people need to re-evaluate their technology choices (maybe iPad is more appropriate) instead of taxing the entire ecosystem to protect them from themselves.

Unfortunately Apple normalised it, first with the iPhone. There are upsides (theoretically - less trash apps), but the review/curation process doesn't scale, and yep - the small devs are effectively told to bug off.

10 years ago I wanted to build a Love2D game, and release it for the three major OS's. The .love files are effectively ZIP archives, kinda like cartridges, but you need the correct Love2D version (they broke API compat every year or so). Windows and Mac used to be: "cat love.exe game.zip > game.exe".

Linux gave me the most crap, because making a portable, semi-static build was a nightmare; you couldn't rely on distros because each one shipped a different version of love.

Now Linux is actually becoming more viable, not because it's making that much progress, but because the two mainstream platforms are taking steps back.

low income countries don't have the money for iPads. My parents run on a 300 Euro computer bought 5 years ago. My dad is technical enough to get around a computer, but he's in his 60s now. My mom can open Facebook and youtube. Sometimes either of them downloads stuff, and opens them. So your solution is "make millions consumers spend $$ on overpriced hardware and even more closed off system, so few hundred open source devs don't spend 500$ to verify their app (which they will have to do if they want to release on the iOS platform either way)" Ain't no way.

Unfortunately that is something Microsoft seems incapable of.

MFC was already relatively bad versus OWL. Borland[0] kept improving it with VCL and nowadays FireMonkey.

There there is Qt as well.

Microsoft instead came up with ATL, and when they finally had something that could rival C++ Builder, with C++/CX, a small group managed to replace it with C++/WinRT because they didn't like extensions, the irony.

With complete lack of respect for paying customers, as C++/WinRT never ever had the same Visual Studio tooling experience as C++/CX.

Nowadays it is in maintenance, stuck in C++17, working just good enough for WinUI 3.0 and WinAppSDK implementation work, and the riot group is having fun with Rust's Windows bindings.

So don't expect anything good coming from Microsoft in regards to modern C++ GUI frameworks.

[0] - Yes nowadays others are at the steering wheel.

> Good. This might suck for opensource devs, but for normies that might get a random exe link this is good

That random exe link is signed by Microsoft.

A popup warning is not a heavy tax.

If you count the number of ignorant people who use Windows versus the people like you, you'll quickly realize the tax is very cheap for the level of protection it offers to the number of people it offers it to.

Now I get why a project I work on is signed for Apple and not for Windows... 5x the price, jeez

At least signing is free for MacOS apps. And back when I used it only $100/year for iPhone apps.

"C# Markup" [1] [2] sounds a lot like what you are looking for. As the only "second party" option in this space it's interesting that it is so MAUI only/MAUI focused, but I suppose that's the "new hotness".

There have been similar F# libraries and third-party C# libraries for a while that seem nice to work with in similar ways.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/windows-dotne...

[2] https://github.com/CommunityToolkit/Maui.Markup

We spent the better part of a calendar year researching what framework to update our MFC app to. We really liked the idea of staying first-party since our UI is explicitly Windows-only, and we looked at every framework - MAUI, winforms or WPF with a C# layer, WinUI3...

It quickly became apparent that WinUI3 was the only one even close to viable for our use case, and we tried getting a basic prototype running with out legacy backend code. We kept running into dealbreakers we hoped would be addressed in the alleged future releases, like the lack of tables, or the baffling lack of a GUI UI designer (like every other previous Win framework).

...We're currently writing our GUI in Qt.

... where is signing free for macOS apps?

You can use an ad-hoc signature to sign, but people who download the app will still have to jump through hoops to run it.

The new Edit.exe is indeed safe from those things.

A requirement for the tool is that it must remain as small as possible, so that it can be included in the smallest distributions of Windows, like Nano Server. It is the rescue text editor there.

I’m sure plugins are going to do all the things that everyone doesn’t want (or does want) but the default edit.exe will remain small, I’d bet money on it.

Borland was pretty good on the GUI front, I think we're forgetting how easy it was to get something rolling in Delphi. It's baffling Microsoft still hasn't gotten their stuff together on this. They've been just releasing new frameworks since the WinRT era and hoping something sticks.

The correct answer should be a legally-mandated one-time escape hatch.

Bury it as deep as Microsoft wants, but...

  1) Everyone can use it
  2) It turns off all nanny-checks
  3) It makes future checks opt-in instead of opt-out

Microsoft's GUI problem is two-fold.

Firstly, that nobody believes them when they swear that {new GUI framework} will be the future and used for everything. Really. Because this time is not like those other times.

Secondly, pre-release user feedback. Ironic, given other parts of Microsoft do feedback well.

Imho, the only way MS is going to truly displace WinForms at this point is to launch a 5-year project, developed in the open, and guided in part by their community instead of internally.

And toss a sweetener in, like free app signing or something.

No they didn't, signing was already common across Symbian, J2ME, Windows CE/Pocket PC, Newton, PalmOS, Blackberry, BREW.

And game consoles naturally.

Then they should pay it, not the developers?

All of these platforms combined had less global impact over their lifetime than iPhone has had in its first five years.

Apple is never first to do something.

Only from an American point of view, catching up to the mobile life in Europe, Asia, and some lucky African countries.

I started coding for J2ME on a Vodafone contest, based on Sharp GX20, which was using DOCOMO APIs in 2003.

Afterwards I joined Nokia, so I kind of had an idea how we, and our competition was doing in the market.

US was the only market that stayed PDA centric, with exception of Blackberry adoption, until the iPhone came to be.

Traditionally it was the only market where Nokia had issues.