Winapp, the Windows App Development CLI

80 pointsposted 15 days ago
by MaysonL

15 Comments

pjmlp

9 days ago

I already mentioned in a few places, this is useless, probably a team having to meet some KPIs, OKRs, or whatever to show their impact value on the next evaluation cycle.

Anything related to WinUI, WinAppSDK, CsWinRT, C++/WinRT is a sea of bugs, broken tooling, and unfulfilled promises, that no one should bother with.

Easily confirmed by going into their public repositories over at Github, or community session recordings over at YouTube.

For those using .NET, keep using Windows Forms or WPF, or reach out to Avalonia and Uno.

For those using C++, the aging MFC has much better tooling as incredible as it sounds, or use instead VCL/Firemonkey (C++ Builder), Qt, wxWidgets,....

For anything else, whatever bindings are available on top of plain Win32.

irrlichthn

9 days ago

Sounds very negative, but I can confirm - it's the truth unfortunately.

I'm developing windows desktop apps since nearly 30 years now and tried mostly everything Microsoft has thrown at us - Win32 - WinForms - WPF - WinJS - WinRT - UWP - WinUI - MAUI - not sure if that was all - and Win32 always wins. Everything else is incredible broken and stops being supported in such a short time. It's a shame really.

embedding-shape

9 days ago

Not to mention, the code is quite obviously vibeslop...

Why are they building CLIs and tooling in this way? Don't they realize that shipping low quality code will eventually hurt them more than whatever UX benefits it gives developers? People will give up on using this quicker than the attention you get from launching it.

Just one example that shows how little they care, since the commit message is obviously written by an agent/LLM, the code surely is as well: https://github.com/microsoft/winappCli/commit/3dead8ed147917...

philistine

9 days ago

So you're saying that Winapp doesn't kick the llamas' ass?

sandos

9 days ago

I have no clue about GUI programming, but I eventually came to the conclusion to use Avalonia after even my LLM told me to do it.

bossyTeacher

9 days ago

> Anything related to WinUI, WinAppSDK, CsWinRT, C++/WinRT is a sea of bugs, broken tooling, and unfulfilled promises, that no one should bother with.

Can you add MAUI to this list? Please and thank you.

vjvjvjvjghv

9 days ago

I don’t rally understand what what they are thinking but it seems MS has given up on windows desktop dev. Even Office is now moving to web technology even if it means to make these apps worse.

voldacar

9 days ago

What's the best way to get into MFC or Win32 in current year? Is there a canonically best book or tutorial for those wanting to learn?

kumrayu

9 days ago

What are Microsoft's own Office Apps built on?

actionfromafar

9 days ago

Or just plain Win32, no wrappers! Maybe with coding agents it can have a renaissance.

bob1029

9 days ago

Raw win32 isn't actually that bad now that we have LLMs. I don't even use the cswin32 project anymore because chatgpt is good enough today. I think win32 from modern C#/.NET is a very happy blend when you need that low level access.

TheAceOfHearts

9 days ago

Looking back on the history of Windows, one of the things that most stands out to me as a user is the utterly insane UX around the C++ redistributable. They really should've figured out a better solution than having every single application ship their own copy along with a separate installer, and then having the installer run always because the developer cannot be sure if it's installed correctly. As I understand it, this might still be a problem with the latest version? If someone like Steve Jobs had been responsible for Windows he would've fought with managers, lawyers, and engineers until the problem was resolved.

asah

9 days ago

But does it whip the llama's ass ?

reddalo

9 days ago

At first I was like... what does Winamp have to do with apps development?