On: WinUI – The modern native UI platform of Windows

[pjmlp]

UWP is the future of Windows APIs, Win32 is mostly frozen since WIndows XP.

Microsoft is just making UWP similar to what Google is making with AndroidX, detaching the technology from the OS version.

[vetinari → pjmlp]

The value of Windows is in the Win32 API, due to the existing investment into software. If you have existing code base, you want to keep it running with minimal ongoing investments.

For a case study of interest for newer APIs, see also Windows RT.

[pjmlp → vetinari]

Windows RT failed because of ARM.

Some people are still running critical business on Windows XP, yet the world moves on.

[vetinari → pjmlp]

Windows RT failed, because it had no applications, except for MS Office.

So Win32 was there, ISVs just were not allowed to recompile their apps for the ARM target. They were expected to port them to Modern API. Which of course, they didn't.

[badsectoracula → pjmlp]

And the reason ARM caused it to fail was that the applications people wanted didn't exist for it.

[coribuci → pjmlp]

> UWP is the future of Windows APIs, Win32 is mostly frozen since WIndows XP.

Frozen is usually a good thing.

> Microsoft is just making UWP similar to what Google is making with AndroidX, detaching the technology from the OS version.

... and from users also. Will they get a lawsuit from Google for copying their UI as they got from Apple ? I think not because the UI is so bad that they will be ashamed to go to court with something like this.

[pjmlp → coribuci]

Frozen is only good as means to preserve food.

What did Microsoft copied from Android?!?

If anything, Material 1.0 is heavily based on Metro.

[freeone3000 → pjmlp]

Frozen is good because it means you can develop reliable software that will continue to work in the future without running on a constant treadmill of useless updates.

[pjmlp → freeone3000]

Frozen and reliable are not synonyms.

It is also hard to get bug fixes without updates.

[badsectoracula → pjmlp]

The API is frozen, not the features and bug fixes. New APIs can be introduced (and are introduced) and bug fixes and features are added. As a very simple example, see how you can enter emojis in any unicode-aware Win32 input box application with Win+; even though this functionality was introduced in (IIRC) Windows 10 Fall Creators Update.

[pjmlp → badsectoracula]

Most of that stuff is done in UWP/COM and exposed in Win32 via interoperability APIs.

When Vista emerged as Longhorn's reboot, all the low level .NET stuff was redone in COM.

Since then all new APIs have been to large extent based on COM.

And what many seems to not yet put on their brain, UWP is the new COM.

[badsectoracula → pjmlp]

My point is that Win32 applications still get both new features and bug fixes, how those are implemented isn't really relevant to what i wrote.

[pjmlp → badsectoracula]

It is because even they come via XAML Islands, or UWP/COM interop, at the end of the day it is still UWP/COM that is going forward.

Looking forward how Windows will look like now that it was officially communicated that Windows 10X is also coming to desktops and laptps, with its sandbox model for 100% of all userspace.

[badsectoracula → pjmlp]

All that is irrelevant, the point is that having a frozen API doesn't mean that the API's implementation is also frozen. You can still get new features on a frozen API as well as new APIs alongside it.