Microsoft Officially Deprecates UWP (thurrott.com) 44
Microsoft continues to baby-step around the obvious, but it has officially deprecated the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) as it pushes the desktop-focused Windows App SDK (formerly called Project Reunion) and WinUI 3 as the future of Windows application development. Paul Thurrott reports: For those unclear on the matter, the Windows App SDK basically takes key UWP technologies and new technologies like WinUI 3 that will not be backported to UWP and makes them available to developers in a way that is not tied to specific Windows releases (as was the case with individual UWP features). In this way, Microsoft can "deliver on the agility and backward compatibility developers need to reach across the entire Windows ecosystem" while not leaving developers behind. Going forward, UWP will only receive "bug, reliability, and security fixes," and not new features, Microsoft says, indicating that it is now deprecated. Developers with UWP apps in the market who "are happy with [the] current functionality in UWP" can of course continue to keep using UWP. But those who want "the latest runtime, language, and platform features," including WinUI 3, WebView 2, .NET 5, full compatibility with Windows 10 version 1809 or newer, and any upcoming new features will have to migrate their apps to the Windows App SDK.
...and nothing of value was lost. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Might be a lot because you lose retroarch on Xbox with the loss of UWP.
Made the Xbox Series S a cheap machine that also plays PSX and PS2 games.
XBox (Score:2)
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You can use WinUI 3 to target Xbox as well. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-... [microsoft.com]
And it's not like UWP apps will stop working anytime soon.
if I need to whip up a desktop app ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:if I need to whip up a desktop app ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:if I need to whip up a desktop app ... (Score:4, Interesting)
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The problem all of these universal UI tools have is that they give way too much control over the design to application developers. For anything like that to be even remotely successful, the application should turn over just about every aspect of the UI to the system, providing little more than a tree with a few semantic hints.
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UWP didn't really have a niche. You could use it on PC for Windows Store apps, but Windows Store didn't take off.
On Xbox it was intended to be used for apps, not for games. People don't really use their Xbox for apps other than streaming services, so there wasn't much point here.
HoloLens is a pretty obscure niche platform. Few devs would even think about it.
There just weren't many situations where UWP was an advantage.
Re:if I need to whip up a desktop app ... (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems every time MS tries to "dumb things down" they don't understand that developers actually need more power and as a result all these "new technologies" like WPF, UWP, Windows Phone end up dying...
There is a massive confusion at Microsoft about what to do with the data they have collected.
They have data that says that developers want languages that are easier to use in a safer manner.
But what the fucking decision makers for 20 years have converted that into is the notion that developers want limited languages.
Its fucking opposite land in the programming language world. It takes a full blown retard to confuse more advanced with more limited, but they fucking did, and intend to fucking keep doing it, while insisting that the repeated backlash to their repeatedly mortonic decisions is whats repeatedly in error.
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It is honestly the same with user interfaces. Not so surprising. Making something both advanced and easy to use is hard, and often not something you can force, but only do when somebody has a great idea.
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But what the fucking decision makers for 20 years have converted that into is the notion that developers want limited languages.
I wouldn't attribute it quite to malice. The problem with creating something new is that they ship as soon as it's minimally viable. Much like the Control Panel that still exists in Windows 11 despite being "replaced" by the Settings app nearly 10 years ago in Windows 8.
And then they are perpetually plagued by a chicken and egg problem. They're waiting for developers to adopt something that isn't finished so they can get valuable feedback, meanwhile developers need something that's already finished. The
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They are evolving, not really dying. Silverlight died, but that was pretty much a variant of WPF that was competing with web technologies. Desktop tech on the web, hmmm. The latest WinUI3 is an evolution of UWP that borrows heavily from WPF. Technology moves on, people need to let go of their favorite old GUI tech from the past, hey I used to be a fan of the Borland Widget Toolkit in the 1990s. Win32 is still there because it's closest to the underlying O/S, and the O/S supports al
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Re: if I need to whip up a desktop app ... (Score:2)
Isn't MAUI written in .net? If so, it's only really useful cross platform if you're using c#. C# is great for what it's intended for (business applications) but if you want to be close to the metal, then it's not a good choice.
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MAUI is a UI layer. You wouldn't be running it close to the metal.
You can get very close to the metal in C# in general, but if you need to directly manipulate memory, then C or C++ might be a better choice, for just the code that does that.
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WPF is a godsend with it's separation of data model and GUI code via databinding
WinForms supported data binding as well. It did not originate with WPF.
Re:if I need to whip up a desktop app ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep. you may lol but...
I've just started developing a large internal Line Of Business App and after much soul searching went Winforms in C#.
It's fast to develop in.
C# is a nice language to code in.
Runs and renders very fast.
Easy to debug.
Has no weird platform bugs.
Winforms FTW!
c# (Score:4, Informative)
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I wanted to write a little web service to simplify access to the Philips Hue REST API. Do some automatic mapping so that you could send a very simple web request to the service with simple commands and scene names and have the service do the multiple required requests and mappings in the background.
Wrote the code in Visual Studio as an ASP.NET Core service on a x64 Windows desktop. Told Visual Studio to publish to an SMB share on a Raspberry pi 2B, an ARM32 processor with only 1GB of RAM. Ran the executable
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I can see why. C# is great, Winforms is solid and easy to work with, and probably still has a market with a gazillion custom controls if you need them. If you don't need to do anything too crazy with your UI, it's not a bad choice.
I still like WPF for it's great flexibility (making custom controls is pretty easy) and powerful data-binding mechanisms. But it always felt a bit overly ambitious (killing performance), yet at the same time kind of half finished (no numeric spinner?).
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OP Here.
I agree with you.
I went Winforms because the app will only ever be used internally for a 100 person company that is a windows shop already.
If I was developing a 'lets sell this' app, or the company was much bigger, I'd certainly go the MAUI or some hybrid c# back end something else front end approach.
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Love C# and .NET Core. But WinForms? Not so much, for the main reason that it's likely to remain Windows-only forever. Unfortunately this is true of WPF also. Both are very tightly bound to Windows.
For something like this today I'd likely be doing C# and .NET Core for back end and middleware, and ultimately a Web front end, so as to be as cross-platform and as future-proof as possible.
As stated before I don't believe WPF per se has much of a future, but something somewhat like it (UNO, MAUI, etc.) very
That name was asking for it (Score:3)
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Yeah, that universal serial bus... completely useless for everything from displays, Ethernet, mice, storage, networking...
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The irony is that USB only became truly universal by becoming hilariously fragmented, to the extent that you can no longer have any real idea about the capabilities of any USB port or cable.
Does this USB-C cable support USB 2.0 speeds? USB 3.0 speeds? USB 3.2 gen whatever X by Y speed? Does it support power delivery? Does it support thunderbolt 3? Does it support thunderbolt 4?
Does this USB-C port support USB 2.0 speeds? USB 3.0 speeds? USB 3.2 gen whatever X by X speed? Does it support power input? Does it
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Even history bears this out.
The term "Catholic" derives from Greek, via Latin, and means "universal."
But in the 11th century, when the Eastern churches split from Rome, the Roman side declared itself to be the sole and final arbiter of the term "Catholic," which, ironically, thereby stopped meaning "universal," and was thereafter used primarily to refer to the churches in union with the Pope in Rome, as opposed to the Eastern or (later) the Reformed/Protestant churches.
Limited interop killed it (Score:3)
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They were trying to gain a foothold int he phone/tablet market. They thought C++ and no garbage collection stalls would give them a competitive performance advantage. They thought they could convince developers to create phone/tablet apps by giving them an API that would work on everything. Limiting the API was an initial attempt to add phone/tablet style permissions.
It didn't work because you cannot create compelling desktop applications in UWP. To this day it seems like the premier desktop UI framewor
Nonsense... (Score:2)
... Microsoft and the rest of the industry are hell bent on trusted computing and having encrypted binaries and file systems the user can't access. They've been playing with them using things like gamepass and having remote access to everyones PC thanks to backending the shit out of the operating system beginning with windows 10 you no longer own your PC and have Microsoft spying on everything you do.
There agenda is to lockdown the PC and police piracy across the net, turning the net into a global mainframe
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So they will be soon able to "turn off your bits" or turn off your internet. It's called trusted networking and they are working on it.
That's why the Free Software Foundation calls it by it's more appropriate name: Treacherous Computing.
I took a look at the sample code (Score:2)
I expected questionable, but not garbage.
It's garbage.
So win32? (Score:2)
I guess win32 is out too? It seems to still work fine after all these years.
Sigh (Score:2)
I gave up programming against any one particular UI or interface decades ago.
I don't WANT to chase my own tail constantly updating everything with huge multi-gigabyte libraries just to show a box on the screen.
Programming for the desktop has gone to shit in my lifetime, and mobile apps are no better. Everything a moving target.
I try my best to stay on as independent and cross-platform a core set of libraries as possible, and get everything I need to do done. I can't imagine even being paid to chase this c
They've gone nuts (Score:2)
You 'can' follow this guide https://docs.microsoft.com/en-... [microsoft.com] for using Windows App SDK to target versions of Windows 10, version 2004 (build 19041) and Minimum version to Windows 10, version 1809 (build 17763), importing libraries of differing versions that will no doubt be out-dated in 6 months with new APIs breaking tutorials valid currently - and, after adding "[Experimental] Blank Page (WinUI 3)" to your project, and following the guide, you too can have a single button the screen - which is guarantee
Re: They've gone nuts (Score:1)
they haven't "gone nuts"
Its just only the crazy ones that don't realise windows is dead still work there. The rest were either fired, or went to work for google/facebook/twitter etc.
Is there a list of all Microsoft deprecations??? (Score:3, Funny)
Ideally it would also have the replacement listed e.g. VB6 -> VB.net
I am too lazy to do it myself
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Here you go buddy https://www.versionmuseum.com/... [versionmuseum.com]
Look under the developer products section.