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0 pointschipdart1y ago0 comments

> While it’s a bit cumbersome, he doesn’t really point out any major flaw with the WinForms/WPF ideas, other than of course requiring two stacks. He says he wants native code and wouldn’t want any C# visible but doesn’t explain why. Fear of reverse engineering? UI code rarely contains anything secret.

What I find the most mind-numbing thing about the blog post is the way WinUI3 was excluded. WinUI3 looks like an exact match for the blogger's most critical requirements, specially the customization thing, and there is absolutely no better way to target Windows than Microsoft's official GUI offering, but somehow that one is rejected? Absurd.

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3 comments · 3 top-level

smileybarry1y ago

WinUI3 is a can of worms that’s becoming palatable only with .NET 8 (and soon 9). In a normal configuration, you have to bring 500MB of dependencies with you, or ask the user to install a redistributable. You also need the user to install .NET 8, or bring said 0.5GB with you.

WinUI3 can be used in unpackaged apps (I.e.: not appx) but has a few random caveats that just don’t work; random APIs that have a footnote of “oh this doesn’t work in unpackaged apps” or “works in unpackaged apps but only in .NET Preview something-something”.

.NET 8 fixes a lot of this by adding AOT compilation and single-binary releases, but it’s still fairly large. .NET 9 then improves culling of unused framework code from your published file, and also adds WPF -> WinUI3 theming support.

Source: my repeated attempts to rewrite our product’s UI in WinUI3 (from WPF on .NET Framework 3.5) several times.

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pjmlp1y ago

Anyone that has used WinUI since its inception, knows that the best for our sanity is to avoid it at all costs.

It is still years away to provide feature parity with UWP/WinUI 2.0, let alone the Windows Forms, WPF capabilites and Visual Studio tooling.

Using it from C++ is only for ATL / VisuaL C++ 6.0 die hards.

mike_hearn1y ago

Some of the issue is he has outdated understanding of AppX packages (MSIX). You can use all of Win32 from an MSIX package, and all of WinRT, and WinUI3 etc. It's actually the other way around: there are some Win32 APIs that only work if your app is packaged.

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