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0 pointschipdart1y ago0 comments

> Windows GUI apps is painful. Drop any one of these requirements and there are good established options.

The "portable" one is not a hard requirement. It's a whimsical self-imposed constraint, which makes as much sense as complaining that you can't stand on your right foot on Tuesdays. All installer toolkits released in over two decades support deploying arbitrary components. Is this not a solved problem?

WinUI3 supports dark mode/theming out of the box along with fully customizable styling. It's as free as it gets. It's also Microsoft's official GUI framework for Windows. But the blogger rejects it because... Because what?

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3 comments · 3 top-level

dfox1y ago

Well I remember one project where having the app small and portable or at least self-contained was a hard requirement. It involved an embedded device (ridiculously complex and over-engineered embedded device) that used customized USB flash sticks for user authentication, data transfer and firmware updates and configuration. The partitioning scheme of the update/configuration scheme meant that I had only about 16MB of free space on the windows-visible partition for a Windows GUI configuration application for the thing.

Originally I started writing it in MFC, but MFC is not exactly good match for something so trivial and all the abstractions meant for document-based applications were mostly in the way and I ended up doing it in Lazarus.

pjmlp1y ago

And those COM errors that just kill the process, bypassing C++, and .NET exception mechanisms? lovely!

No designer, manualy editing IDL files for XAML C++ bindings, without any kind of syntax highlighting or code completion, manually merging generated C++ code, even more lovely.

Using a Webview wrapping Bing Maps, instead of the native UWP map control, even better.

temac1y ago

"Portable" i could see a few use cases. No MSIL and only native code, however...

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