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0 pointsWorldMaker1y ago0 comments

> And WinUI3 has also already been completely abandoned.

I'm not sure where you got that impression, but WinUI3 is in almost all of Microsoft's software at this point. Admittedly a huge amount of it is embedded inside React Native, but WinUI3 seems to be the UI toolkit that has won and is still going strong. They announced a bunch of WinUI3 enhancements at BUILD even.

(One such announcement is a coming standard control for the sort of custom Windows Title Bar with a search box and branded logo and extra buttons that has become common in every first-party application from the Microsoft Store app to all of Office and many other places.)

> Contrary to this article, it still doesn't even have a visual designer.

Huh? Visual Studio has a visual designer for the WinUI 3 flavor of XAML. If you don't want to write XAML to back your UI they probably will never support a Visual Designer for you (ie, C# UI seems neat and maybe a bit more "functional programming", but I'd rather use XAML just to have the Visual Designer at least). Last I checked the XAML designer works just fine even in C++ projects targeting WinUI 3.

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somenameforme1y ago· 2 in thread

Visual Studio's designer really does not support WinUI 3. Try it! Hot reload also doesn't work worth anything. There's an ongoing issue/discussion on Github here [1] from 2021. There's also loads of fundamental issues like various controls causing replicable crashes with drag and drop, the community calls are disappearing, and more.

[1] - https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/issues/5917

WorldMakerOP1y ago

Sure, it is definitely very buggy, but the point is that it still exists and is useful to some extent. I was refuting the claim that there is *no* visual editor, not the claim that the visual editor we do have is maybe deficient and buggy.

Relatedly, I still think it is something of a shame that (Expression) Blend didn't survive to the modern era. A designer-focused XAML design tool that doesn't need a full Visual Studio install (nor the same sort of expensive VS license) and feels more like Firefly or Figma or whatever other designer-focused tool is current en vogue would be really handy in a lot of situations.

I don't think it is the only reason that designers tend to prefer HTML (and thus we use Electron or similar to placate the designers that think that "just copy and paste it from the design tool" works "well") over XAML, but it certainly doesn't help that there isn't a "XAML Figma" and it's a shame on multiple levels that Microsoft recognized that threat early on, built a solution, then got confused why they built it, confusingly merged it into Visual Studio licenses and installs, which lead to its sadly inevitable death just a few years before it would have been very helpful to have to send to some designers and stop getting HTML-only mockups.

somenameforme1y ago

To be clear I am saying that drag and drop operations do not work during runtime. The designer literally does not work at all, for WinUI 3, for reasons that are not at all clear, since Visual Studio had a 'native' designer for WinUI 2, as well as the weird disconnect with Blend as you mentioned.

I almost feel like you're mixing up WinUI 2 and 3, because the designer was kind of borky for WinUI 2 but did work, and was overall an okayish experience. But for WinUI 3 it's an entirely different game. Early on the messaging was that the designer would be "coming soon" (tm) and that people could just use hot reload in the interim, then at some point hot reload ended up completely broken as well, Microsoft gradually started withdrawing engagement with the community, and here I am saying it's been defacto abandoned.

The point of the designer is not just mock ups. At many (most?) small businesses and studios the developer/designer dichotomy doesn't exist. There's a reason lots of companies are still even using e.g. Winforms. A high functioning designer simply dramatically improves both productivity and quality.

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