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0 pointsmotorest10mo ago0 comments

> Then there is the issue they seem to be shoting into all directions, with GUI frameworks, Web, Blazor, Aspire, to see what sticks.

Can you elaborate on why you believe that? I mean, with GUI frameworks it's pretty obvious MS is placing all their chips on WinUI3, even though they are not deprecating any legacy framework. I mean, their Win32 API is still alive and well, as well as MFC, ATL, etc. WPF still gets some minor updates too here and there.

I have no idea what you mean by web, too. ASP.NET is perhaps one of the better maintained web frameworks around. What exactly do you interptet as a concern?

Blazor is also Microsoft's alternative to JavaScript and it's main value proposition is being able to write webassembly apps using Microsoft technology exclusively. What do you think is replacing this?

Pointing out Aspire is even weirder. It's a containerization framework to help with observability and manage distributed applications. What exactly is the overlap?

I sense a great deal of confusion in your comments. What exactly are you trying to say?

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3 comments · 3 top-level

Lich10mo ago

> I mean, with GUI frameworks it's pretty obvious MS is placing all their chips on WinUI3, even though they are not deprecating any legacy framework.

WinUI3 is dead, lol. I tried to migrate from UWP to WinUI3, but it is literally dead. There doesn’t seem to be any team at MS actively working on it, the community calls have died, and the last build conf didn’t have any WinUI3 talks, all AI stuff. Yes, you can build apps with WinUI3, but development and support for it has stalled and I couldn’t justify moving the companies product over to WinUI3.

pjmlp10mo ago

No they aren't placing all their chips on WinUI3, only those that never went through all reboots since Windows 8, believe that.

WPF got taken out of legacy mode at BUILD 2024, exactly because hardly anyone outside Redmond cares about WinUI 3.

Anyone that has been long enough around, has seen ASP.NET MVC 5, ASP.NET Core MVC (not compatible with MVC 5 predecessor), Razor Pages, Minimal APIs, Blazor,...

So it is a mess doing consulting and depending on what .NET version the customer team is allowed to use, and existing code, what gets to be used by that portfolio.

Minimal APIs have been designed to bring in Python and JavaScript developers into .NET, which many of us see as not working at all, while having created the need now everyone creates their own controllers infractruture, as means to tame having minimal APIs all over the place, there are even MVVM like frameworks now for that purpose.

Blazor is really only usable as path forward for those still stuck in WebForms, due to the similar approach to do Web UIs, and to .NET shops without frontend teams.

In the age of distributed computing with microservices and frontend teams, it is a hard sell to make them adopt Blazor and learn C#, instead of React, Angular, Vue.

At least they have adopted TypeScript, the next language that Anders Hejlsberg decided to focus on.

Aspire is something that has been pivoted, now they try to sell it as Microsoft's Pulumi, but everyone has to write the orchestration code in C#, thus only relevant to .NET shops.

Maddy Montaquila has said in a few .NET podcast interviews that they are trying to use Aspire as means to sell .NET to UNIX shops, given the low adoption numbers outside the traditional Microsoft shops, even after almost a decade being open source.

PKop10mo ago

> it's pretty obvious MS is placing all their chips on WinUI3

Not it isn't, based on the paltry resources and team size they have working on it, the pace of bug fixes (non existent), the fact that in 2024 they stated WPF is on par with WinUI 3 as a recommended GUI framework. I'm not sure what signals to you they are "all in" on it.

Look at the size of this thread [0], and how many people tried to give WinUI 3 a chance but have been burned by lack of support. This is not the sentiment that surrounds a platform that has a lot of chips betting on it.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/discussions/9...

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