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Thread: UWP vs Win32 info from Microsoft

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    PowerPoster jdc2000's Avatar
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    UWP vs Win32 info from Microsoft

    Another possibly interesting link for Developers of software for Microsoft systems:

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/micros...-windows-apps/

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    Super Moderator Shaggy Hiker's Avatar
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    Re: UWP vs Win32 info from Microsoft

    Seems to be acknowledging the obvious. Still, I wonder is XAML Island is something like Fantasy Island. Perhaps a really short Bill Gates is running around saying "XAML Plain! XAML Plain!" Though, considering how floundering MS seems to be with sticking with a technology strategy, perhaps it's more like MS Survivor: Will YOU be voted off the XAML Island?
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    Re: UWP vs Win32 info from Microsoft

    With Microsoft, it is hard to predict what they will do next. Maybe XAML Island will slowly sink beneath the waves.

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    Super Moderator Shaggy Hiker's Avatar
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    Re: UWP vs Win32 info from Microsoft

    A year or two hence, once all of this has been long forgotten, somebody will stumble upon one of those XAML islands and find nothing but a bunch of Stone.Header properties and wonder, "Who were these people? Why did they create these objects?"

    Then they'll name the place Easter Egg Island and leave.
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    Super Moderator Shaggy Hiker's Avatar
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    Re: UWP vs Win32 info from Microsoft

    A year or two hence, once all of this has been long forgotten, somebody will stumble upon one of those XAML islands and find nothing but a bunch of Stone.Header properties and wonder, "Who were these people? Why did they create these objects?"

    Then they'll name the place Easter Egg Island and leave.
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    Super Moderator Shaggy Hiker's Avatar
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    Re: UWP vs Win32 info from Microsoft

    A year or two hence, once all of this has been long forgotten, somebody will stumble upon one of those XAML islands and find nothing but a bunch of Stone.Header properties and wonder, "Who were these people? Why did they create these objects?"

    Then they'll name the place Easter Egg Island, take a few selfies, and leave.
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    Re: UWP vs Win32 info from Microsoft

    Microsoft Gives Up On UWP more or less chews the same cabbage.

    About the only additional thing I see there is that Microsoft has yet another new hobbyhorse to ride: the so-called Progressive Web Apps (often redundantly referred to as PWA Apps). I guess they don't feel sufficiently embarrassed by poor decisions yet. Google will probably drop PWAs in a year and Microsoft will have another dead end on their hands.

    What next?

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    Re: UWP vs Win32 info from Microsoft

    So much resources were lost on these platforms, UWF, WinRT, Store, which all will mostly die soon, but all the code will be carried with Windows for the next dozens of years for backward compatibility. So much of heavily-researched and successfully established desktop ergonomy was sacrificed for wannabe mobile-friendly GUI that's oversimplified and confusing when MS is basically leaving the mobile market after all. I don't know of anyone who actually productively use any Store App.

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    Re: UWP vs Win32 info from Microsoft

    Much the same thing happened during the Longhorn fiasco, and for that matter the Windows phone debacle that destroyed the lead and good will of developers for Windows Mobile. WPF seems to be on life-support itself, with much dithering over whether to finally pull the plug and let it rest in peace.

    The endgame is hard to predict. For all we know Azure will go 100% Linux, with Windows dead completely and Chrome the only client OS acknowledged by the Incredible Shrinking Microsoft.

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    Super Moderator Shaggy Hiker's Avatar
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    Re: UWP vs Win32 info from Microsoft

    Incredible Shrinking Microsoft? They are currently vying with Amazon and Apple as the most valuable company in the world. Is that a sign of their imminent failure?

    They do seem uncertain which way to steer, but the overall direction has been hugely profitable, and continues to be. The bigger problem may well be the current fragmentation of the device population. When everybody had a beige box (some of which had a piece of rotting fruit on them) on their desk, it was easy to set the course. Now? Well, I certainly have no idea what the killer platform is going to be in five years. Anybody who says it's mobile is being silly, since mobile is currently multiple things and subject to various definitions. Technically, MS is in mobile, as my Surface Pro is an excellent travel device, and runs VS on Win10 Pro just fine. In fact, it's better than my work computer in pretty nearly every way (if I got a docking station, it would be superior in EVERY way).

    MS is trying to foresee a future that is opaque to every person who is honest about it. They're doing better than ever, though, and certainly not shrinking in any noticeable way.
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    Re: UWP vs Win32 info from Microsoft

    When somebody is running away from you as fast as they can perspective makes them appear smaller and smaller. Even before they disappear entirely you can't hear them any more.

    It doesn't really matter to me how successful they might become at renting washtubs.

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    Super Moderator Shaggy Hiker's Avatar
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    Re: UWP vs Win32 info from Microsoft

    That mostly works when you are either standing still, or running backwards.
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    Re: UWP vs Win32 info from Microsoft

    Stuff like CERN Goes Open Source can't be helping though.

    The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, CERN, is stopping using Microsoft products in favor of open-source. The decision has been taken following big increases in license fees by Microsoft.
    I would think such a move would be pretty darned expensive, both in transition and in ongoing support costs. I find it hard to believe there is less of an issue with labor and institutional knowledge retention when using a gigantic random grab bag of mutating and vanishing square pegs and round holes for both your infrastructure and your mission-critical software.

    I'm not sure how much of this can be blamed on Microsoft though. "Some animals are more equal than others" may well be a basic tenet of life in the EU but it doesn't play as well outside the welfare state. Why not argue that licensing ought to be cheaper for everyone?

    I might be pretty worried if I was one of those tinfoil hatters expecting CERN to screw up and create a black hole that'll swallow us all.

    I suppose it might be more bluster than plan, hoping that publicity might regain CERN its privileged status again.

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    Fanatic Member 2kaud's Avatar
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    Re: UWP vs Win32 info from Microsoft

    CERN are not the only ones. We currently use Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 Enterprise. This combination was upgraded from XP/Server 2003 Enterprise ... These configurations have served us extremely well over many, many years. However, the extended support for 7/2008 finishes 14 Jan 2020. So we need to change (not for licensing costs though). A while ago we appointed a 'Head Of Futures' (great title!) to determine the way forward - and her strategy paper for post Windows 7 doesn't involve Microsoft. We've discussing it at Board next week - with a decision by 1 July. Assuming the paper is accepted, we'll be migrating to a totally open-source environment over the next 18 months!
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    Re: UWP vs Win32 info from Microsoft

    I suppose Microsoft's mistake is in getting a little too arrogant.

    The days when people understood how high the costs of conversion are let alone the costs of herding the open source cats can be... are gone. Political motivations have overtaken common sense and experience, so "making sense" is no longer a primary motivation with regard to platform decisions.


    I'm reminded of a large mission critical system that after 15 years of investment has still not met its goals to migrate from a mainframe platform to Windows. Little but some front-ends and some reporting ever did get migrated after three major pushes. For the past 3 years they've been dumping money into a "Fire Four!" open source migration.

    At least the big 3rd party consulting and contracting firms involved are getting rich despite lawsuits and penalties.

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    Re: UWP vs Win32 info from Microsoft

    At least the big 3rd party consulting and contracting firms involved are getting rich despite lawsuits and penalties.
    Yeah - that's why we've not using any!

    to migrate from a mainframe platform to Windows.
    I was involved in some of this in the 1990's - moving from Mainframe to Windows NT. The big gotcha then, we quickly realised, was moving from character terminals to a windows environment. So in the end for the first couple of versions we didn't. We wrote for the console so that the NT version looked and acted pretty much the same as the mainframe version. We split everything into 2 parts - processing and user-interaction. I think that from the start until the mainframe went was about 2 years - all data, everything migrated. Once we had it all working on the NT systems then we started to convert the user-interaction parts to windows without any real time pressure as everthing was working and the users weren't grumbling - in fact we had more resistance when we started to convert console to windows than we did when we moved from mainframe to NT! IMO some try to do too much with a migration and fail. Small steps at a time...
    All advice is offered in good faith only. You are ultimately responsible for the effects of your programs and the integrity of the machines they run on. Anything I post, code snippets, advice, etc is licensed as Public Domain https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

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