37 pointsby steviey198 hours ago9 comments
  • pjmlp5 hours ago
    People stop believing in anything related to WinUI coming from Microsoft marketing machine.

    Besides examples like this one.

    The amount of issues on Github across all WinUI related tools, keeps increasing all over the place, there is almost no visible activity, the community calls have been a disaster with Q&A being ignored, team rotation, whatever.

    Native AOT still cannot do what .NET Native did (there is a CsWinRT 3.0 that supposedly is going to fix that). Additionally it requires all classes to be marked partial classes.

    C++/CX was killed, replaced by C++/WinRT without any Visual Studio tooling, meaning using it is similar to using ATL during the Visual C++ 6.0 days. The experience promised at CppCon 2017 never came to be.

    Additionally hidden in a comment thread on its Github repo, the original devs that are now working on windows-rs, mention that C++/WinRT is in maintenance mode, it won't be further developed.

    Ah, and they are open sourcing WinUI, guess how many devs are still left to work on this.

    Really, from someone that used to advocate using WinRT back in the Windows 8.x/10 days, stay away from any technology that is somehow related to WinUI.

    Microsoft themselves can do whatever they feel like with WinUI, it comes with the job, the rest of us, better use Win32, Forms, WPF, Avalonia, Qt,...

    EDIT: I forgot to mention in its present state, the application identity and COM reference counting required by WinUI, makes the "blazing fast C++" components actually run slower than typical .NET applications. The irony from the folks that kind of sabotaged Longhorn efforts, and went ahead redoing the ideas in COM.

    • nubinetworkan hour ago
      Still waiting for them to finish the control panels, oops, I mean settings windows...
  • steviey198 hours ago
    Buried in this announcement about Windows 11 improvements is a fascinating admission: the Windows 11 Start menu has been built using React this entire time. Microsoft is now migrating it to their native WinUI3 framework to improve performance and reduce interaction latency.

    This explains a lot about why the Start menu has felt sluggish compared to Windows 10.

    The React → WinUI migration is the most technically interesting detail imo.

    • wodenokoto3 hours ago
      Did the headline get updated since this comment? At the time of writing this reply, the headlines is “windows 11’s start menu was built using React …”, which I agree is super interesting.
    • stephenr7 hours ago
      It's been known for a while - at least 2024 - that its react.
      • alsetmusic7 hours ago
        Yeah, I know about that and I'm a Mac / Linux guy.
    • evanjrowley8 hours ago
      This comment may have been flagged by the anti-AI spam measures due to use of the arrow symbol.
  • userbinator7 hours ago
    WinUI is still a bloated pig compared to Win32.

    If MS really wants its users back, many of which have left for Linux and Mac, it should seriously consider going back to the Win7 era UI, or at least restore the Windows Classic theme.

  • Panzerschrek7 hours ago
    Why it was necessary to rewrite start menu in React at all? Why rewriting what works fine?
    • userbinator7 hours ago
      Developers trying to justify their employment and pad their resumes.
      • oreally6 hours ago
        Resume-driven development making people justify their jobs.
      • replooda5 hours ago
        Come on. Are you an employed developer? If so, even if you have that much power over the flagship product of the company, that you can use it to pad your résumé, do you think the same happens at Microsoft? By all means, the bugs may speak of skill issues (or may not: there's also crunching, mandated AI... Who knows), but the Cloud-first, push-ads, force-account etc. enshittification is the implementation of a vision I doubt was collectively composed by devs, let alone a single dev.
        • SR2Z5 hours ago
          The ads pushing would be just as possible with a fully native start menu.

          Using React for it was probably done since it's just objectively easier and faster to tweak a React app than native components (see various folks complaining about WinUI).

    • bhhaskin6 hours ago
      My best guess is ads.
  • pathartl6 hours ago
    It's not React. A small part (recommended apps) was built using React Native for Windows, which is not React Native but an offshoot that uses native Windows APIs.
  • khelavastr7 hours ago
    Lords be praised. Microsoft is bringing back native performance .
    • flohofwoe2 hours ago
      I fully expect that the "native" rewrite will be substantially slower than the current version ;) Software performance (or lack thereof) is mostly not a technical problem (e.g. the technical part of software performance is trivial to solve), but organizational.
  • idiotsecant7 hours ago
    How does this happen? How do you build a fundamental OS control in react?
    • pjmlp4 hours ago
      Plenty of stuff nowadays uses Webview2 across Windows.

      Not only has Project Reunion been a disaster (moving UWP regular Win32), apparently Microsoft new employees lack Windows experience, being raised in Chromebooks and Macs, apparently they aren't getting the trainings they should.

      You can go watch recordings of the community calls, and see puzzled faces when asked about Windows capabilities not yet supported on WinUI/WinAppSDK.

      • userbinator4 hours ago
        apparently Microsoft new employees lack Windows experience, being raised in Chromebooks and Macs, apparently they aren't getting the trainings they should.

        They should be given Petzold's famous book on the subject, published by Microsoft Press itself.

        • pjmlp2 hours ago
          Yeah, certainly.
    • Traubenfuchs7 hours ago
      No one left who can use whatever half deprecated native actually-not-that-native windows ui framework is currently undead state of the art and not enough examples in the llm‘s to vibe code it.

      That leaves „web technologies“.

    • solid_fuel7 hours ago
      This is what I'm wondering. How dysfunctional is microsoft that they shipped a react-based start menu? It reads like satire, "Windows 11 is so bad that even microsoft doesn't use native controls".
      • userbinator7 hours ago
        MS also made one of the most hated IM and audiovisual meeting applications with web tech, replacing a previously (not great but much better) native one: Teams.
      • drysart4 hours ago
        It's not React. It's React Native. React Native and React are about as similar as JavaScript and Java.

        React Native is a way of orchestrating a UI comprised of native controls.

        • flohofwoe2 hours ago
          It's still baffling, since the core idea of React only makes sense as a workaround for limitations of the browser DOM. Wrapping much more flexible 'native' widget frameworks with a React layer is pure cargo culting (same with SwiftUI).
  • trimethylpurine7 hours ago
    Coca Cola famously improved its position when New Coke flopped and it reintroduced the original flavor as "Coca Cola Classic."

    If you can't make it better, make it worse, it seems.

  • gjvc2 hours ago
    making it nice and fast; hello. it was nice and fast on windows 2000 and they've been fucking it up ever since.