UWP Developers Await News on WinUI
The WinUI Effort to Facilitate Porting Win32 Apps Might Compromise UWP
First edition. This essay is entirely a matter of the author’s opinion. Copyright © 2022 Talon 38 Personal Media, SmLLC.
I am a Store application developer for Windows 10 and Windows 11. I am long experienced with, and avid about using the Universal Windows Platform (UWP).
I am preferring that Win32 classic ways of programming, moving forward to allow global developers to catch up their collectively huge legacy code base via WinUI, does not cater so very much to Win32 programmers as to break the lineage from UWP. The catchup reasoning for performing the work of porting Win32 C++ application code to WinUI might seem unnecessary or to have the option of low priority with more than ample time later, but that’s because in this twenties decades it is too much presumed that paradigms could not again much shift, by default. That is somewhat ironic, as I do that as well, in my default ways of operating, and it involves some deliberate effort to stretch the imagination for a few notions, and it involves choice to not conclude on possibilities, but just to consider a few types of possible future changes in notional category, and that to be enough to freshen up my attention to the degree to which standards and norms in computing, widespread, might very well drastically reform in the next two decades.
This is not so much, anymore maybe, a matter of possibly progressing much further along current paths and the paths of the past 40 years, to which we are well accustomed. Instead, it might finally become a matter of potentially reaching a new and unfamiliar stage when complete studies could be performed to do lookback at old timelines of choices and designs, from file format features to the frail nature of email metadata equivalents, and do varied complete makeovers of subsets of computing and the internet. This could involve informed and experienced essential “do overs’ in major categories of computing and internet issues, possibly greatly, here and there in pertinence, over the years ahead. That possibility, if truly to come, applies to both hardware and software.
I wonder without ability to know, if WinUI, in its plans ahead, also retains current UWP fidelity and style in its migration to WinUI, in the UWP control, event, styling, ease and straightforwardness of UWP code porting, and behavior path it mimics, into an eventually fully integrated set of options, becoming more similar in event driven methodology, rather than deprecate the UWP younger-legacy global code base now existent.
I am an advocate of conveying to those critical of UWP, that nearly all that could be done with a C++ Win32 application (excepting look-and-feel developer custom chrome design, but very equivalently and flexibly replaceable by Windows 11 standard look-and-feel, quite modifiable intricately), can also be done with FullTrustProcess capabilities tagged, and/or with COM Interop. FullTrustProcess, while developing, is no error or violation in reality, but to my notice and experience most likely is merely a flag to notify Microsoft that a different realm of Store Quality Assurance is due to be passed, as well as of course enabling that breadth of open abilities to the application creator, for coded usage.
There is of course a significant learning curve to using any new programming and coding paradigm. Learning the UWP ways of implementing features can be daunting for that first hour of online document search, and that’s for about each distinct feature it becomes in due course personally chosen time to train oneself on. However, it seems for me, after years of UWP developing, that after approximately that much time average searching and sifting through the documents, I do discover a way to do just about anything to full satisfaction plus bonus, if I get through that hour. Then comes the coding, while returning briefly occasionally to the documents, which is the fun part, and the productive part.
I consider that Microsoft personnel seem to have maybe, but not surely, chosen at some point a few years ago, to not publish or state much countering information against some significant old-style developer “putting down” of the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) application production way. I wonder that might be wise actually on their part, after considering factors, as maybe understandably a matter of maintaining courtesy to their users and developers, by way of not wading in and swinging away in hot debate, which of course might be only counterproductive, overall.
I’ve read many internet searchable accounts of UWP ostensibly performing very poorly, but those accounts I have concluded, by way of noticing UWP powers and strengths stretching extensively and very comprehensively, always beyond my coding and designing desires, and with more refinement and polish available beyond even the crisp presentation I like to produce for users. In keeping with that experience, I disagree with the accounts of UWP negative critique, and I conclude the opposite. I conclude that UWP is a stunningly powerful and smooth way to develop and produce applications, with that smoothness especially evident in how it increases of its own convergence toward version publishing, maybe somehow in design of UWP, as design and code matures.
If you are not familiar with UWP, as possibly a C++ code base Win32 programmer, designer, or developer, then I can assure you that the qualities of a great host of UWP applications on the Store are, only in my opinion, a bit on the poorer in quality spectrum, mainly only due to the truly heavy initial adjustment time involved in becoming accustomed to the UWP way of putting XAML and C# together. You might be able to confirm that by way of performing screenshot reviews of many UWP apps on the store, without buying, until having found enough of a sample size to encounter some examples of truly beautiful interfaces, complete with sensible and smooth user flow of actions, well integrated. UWP seems to me designed with that in mind. Special attention to margins and padding, plus alignment, can produce great results. Also, collapsing visibility or shrinking screen elements when the main page window is sized smaller, than are stages of coded-in dimensions to handle when sizing events happen, can preclude control element overlap and shuffling having a messy looking display, upon for example snapping a window to a corner quarter of the display screen.
If you’re a proponent of the Universal Windows Platform, I believe UWP might be at some risk of Microsoft possibly being pressured or presented a distorted picture of reality by a host of Win32 programmers having their attention. To counter this, some writing in favor of UWP might be something you could enjoy crafting up, and might be great support for WinUI leaning closer to the vector established by UWP previously, as the guiding standard by which to blend Win32 code programming style and syntax, WPF ways, and Windows Forms ways, into WinUI.
Authored by: Patrick L. Cheatham, Master of Science in aeronautical engineering
UWP Developers Await News on WinUI was originally published in Humen Facets Techniques (Mastery Meny Sciences) on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.