I’m still confused which frameworks are tied to which “visuals”. Ignoring the web-frameworks, do Win32 apps inherently look like Windows XP buttons or can they look more modern?

It might be nice if the article could add screenshots, a few of the Wikipedia links have a screenshot, but again I’m not sure if you’re limited to that UI or not.

I also like the carousel in the article showing the tray menus, but again not sure what they are each “built-with”.

"So when I went to work on my app, I was astonished to find that twenty years after the release of WPF, the boilerplate had barely changed."

Such is the benefit and the curse, I guess, of having the Windows API being locked in the distant past for backwards compatibility.

I've always been surprised that Microsoft didn't do a full operating system refactor and provide a compatibility layer for running old binaries. Perhaps they figure it would be better to just transition everything to software as a service using web tech? But I just don't see how that strategy is gonna work long-term.

TCC supports win32 and is less than a meg download and as an added bonus supports linux very well thanks to wine.

Most of the desktop applications I have wrote over the years have been in other languages like Java and Go as I have wanted them to mostly be cross platform. In these cases I have always used the Software UI, which in Java is Swing and in Go is Fyne. These are usually reasonably fast, don't necessarily look native depending on how its themed but ultimately fit the language better than trying to bridge to Win32 or GTK/QT.

The Windows code signing experience has prevented me from shipping apps that otherwise run perfectly fine on the platform. It is a nightmare and I cannot believe it wasn't called out in the "We want to fix Windows" blog post.

Just do exactly what Apple does. Charge me $100 directly from you and let me build an .exe that I can distribute on my website.

When I tried to release a flutter app via exe installer, google drive said it was a virus but it otherwise installed just fine in windows 10/11. I'm doing the same thing for msix for now. But when I searched for certificates I could only find closer to $200/yr and you need to load it in the latest $100 yubikey due to the fips requirement. I didn't realize that CAs dont let you just get the private/public key files any more. Only distribution method is hardware based fips key. I've given up entirely on code signing since I only made a single open source project for amateur radio.

> One might think that an advantage of controlling C# would be that Microsoft has carefully shaped and coevolved it to be the perfect programming language for Windows APIs. This does not appear to be the case.

I think they spent all their mana for that on pre-.NET Visual Basic and then had nothing left.

Steve Gibson, Gibson Research.

https://www.grc.com/freepopular.htm

Just scroll down the page and look at the size of the completely self-contained executable programs. THIS is what Win32 is capable of. Something we always had with Win32 that was thrown away with .Net and C#.

And _please_ just spare me your opinions of how Steve Gibson "doesn't know anything about security". That's not what's important here. What's important is how freakin' small his full-on GUI stand-alone executables are.

EDIT: Just noticed this on his page.

Total Historical Count of files downloaded from this page: 52,292,601

That is why everyone even Microsoft themselves does Electron.

Running with html/css/js has benefits it really is open and free development based on international standards and not locked into any single big tech.

Lazarus is crazy good, as is Delphi, if you can afford it. wxWidgets is also nice, without the licensing weirdness that is Qt.