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Posted by domenicd 17 hours ago

Windows native app development is a mess(domenic.me)
329 points | 339 commentspage 6
whobre 13 hours ago|
Interestingly, no mention of WTL
domenicd 13 hours ago|
Ahah, I knew I missed one!

I originally had ATL in there, but my proofreading squad (Claude and ChatGPT) told me that ATL was a more niche thing for COM, and looking at the Wikipedia article I was convinced they were right.

But WTL was what I was thinking of---the step between the MFC and .NET that I forgot.

int_19h 4 hours ago|||
WTL was never a "step between the MFC and .NET" in any meaningful sense. It was more like a very lightweight subset of MFC+ATL, never officially supported or recommended, just something that Microsoft used internally that it decided to publish and then community picked up.
odkeidjwidj 11 hours ago|||
> but my proofreading squad (Claude and ChatGPT) told me

With all due respect (seriously): fuck off man

This is why you don’t use these stupid fucking tools for this

livinglist 13 hours ago||
Still remember the days of writing apps for windows phone using c# and XAML. Good old times but no definitely don’t wanna go back.
Dig1t 8 hours ago||
>Displaying a tray icon with a few menu items: not available. Not only does the tray icon itself need P/Invoke, the concept of menus for tray icons is not standardized

Having never written Windows apps, I am surprised to learn how disorganized and chaotic this all is.

on_the_train 12 hours ago||
All my work experience with guis was mfc. And all modernizations were web based. The in betweens are usually not considered worthwhile.

But imgui is a breeze of fresh air for internal stuff

anthk 13 hours ago||
Given the size of some Electron software, bundling TCL/Tk with IronTCL and TCLLib+TKLib weights 58MB and you can develop your own software with it, and that with the source of everything included.

And if you set a native theme for TTK in your code (literal two lines), your software will stop looking Motif-Industrial, the widgets will have the classic Win32 themes. It will look native from XP and up.

FpUser 7 hours ago||
You missed something.

With Delphi creating of Native Windows Desktop Applications is a piece of cake (also does MacOS, iOS, Android and partially Linux). Yes it is by now obscure and expensive tool but I still use it to maintain my existing native GUI desktop applications. It is incredibly easy to use / develop with and single exe no dependencies deployment mode is superior. Compatibility between Windows versions is stellar as well.

There is also an opensource version of Delphi called Lazarus which is way less polished.

stefantalpalaru 10 hours ago|
[dead]