This barely mentions Windows Forms, which is the cleanest and fastest way to code Windows GUI apps.

A few years ago, I wanted to prototype something quick and I wrote it in Windows Forms over C# (all code, no visual editor).

> From their perspective, gambling on a new managed-code framework had produced the most embarrassing failure in the company’s history

Most embarrassing failure in the company’s history that far.

I would bet in Avalonia UI. It's like WPF but cross-platform. https://avaloniaui.net/

At Redmond, there was also the Patterns & Practices group (P&P) that tried to make sense of the dev products, and built extra libraries “to show customers how to use them”. They followed the bouncing ball of the frameworks releases from the main development teams. It suggests that it wasn’t clear exactly how you’d use the main products: so P&P said, ‘try it like this.’ I also think the article didn’t say much about MS in the web era. The company survived webdev IMO, but it definitely wasn’t the leader

As an outsider, it always felt that 'internal team politics' were the root cause of Microsoft's technological downfall. This went far beyond the GUI. In 'flagship' offerings like SharePoint or Skype/Lync/Teams you could see the unmixable partial code-bases brutally forced together under a single product name an foisted upon a user-base baffled by how this could have gone so wrong.

Microsoft GUI development is a mess. They don't seem to care. Just look at the mishmash of different GUI styles in Windows 11.

Thankfully I have been mostly insulated from it by sticking to Qt and C++ for the last 25 years.

This article smells so strongly of AI that I'd be surprised if the author did much of any writing.

Windows frameworks got web envy.

Xaml and styling and all sorts to try and compete.

Trouble is, it made desktop development harder, and it didn't win against the web. It left the simple and safe formula of standard and common controls for a designer's playground, but the designers preferred the web. And if you make something for the web, you can package it in Electron and get cross platform cheaply.

So the windows team hates .NET, so they use react webviews and put them in explorer and start menu???

There’s a poster on here who keeps posting and re-posting about their dinner with a Microsoft executive and how they were told Microsoft is all-in on enterprise. Waiting for that copy-paste to make its way over here.

Microsoft keeps footgunning things so hard I think even enterprise might be reluctant to go with them moving forward [0]. I don’t have Netcraft numbers in front of me but I doubt things have notably improved even if they do have a strategy shift to enterprise which includes crapping all over Windows for no good reason.

I’m personally glad FOSS is going strong but that’s a complete aside.

[0] We got burned by Azure as I’m sure many other enterprises have, and they did exactly nothing to remedy/compensate the situation, SLAs be damned. At this point our strategy is to move off of reliance on any Microsoft/windows tech. We moved off of ActiveDirectory not too long ago. Bing/Edge/etc honestly who cares.