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.

Microsoft's biggest mistake was .Net being a Java competitor when it should have just been like golang producing native binaries. Especially since .Net was realistically only going to succeed on x86/64 at that point (late 90s and 2000s). This shut the door on C# for consumer UIs, and people stuck to Visual Basic and MFC.

It took them more than 2 decades to finally support pure native binaries (via NativeAOT). And it's fantastic for servers on Linux.

I very much dislike WPF. If I have to do a windows UI (and usually when I do it's a simulator for some piece of hardware), I honestly just grab WinForms. It's stupid simple.

Given how bad windows has become since windows 7, I’ve been wondering. Does Bill Gates still use Windows? Does he put up with the horribleness?

Winforms is still compelling to me. Now that we have WebView2, building complex hybrid apps is trivial. I know I could easily go pure web, but something about having proper native chrome feels better as a user. All of my clients/users are on windows so I stopped fighting this battle years ago. I've recently been using .NET10 + Winforms + WebView2 to build custom ai assistants for others. I cannot imagine how much it would suck to iterate the presentation of a conversation history in pure win forms. The hybrid stuff is crazy productive.

Today i still use C# with Windows.Forms. All my old knowledge is still usefull. People know how to use a Windows.Forms program.

To quote Steve Jobs: "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products. "

This is what happens when one's performance is measured by "impact".

A couple of years ago I played a bit with Go and Win32.

I got to the point that I could create windows and controls, and had a basic message loop working.

I then started dabbling in painting in non-client areas. It was buggy and didn't work well (my fault), but then I could see 2-3 different Windows UI styles competing to draw the window chrome.

The amount of crumbs hidden under the Windows carpet is incredible.

A decade or so ago, I had a clear idea of what a "native ui" should look and feel like, even if there were multiple routes to get there. I don't know any more.