Posted by naves 1 day ago
Windows Native App Development Is a Mess
It's worth noting though that Apple is on a similar trajectory and is now in a very nearly as bad position given all the serious issues with SwiftUI and how badly it has fragmented/degraded Mac desktop application development.
It's almost like the major desktop platform vendors have all given up on supporting high-quality native desktop applications.
Apple (and Next before it) have been iterating on Appkit/UIKit for three and a half decades.
Now they have added SwiftUI as a second option and have been iterating on it for a bit over half a decade.
This is in no way similar to Microsoft creating and abandoning another UI framework every couple of years.
If Microsoft had been steadily improving Win32 all these years, where would it be today?
Did they even try to make it look like the new context menus?
It is a fantastic book, I learned everything I know on Win32 from it. Wrote real time scientific software in windows for ~10y! We did it all, external hardware control, custom UIs, etc. Thanks Ryan Geiss for your timing info.
Right about VC6 was the sweet spot imo, C/C++ with lightning fast UI for docs and more. Tools got out of the way. Once other languages got involved (C#?) the docs got out of control and harder to use, and the UI started to get a little overloaded.
The snappiness of those old windows systems was pretty great.