Windows 10 at 10: How Microsoft led developers round in circles

Comment It is July 2015. Microsoft has just released Windows 10. Developers, weary from the false trail of Windows 8 and being urged to make "Metro style" apps, are now being pitched a new vision from Microsoft: the Universal Windows Platform (UWP).

"Developers can now create a single application for the full range of Windows 10 devices," said Terry Myerson, head of Windows and devices at the time. Those devices included Windows 10 Mobile, Xbox consoles, and HoloLens augmented reality headsets. What could possibly go wrong?

Answer: pretty much everything. Consider a developer who began with Windows Forms line-of-business applications back in 2002 – perhaps a reluctant convert from Visual Basic 6.0 – and stuck with it through Windows 8, Windows 10, and now Windows 11. They can justifiably claim that their applications have continued to work across all these versions, needing only routine maintenance and framework updates. The framework itself, now open source for .NET Core, remains under active development. There may have been a few bumps along the way – issues with Access databases, or scaling on high-DPI devices – but overall it's been a far smoother journey than for those who tried to follow Microsoft's shifting vision for Windows desktop development.

The first thing to go awry was the abandonment of Windows Phone, formally discontinued in October 2017 but with deprecation well signaled before that. A platform without a mobile OS is not universal. Even on Windows 10 though, UWP had issues, with deployment initially limited to the Windows Store, sandboxed file and hardware access, and a lack of components compared to the mature Win32 API.

Having fractured the Windows development ecosystem, Microsoft tried to put it back together with Project Reunion, introduced in 2020, and WinUI 3, which Kevin Gallo, then corporate VP of Windows Developer Platform, said was the "high performant, Fluent-optimized native UI framework for Windows." UWP was no longer the way forward, though it is still supported, along with the accompanying WinUI 2.

Developers who embraced WinUI 3, though, have not had an easy ride. An anxious developer posted last year, under the heading "WinUI3 is really dead! – When can we expect the announcement?" noted numerous issues, including decreased activity from Microsoft, lack of adoption from component vendors, inability to ship a visual designer for Visual Studio, and poor developer experience. "The whole architecture behind this is ridiculously complex, all the projections, WinRT, the insane build system for the WinUI3 code," they said.

Not long after, Microsoft also started talking up the ancient but still loved Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), which, like Windows Forms, is now open source, as "an excellent choice."

On GitHub, the Windows team responded, saying that "WinUI 3 is not dead, I would even say that I see WinUI as the future of Windows desktop development," but added that "our platform is not in the place we want to be in the future... One of the strongest feedback items we've heard consistently is that Microsoft is not using the same technologies we are recommending to developers, and we are working on that too."

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That last remark is significant. Microsoft Office is not a WinUI 3 application. Microsoft Teams is built with web technology. A key reason is that these applications are cross-platform, but it also means that these large projects within Microsoft are not providing internal feedback and impetus to fix issues.

Want to use Windows Fluent Design components within Windows Forms, WPF, or C++ Win32 applications? This can be done using XAML Islands, available since Windows 10 1903, which allow WinUI components to be embedded in these other desktop application frameworks.

Windows remains the dominant business desktop, but Macs are not uncommon, and the capabilities of Android, iOS, and web applications continue to improve. The concept of the home PC is long gone. This means that Windows-only desktop development is of diminishing importance and cross-platform support is of increasing importance, with many available options.

In the meantime, Windows Forms and WPF still work and it feels like full circle since the launch of Windows 10 and its promise to change everything. ®