Microsoft GUI-disaster

The great Microsoft GUI confusion game

Like a backyard company Microsoft has started developing countless frameworks over the years, all of which were abandoned, discontinued, and discarded after a short time. Is Microsoft afraid of competition from independent developers? Many developers today say, “Microsoft has lost our trust.” The disappointment runs deep.

It seems that Microsoft wants to scare developers away.

The developer community now only makes jokes about Microsoft: “Great News: All Bugs Will be Fixed In the Year 2041.”

Anyone who spends a lot of time on Github will notice that many of the published source codes are command line programs, as was the case in the nineties with Win95 and Win98. The confusion caused by the many GUI alternatives that were not pursued further is clearly reflected on Github, and many developers are now turning to other alternatives.

Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC)

Microsoft Foundation Classes, or MFC, was a library that provided an object-oriented wrapper for the Win32 API. It was a GUI library that underwent significant development by the Internet community. GUI applications and resource management were greatly expanded and simplified by this class library and finally raised to the level of C++.

MFC was introduced in 1992 with version 7 of Microsoft's C/C++ compiler. Microsoft was late to jump on the C++ development bandwagon. Later versions of Visual Studio had significantly improved versions. Then this 'foundation' was abandoned without any warning and without any further comment. A lot of work by a lot of people was quietly thrown in the trash by this abandonement.

Originally, the library was planned as 'Application Framework Extensions' (AFX). However, the marketing department changed the name to MFC, 'Microsoft Foundation Classes', but the code remained the same. Many headers still refered to “Afx” instead of “Mfc,” such as the precompiled standard header, the StdAfx header automatically generated by Visual Studio.

Windows Forms

Windows Forms has been around since 2002, and its appearance reflects that. It feels like being transported back to the days of Windows XP. The digital Stone Age laughs at the user from every program programmed with it.

Silverlight

Who still remembers the Silverlight disaster? Once advertised as the Flash killer, Silverlight was later quietly discontinued.

WPF

The Windows Presentation Foundation entered the stage in 2006 and seemed to promise a lot: a hardware-accelerated interface, XAML, data binding, styles. For some Windows applications, WPF could still be relevant today, but only proprietary for Windows; the many other systems today are left out.

BYOD is a foreign word for Microsoft. And WPF is no longer being developed. So here, too, it's just a dead end. Although it can be run cross platform, even on Linux, thanks to Avalonia XPF. But it's no longer being developed....

UWP

Should bring the app revolution to Windows – but is languishing as a niche solution.

November '24 you could still read on Visualstudio-Magazine-page : "Microsoft is previewing UWP (Universal Windows Platform) support for .NET 9, providing a path for existing UWP developers to modernize their apps with the latest .NET and Native AOT. That's being done as the company urges devs to switch to Windows App SDK and WinUI 3 because UWP is no longer under active development." This happened at exactly the same time as Win UI 3 was abandoned by Microsoft officials.

WinUI 3

The Windows UI Library (WinUI) is the native UI framework for Windows 10 and Windows 11. Anyone who has painstakingly learned how to use WinUI and its UI description language XAML to create modern Windows desktop applications with .NET and C# is now left behind.

One newspaper writes: “A project that was made ‘open source’ many years ago is now suddenly announcing ‘true open source development’? What kind of joke is Microsoft playing here?”

In 2024, Github announced: "WinUI 3 is dead. When can we expect an announcement?" The thread has since received over 580 comments and has become a gathering place for the community's dissatisfaction with the stagnant development of WinUI 3.

The disappointment now is great:

"Same goes for the effort that so many people have taken in order to submit bug reports or create design proposals.
You have been watching everybody doing it, even though you knew that they will never be worked on and fixed.

2. Have Microsoft Representatives been Lying to the Developer Community?

This needs to be evaluated. Behaving as if all would be fine and the product would be continued is quite close already.

And I recall statements like "all developers are working on WinUI3 now" which I think were made after 2022 and after stopping development (largely),

When the UWP bugs were all closed, it was promised that issues will be better handled in the future and it won't happen again.
IIRC, this was also after 2022."

MAUI

Then .NET MAUI was supposed to bring salvation. Finally, a framework for many platforms. Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS were to be supported. But the large market for Linux was missing. The reality was sobering. MAUI is being developed half-heartedly and, after years on the market, still suffers from teething problems. Problems with deployment, performance, and a lack of documentation. MAUI started out as the great hope. Today, it turns out that it is anything but a beacon of hope.