> The Microsoft provided APIs are a disaster that keeps getting rewritten every ...

mdasen · 2025-11-13T10:21:59 1763029319

I think few people are using the Win32 APIs directly and Microsoft has been shifting their stuff a bunch.

WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation ) had been the recommendation a while back, but then Microsoft started pushing UWP (Universal Windows Platform). Both of those have been succeeded by WinUI 3. UWP has been deprecated. WPF is alive, but more in a maintenance mode while WinUI 3 takes over the future. Oh, and WinForms were popular, but now not.

There's definitely been a lot of shifting and I think that's caused a lot of annoyance in the developer community - especially as Microsoft ships JS/WebView2 based apps instead of dogfooding their own stuff. If you hang out in the dotnet subreddit enough, you'll definitely see Windows devs annoyed at Microsoft's mercurial attitude toward their desktop frameworks and seeming lack of direction/interest - as their big new things are JS/WebView2.

tcfhgj · 2025-11-13T10:53:41 1763031221

afaik UWP still works though, and switching to WinUI3 is mostly just updating the namespace of your windows components

sirwhinesalot · 2025-11-13T11:15:06 1763032506

Stable is the wrong way to view it. Frozen is the right way to view it.

You have a graveyard of frozen APIs you can use, with new features only available on the later ones.

TiredOfLife · 2025-11-13T10:15:08 1763028908

They are talking about UI. Winforms (abandoned), WPF (abandoned), UWP (abandoned), MAUI.

Windows itself was always using their own custom stuff and not any of those. The closest thing to an established framework in Windows is react native that is sprinkled here and there. And QT that OneDrive uses

tcfhgj · 2025-11-13T11:10:42 1763032242

you can still use all of them to write windows apps, even though they might not receive the latest & greatest shiny features