Just wanted to add a shoutout to WinJS for posterity, with which I built a Windows 8 app that I had published to the Windows Store for a brief period of time. Then they open-sourced the UI part of WinJS and decided it was just a web framework instead of an officially supported method for building Windows apps iirc, which was the end of my foray into the Windows store.
replyI was actually part of a team at Barnes & Noble.com which tried to use WinJS for a serious application. (We were previously using Chromium Embedded Framework, or our own hand-rolled WebKit integration, for the desktop e-reader.)
replyIt didn't go great. I gave a talk about it. https://youtu.be/HySQR0t_7CI?si=5sfKbb-7u-qqD65R . (Be gentle to my 2012 self's speaking skills.)
> for posterity
replyAnyone remember this one?
Microsoft Press: Learn Java Now (complete with J++ installation CD). https://www.amazon.com/dp/1572314281
The CD is available on Archive.org
replyI have a WinJS book somewhere, from Microsoft Press.
replyWhen it was announced at PDC, they only talked about WinJS and nothing else, the folks of .NET Rocks have a few shows where they mention they thought .NET was done, and they needed to refocus into something else.
The show where they interview Miguel de Icaza they go into this.
If you want JS, isn’t react-native-windows an option?
replyIt probably is now, but I don't think it was at the time. This was back in the early Windows 8 era, when apps were called "Metro" – 2012 to 2015 I think? I'm primarily a .NET dev by trade, but I wanted to try something different with WinJS so invested time in learning that.
replyIn that light, it is troubling that Friday’s blog post [0] announced
“moving core Windows experiences to the WinUI3 framework” as a measure to improve the quality of said experiences.
reply[0] https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/03/20/our-com...
These steps are necessary stepping stones in getting the thing good, the question is, given Microsoft's tendency to abandon UI frameworks halfway, apart from the classical ones listed above, is if they will keep it focused until its gets as mature as those.
replyAs long as it only applies to Microsoft employees, maybe the pain using C++/WinRT will finally improve the Visual Studio tooling for the rest of us, but I doubt it.
replyThus better leave WinUI to the Windows team.
The only good thing to say about that is it removes the stupidity of using Electron (or the Microsoft Edge equivalent) for built-in Windows apps and the Start Menu. SMH.
replyThe start menu never was electron. It's react native desktop. So, nodejs creating and updating native (well, winui 3) controls.
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