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If I'm writing Windows desktop GUIs I still stick to WPF. Might be Stockholm syndrome but I quite like it.

I don't see the reason to use any of the new ms ui frameworks. Especially if ms themselves don't even really use them.

As far as I know visual studio is still a WPF project so I'm not super worried about it no longer working.

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WPF looks much nicer. Personally I find it hard as hell to debug.

Winforms just work, and have a well defined set of behaviors. It does not matter that they do not look as nice for most people.

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That’s not so bad. I still stick to win32
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Microsoft had a lot of great talent suffering from a lack of leadership and coherent vision. They foreshadowed everything wrong with Big Tech today.
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what surprised me is how different the rendering architecture is for each framework.

Win32 -> message loops & GDI

Winforms -> managed C# via P/Invoke

WPF -> throwse all away and uses DirectX

UWP -> Appcontainer sandboxing

WinUI -> decouples from OS entirely

This visual breakdown helped me to see it clearly - https://vectree.io/c/evolution-of-windows-gui-frameworks-fro...

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As far as I remember, WinForms is just a thin wrapper around Win32 with a message loop, i.e. not all that different.
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At the same time VB still works and runs, so they don't always rug pull.
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They might have forgotten to pull that rug.
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They did pull that rug, twice, in two different directions.

1) VB7 (VB.NET) entirely split the VB developer community.

2) VB6 IDE has not worked well and is entirely unsupported in every Windows after XP. It's generally recommend to build VB6 apps in an XP VM and XP being out of security support it's now a huge "Use at your own risk" and "Do your best to isolate the VM from ever having an internet connection". (Not to mention that installers like Install Shield that still understand VB6' super messy version of COM are generally also out of support and security support.)

It was alleged that Microsoft almost dropped the runtime components for VB6 in Windows 11. It starts to feel like only a matter of time before they do.

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Definitely not, since it actually takes quite a lot of red tape to ship something as ancient as MSVBVM60.DLL in Windows 30 years later, and guarantee that it is still working.

It's just that it's a piece of tech from back when Microsoft corporate dominance on the desktop was at its peak, and many large companies bought into the then-current tech stack, including VB6. So now Microsoft is stuck maintaining it because those are the customers that bring consistent revenue.

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