For long time Windows developers like myself, the underlying model of WinRT is what the original .NET was supposed to be.

It was called Ext-OS and based on an improved COM API, called COM+ Runtime.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/07/05/more-c-net...

So with C++/CX and .NET Native built on top of WinRT, Microsoft has gone full circle back to the original idea.

Personally I enjoy developing UWP (started right away with the old Windows 8 model), because it offers me a modern OO API to Windows, similar to the OS APIs from Xerox PARC and ETHZ OSes.

Also, sadly Microsoft torpedoed the whole WP eco-system, but the tooling is so much pleasant to use than Android's.

I also welcome the container model to put some control into the mess that is installing Windows applications.

I'm a "long time Windows developer" and personally my opinion seems like the exact opposite: I enjoy pure native Win32. All that new stuff never interested me much, and felt like too much added complexity and learning curve for little gain. MFC looked more like a bloated make-work scheme, I was very much not impressed when I tried playing around with .NET for the first time, and I can still discern clearly which apps I need to use daily are native and which are using .NET, simply by how long trivial operations take and how much memory they consume. It's better than Java, although that's not saying much...

I've found that WTL is a good level of abstraction for pure Win32 API. It's not free (in terms of size and speed costs) and does contain some kludges but you get an object oriented system to control the Win32 API.

Do you use XAML? What do you think of it? I've never really been able to get my head around it - although my professional projects are mostly ASP.NET MVC and WebAPI so I've had no real pressing need to learn it.

Am I the only one who still likes Windows Forms?

It has the developer sanity that web development lacks with its Frankenstein mixture of HTML, CSS, JavaScript to make <div/> behave like native widgets.

Have you ever tried to use any web design tool capable of matching Blend for UI design?

XAML is what web could have become if XHTML and its sublanguages had been adopted properly.

When I don’t care about the UI design, just need some GUI that works — yes, I still like Windows Forms.

When I have professionally-made UI design on input, and need to make GPU-rendered GUI — XAML is the best technology with the competitors far behind.

Any github Project or existing application developers.. who have successfully ported their libraries to UWP.. that you can point me to ? That would be damn awesome.. :)

Not sure what exactly what you would like to know.

There are lots of projects using C++/CX on Github.

https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=C%2B%2B%2FCX

Edge HTML is UWP based.

Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Quantum Break, and Forza Motorsport 6: Apex (Beta) are all UWP games.

I recently did.

https://github.com/Const-me/EsentSerialize

pjmlp seems to be an expert in a lot of this stuff but I'll throw in one other perspective: if you need to write a native app on Windows, yes, UWP is the way to go, certainly over MVC, WinForms and WPF. But it is tied to Windows...

I doubt the performance improvements are significantly different. It's really about portability (Windows Store) and latest Windows features (start menu, menu bar, Cortana, ink, touch, high dpi)

Also, I hear if you do have an exiting WinForms/WPF app, you should be able to upgrade it to UWP.

+1 app on MS App Store.