Had UWP run on windows 7 we might have seen some more take-up.

These days it's getting even easier with Xamarin adding support for WPF, but even without that sort of hand-holding there have always been options.

XAML/WPF is much better than "no backwards compatibility" if you needed to support a UWP-first application on Windows 7. Certainly there were more issues moving the other direction, but particularly/mostly if you had skipped architecting for Silverlight as an intermediate step.

Seconded. The previous times I wanted/needed to do Windows development, the first step was ridiculously simple:

  BUY book
  FROM bookstore
  WHERE author = 'Charles Petzold'
  AND title CONTAINS 'Programming Windows'
  ORDER BY publication_date DESC
  LIMIT 1

Nowadays, that gives "Programming Windows Sixth Edition", from 2013, which "focuses exclusively on writing Windows Store applications", for Windows 8, almost always in XAML and C#. He says that "Plenty of other books already exist for writing Win32 desktop applications, including the 5th edition of Programming Windows. I’ll occasionally make reference to Win32 API and desktop applications, but this book is really all about writing new Windows 8 applications".

If I use this book, will it work for Windows 10 also? Are these applications only distributable via the Windows Store or can I host them for download from anywhere? If I want to distribute an application through the Windows Store does it have to be this type, or can I also distribute Win32 desktop applications via the store?

I have one specific application I miss from my old 3rd generation iPad that I have not found a good equivalent for on my Surface Pro 4, and so would like to write it myself, but I have not found a clear explanation of just what my options are, so have not started.

Microsoft made $21bn on $90bn in revenues [1] and the stock market responded by sending the stock to an all-time high of ~$74 [2].

Microsoft is still a very healthy business and will remain so for a while.

[1] https://www.recode.net/2017/7/21/16008618/microsoft-all-time...

[2] https://www.google.com/finance?cid=358464

You forgot the big one, Visual Studio Code - a runaway success, and an electron app. The reason they don't build these as UWP apps is because they are cross-platform. UWP is currently only available on Windows, and they want VSCode etc to run on MacOS and Linux.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if they bring the UWP platform to MacOS and Linux in the near future. It makes perfect sense (apart from the name, but MS is no stranger to renaming things)

> Ordinary users can't tell an app built using Electron from a native Windows app. Thanks to Metro and its bland flatness, Windows apps does not have a differentiated look & feel, so end users don't know to demand Windows native apps.

I'm really not sure what you mean here. Metro is bland and flat if you design your app that way, and a lot of people design electron apps specifically "flat" to avoid them looking like a particular OS. android and ios apps look like this, I think its just a natural trend of the software / UI industry that apps are starting to look homogenous.

I personally don't like it though. I like file menus like old school forms apps. If that's what you mean then I agree.

> So developers are better off using cross-platform technologies such as Electron.

Not for design reasons!

Xamarin announced support for Linux and macOS at BUILD, and from what I hear most of the work is fairly far along (on GitHub).

So if Xamarin is the "React Native" to the UWP's C#/XAML platform, Electron and Cordova are still useful cross-platform runtimes for the UWP's JS/HTML stack.

I think the messaging from Microsoft seems pretty clear that web-based apps of all sorts (PWAs, Electron, Cordova, UWP JS/HTML, etc) are still welcome on Windows as "first-class" apps and that it's up to team productivity and preference which platform to use. It shouldn't be a surprise to see a bunch of Microsoft-built Electron apps now, because JS/HTML has always been in the UWP "big tent".

(There has even been some cool work done to bring more of the Electron apps more directly into UWP containers, and making them more directly first class UWP citizens, and I hope that work continues.)

I agree though that app stores for desktop apps, seems to be the case for OS X as well. Not quiet sure why.

For the same customers that require WPF/Windows Forms nowadays, and there are tons of them in industrial settings.

Their Windows XP and Windows 7 computers won't last forever, but they still need to plug hardware devices, OS specific APIs, and COM based drivers into their native apps.