It's also just such a bad idea because they never get to mature their features, add uniqueness or allow 3rd party devs to build the ecosystem. They just build the same thing over and over again while their competitors keep refining, innovating and adding features. Really a bound to fail strategy

Exactly that.

The feedback loop is shit as well. Out falls a broken pile of shit for a CTP. No one accepts any feedback. It hits RTM, no one accepts any feedback. Two years down the line, the same bugs are open.

You should hear the partner reps wanting to cry when you report a bug in something that you NEED a fix for and are paying support for. You get fuck all other than a registry fix or a hack even if the mainline product is falling to bits across a thousand or so users (which is what happened to us).

Money where the mouth is as well. Typical shit:

https://github.com/Microsoft/SCVMMLinuxGuestAgent/issues/2 -> ignored. Regularly hoses our new VMs deploying windows on SCVMM.

https://github.com/dotnet/cli/issues/3093 -> fuck you go away we're just going to take your data unless you set a magic variable even though no one wants to give it away as indicated by the ticket and there are bugs in the configuration and it causes people massive audit problems.

From the second ticket

> It's only a matter of time before some enterprising journalist looking for a scoop picks up on this. The headlines here are not good: "Microsoft caught with sneaky program to spy on companies"

Let me take care of that...

Edit: Wrote several of germanys biggest tech sites with focus on dataprotection aswell as the german ministry for cyber security with a link to that ticket. Let's see what happens

Excellent, hopefully something positive comes from it. :)

On a similar note if they get back to you, Mozilla is testing the waters with dumb privacy invasion stuff in Germany soon too:

https://www.ghacks.net/2017/10/06/mozilla-to-launch-firefox-...

They're probably across that already though, but if not it might be useful to point out to them. :)

You do undrrstand thus is a one year old issue in a pre-release of .net core 1 (current version is 2.0)?

The issue is well documented and explained: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/telemetry

I applaud your vigilance, but you are a bit late.

Good work - thank you :)

Maybe MS and the FLOSS world aren’t as different as we thought. Look up CADT by Zawinski for details.

Difference is I’m not paying them. We pay Microsoft a metric fuck load of money.

Same here. I can't even imagine how 3rd party tool developers feel. Let's say you have a grid component. In the last few years you had to do a Winforms and several XAML versions( WPF, WinRT, Silverlight and now UWP). The XAML look superficially the same but all have their set of weird limitations and bugs. I am definitely done with Windows desktop.

Wow, imagine someone trying to make this statement 15 years ago...things have sure changed.

Indeed. 15 years ago I kind of enjoyed it. Win32/winforms is still less horrible than the web these days.

Win32 is in no way less horrible than the Web. Win32 doesn't have any device-independent layout, at all. Forget about handling HiDPI sensibly. RegisterClassEx/CreateWindowEx are incredibly verbose. WndProcs are a mess compared to individual event handlers. The mishmash of COM and inconsistently named C APIs is terrible. COM involves a monstrous amount of boilerplate. COM requires you to deal with apartment threading, legacy that exists primarily for compatibility with Visual Basic 6, which is of course no longer supported but still saddles the platform. Creating an OpenGL context with WGL, with the "false context" stuff, is a nightmare compared to WebGL. Memory management is a giant pain to deal with. The GDI APIs are archaic and slow. I could go on…

Yet I would rather take all of that than dealing with Frankenstein CSS/HTML/JavaScript programming, while making sure it is pixel perfect across all browsers and not making use of the OS features and computer hardware that made me buy it in first place, e.g. WebGL 2.0 on DX 12 GPU.

Most of the issues you mention are solved in .NET, WPF and UWP. COM is a breeze to use in Delphi, MFC/ATL, .NET, C++/CX.

Windows is much more than just Win32.

Apparently Windows event system is so bad, that the younger generation re-inventing it in the form of React.

Also Cocoa, UI Kit, Android and Qt are all better solutions than Web.

Despite the populist mindset that programming the web is a shitshow, it’s really not. Tooling these days is pretty incredible and the ecosystem is pretty great when you are found needing - issues get fixed, PR’s get accepted. It’s a much better experience than a 20 year old environment where everything is set in stone, yet bugs and inconsistencies still exist.

The tools and software for traditional windows app programming have long been neglected and the newer ones throw you into a niche — and still don’t provide a cohesive story.

I would much rather pick up react and produce a working product in less time it takes to troubleshoot XAML databindng and styles, for instance. If my windows app needed something like a map component, I can drop one in my macOS, iOS app - the same one baked into the os - and on the web have an assortment of components to choose from — with WebGL support baked in.

Also, there isn’t such thing as a DX only gfx card - it happily runs OpenGL games and apps just fine

> Tooling these days is pretty incredible and the ecosystem is pretty great when you are found needing - issues get fixed, PR’s get accepted. It’s a much better experience than a 20 year old environment where everything is set in stone, yet bugs and inconsistencies still exist.

Try to make a CRUD SPA as fast as a Delphi one, including a nice L&F by default, just with mouse clicks and setting a few properties.

> Also, there isn’t such thing as a DX only gfx card - it happily runs OpenGL games and apps just fine

This statement means you don't have much experience in graphics programming, at least regarding the fun of dealing with drivers and how OEMs classify GPU features.

So if you prefer I will rephrase it as "WebGL 2.0 on OpenGL 4.6 GPU".

Now feel free to compare what it means in GPU features.

Hint, WebGL 2.0 is basically OpenGL ES 3.0, which maps to OpenGL 4.3.

https://www.khronos.org/developers/reference-cards/

> Try to make a CRUD SPA as fast as a Delphi one, including a nice L&F by default, just with mouse clicks and setting a few properties.

Use Bootstrap for the look and feel. The browser's painting stack is far faster than Delphi's '90s style GDI, so you don't have to do anything there.

You love to use the GDI example against native devs, a Win16 technology, long superceded by better alternatives on Windows.

I only used Delphi as an example, because in 2017 the Web is yet to produce anything that approaches it, even Web Components are yet to be fully done.

A RAD tool is much more than just rendering widgets, a simple CRUD application should be doable just by clicking and setting properties, including talking to the database backend.

Speaking of WebComponents, when will Mozilla support HTML Imports?

> Yet I would rather take all of that than dealing with Frankenstein CSS/HTML/JavaScript programming

I wouldn't.

> Most of the issues you mention are solved in .NET, WPF and UWP.

I wasn't talking about .NET, WPF, and UWP. I was responding to the claim that Petzold-style Win32 apps are better than the Web.

> Apparently Windows event system is so bad, that the younger generation re-inventing it in the form of React.

Huh? React is not WndProc.

> Also Cocoa, UI Kit, Android and Qt are all better solutions than Web.

Disagree.

I've written the same WebGL app twice now, once in Cocoa/Objective-C and once on the Web, with a TypeScript and Webpack stack. Once I got over the initial hump of learning the technology, it was a much nicer experience than my experience with Cocoa. TypeScript is a better language for UI development than C++, Java, or Obj-C, and the fact that the browser implementation of WebGL smooths over the issues with OpenGL on Mac was a huge relief.

Petzold-style Win32 apps were already out of fashion on Windows 95.

Apparently others with better knowledge of Web than me, think otherwise about React vs WndProc.

https://bitquabit.com/post/the-more-things-change/

As for your WebGL example, I would have used Swift with SceneKit instead, regarding productivity in native development on Apple systems.

You're assumptions are outdated

Please provide a link to a Delphi like tool for the Web, including components for backend comunication.

Allow me to present: https://anvil.works/

Visual interface editor? Check.

Component-based UI model? Check. (It's all in Python, everything is an object, very Delphi-ish.)

Back-end communication? Check. (One-line RPC to call functions on the server.)

Database integration? Check.

(The built-in datastore runs on Postgres, and lets you do things like delegate views on a table directly to the client. Mix this with data bindings, and you can create CRUD apps with tiny amounts of code. Or you can start importing the appropriate Python libraries and go to town with your favourite DB.)

Thanks for proving me wrong, Anvil actually does look quite good.

That sounds exactly like the state of affairs the moment you pick a JavaScript framework, which was my point.

Yeah... because compatibility here is MUST.

What I find missing, compared to back-in-the-day, is the _maturity_ of that ecosystem.

Win32 has warts on warts, but around the year 2000 the MS development space was a monoculture and the COM-to-GUI story was increasingly mature and integrated.

.Net came along and, on the one hand, positioned MS to be a whole different kind of tool provider (F# on dotnet core on linux in kuberernetes is niiiiice), but they also lost a few hundred man-years worth of local improvements to their platform. This without providing a credible replacement for Win32 ensuring it would be around for decades.

That fracture fractured again with XAML, again losing tons of maturity, and then fractured even further with the UWP/Silverlight/Metro/WhoKnows. I've never been a bigger fan of MS's product line, but can't justify or defend using much on the client other than html for fancy things or standard winforms for deployability.

Most of the legacy stuff continues working long after it's the hot new thing, though.

Until you hit a bug. The one that killed us was we had to deploy a registry fix to 2000 workstations at hundreds of companies because they broke ClickOnce in IE9 and later. It still isn't fixed today. We still have to eat the administrative cost. Over time, that's a shit ton of cash leaked out on a mistake the vendor has made.

Clickonce is such garbage. I'm sorry I ever heard of it.

I can't believe an company so vested in the enterprise market can do such a terrible job of allowing companies to deploy enterprise software. Click once isn't supported in VS anymore, and was always horrible when it came to things like CI servers anyway. Windows 10 store requires running on azure which make it a no go, doesn't allow push updates anyway. The best options have always been third party ones like chocolatey or NSIS, but they are limited as well, chocolatey does not allow push based and NSIS is pretty weird.

19 years after the first release of apt-get and I'm still waiting for MS to give me something half as good.

Click-Once is like... the smartest idea that ever got built by people who have never worked in places that need something like Click-Once.

I am of the opinion that if they had dropped the "use apps over the web" angle and focused on small-medium-enterprise continuous deployment they woulda had a true game changer on their hands... Click-Once dovetails naturally into something like Apples launchpad, its "turn it off and turn it on again" workflow was ideal for 'Sue in Accounting', its simplified publishing model is great for ISVs with lots of customers, and its sandboxy requirements are a natural fit for the way dotnet core is coming together.

And, yeah, that the Windows ecosystem is still worseoff than apt-get forever ago is a) shocking, b) further proof that Richard Stallman was right about everything ;)

the next Windows update adds ClickOnce-like functionality to its app installer: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/appinstaller/2017/09/27/aut...

perhaps doesn't solve your problems yet :)

Wix isn’t terrible. We use that for deploying two products. When I say not terrible it hides a lot of the design by committee ugliness of MSI packages.

Have you looked at chocolatey as a total replacement for apt-get? If you havent, be prepared for eye gouging disappointment! :(

That too!

But it never matures. You are stuck with half-assed stuff in many cases.

...sometimes to the extent where the hospitals in your country get crippled by malware :-/