I think this might be the other way round: if they're not eating their own dogfood, it's much easier for the UI framework to come adrift from actual use cases.

It's really telling that in Windows 8/10 they "modernised" some, but not all, of the control panel UI. It's basically random as to whether a setting you need will be in a Metro-flavoured window or a Win32-flavoured one.

To me, the trouble with everything after WinForms is that it lacks a really compelling reason to upgrade. It's not easier to develop for and it's not nicer to use, and on many desktop systems the font rendering is much uglier in the new system. It does perform better at high DPI, but (catch-22) few people use high DPI windows systems because it's not well supported by even the OS let alone the applications.

That's really infuriating. Makes me wonder what all these devs they have are doing the whole day.

"To me, the trouble with everything after WinForms is that it lacks a really compelling reason to upgrade. It's not easier to develop for and it's not nicer to use, and on many desktop systems the font rendering is much uglier in the new system. It does perform better at high DPI, but (catch-22) few people use high DPI windows systems because it's not well supported by even the OS let alone the applications. "

WPF had great potential and I think they could have made it a wonderful environment if they had kept improving it. Clean up XAML syntax (maybe something like they with ASP.NET and Razor) , simplify data binding syntax and debugging, make MVVM first class citizen and it would be great. Instead they (almost) stopped development of WPF and cranked out a series of half baked successors like WinRT, Silverlight and UWP.

For me the whole thing was cumbersome and nowhere near as productive as WinForms. Not only that but problems it purported to solve like high-dpi support still had issues.

I also wasn't a big fan of XAML - no matter how much time I spent using it, it mostly seemed more difficult and awkward to get components where you wanted them than with WinForms.

Never had any big problem that I can remember of since Visual Studio 2012.

> In fact, at a recent conference I was at with a large group of C# consultants. When the audience was polled on which desktop UIs their clients were using, the vast majority were WinForms, a small group was WPF, and almost no one was UWP

https://iamtimcorey.com/ask-tim-is-winforms-dead/

And many did long before WinForms

> Less than a year ago, a manager asked me if I could write a library for a client that would allow VB6 to access a RESTful API.

https://blog.submain.com/death-winforms-greatly-exaggerated/

That's true, but Apple also got behemoths like Adobe and Microsoft to port over their applications to modern APIs (Cocoa and Cocoa Touch).

Which is also a reason why they hardly have a meaningful market share across the enterprise world.

But in the real world when people talk about “mobile software” everyone knows that people are talking about iOS and Android. No one is chasing after the Windows software market, it’s been a diminishing platform for the past decade.

When they actually become a match to laptops and 2-1 convertibles, maybe.

And there Chromebooks are no where to be seen outside US school system, iPad Pros are mostly a gimmick in rich countries and Android 2-1 are basically phone apps with keyboard.

If I ever got back into desktop software, it would be highly specialized low level C/C++ code and not WPF/Sharepoint/UWP software.

I'm using AHGotoPage() because NSHelpManager has no equivalent and nobody has been able to explain to me how to make that class do a similar task reliably. (In hindsight, AppleHelp is such a disaster that I should have just avoided it entirely, as almost every other app does.) MAS reviewers have given me grief over many things my app does, but never any Carbon calls.

The last time I saw any Carbon APIs deprecated was 10.8, I think (6 years ago).

When working with Win32 it just isn't possible to avoid having to use GDI, for example dealing with painting to a window surface Win32 will give you a GDI device context by default - for example, similarly handling Win32 messages like WM_PAINT uses parts of the GDI API. Finally, each process on Windows has a limited number of GDI objects it can use as well. Oh, and using GDI/GDI+ in a service context (e.g. ASP.NET or a Windows Service, is not supported: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsui_team/2013/04/16/using-...)

Direct2D is nice - but setting it up in your code isn't easy - and Microsoft does not maintain an up-to-date C#/.NET library for Direct2D.

They do for Direct2D on UWP, https://github.com/Microsoft/Win2D

The story is so bad because the Microsoft units making flagship desktop apps aren't productizing their UI frameworks (not suggesting that this is their choice), instead leaving the firm with public UI framework offerings not tightly grounded in that kind of use experience.

Good frameworks don't lead to internal flagship use, internal flagship use leads to good frameworks through tight feedback between real-world use and framework development.