Re:Windows 11: a survey of text boxes
by fenesiistvan on Friday September 03, 2021 @12:04PM
(#28405980)
They could add an opt-in flag for this per process. So developers could just turn on some "moderngui" flag in their win32 apps and with some little adjustements most of the apps could be modernized.
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Re:Windows 11: a survey of text boxes
by WorldMaker on Friday September 03, 2021 @02:09PM
(#28407411)
Those exist. The Win32 Common Controls libraries are versioned and applications can opt in to them with rebuilds. There are also "application manifests" where in some cases an EXE can claim that "I know I was built with an earlier version of Common Controls, but I do the right things with them and was built with forward compatibility in mind so please display them the newer way".
The problem with opt-in flags is that it still requires active application developer work (keeping up to date on dependencies; sometimes worse, keeping up to date on future dependencies and learning their restrictions needs) and still can't solve the inconsistency issues from applications developed by people that don't exist anymore or don't have a maintenance budget or the source code was lost or…
Including Microsoft own teams.
Manifests are a thing since Windows 2000, as they were also introduced to sort out registry issues, and go back into xcopy deployments.
Yet even Microsoft's own teams keep putting into the registry what should be in manifest files.