Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

Re:Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful by dokka on Sunday June 30, 2024 @04:15PM (#40840007)

Yeah, I can confirm that writing windows GUI apps is not at all painful for me. I still use Windows Forms in .NET 4.8 and my executables are < 1mb, Visual Studio's form designer is very easy to use, you can subclass all the .NET UI controls and customize them however you want. There's always been accessibility and even support for high DPI.

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Re:Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful by fuzztester on Monday July 01, 2024 @12:19AM (#40842506)

>I still use Windows Forms in .NET 4.8 and my executables are < 1mb

Do you need to ship any supporting files separately, along with the app?

And is .NET 4.8 or higher already on Windows PCs?

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Re:Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful by throwaway2037 on Monday July 01, 2024 @01:35AM (#40842841)

.NET 4.8 is default in Win10/11 now.

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Re:Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful by EnigmaFlare on Monday July 01, 2024 @05:40AM (#40844108)

A nice thing about .Net Framework 4.8 is that they finally finished it! No more update treadmill and dicking around dealing with what versions are installed or how to configure your application to use whatever different versions. Just target that and forget about it.

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Re:Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful by WorldMaker on Monday July 01, 2024 @11:55AM (#40847021)

.NET 4.8 is the last .NET to be bundled with Windows. It's a legacy stack, but it exists on every Windows >= 10 so it is a legacy stack that makes deployables easy (just assume it is installed). (.NET 4.8 is the new VB6.)

With .NET 9 right around the corner, how far behind the legacy stack is only increases.

.NET > 5 will never be installed out of the box on Windows PCs. The trade offs to that concession however are: cross-platform support, better container support, easier side-by-side installs support ("portable" installs). .NET > 7 can do an admirable job AOT compiling single-file applications. For a GUI app you probably aren't going to easily get that single-file < 40MBs yet today, but it's going to be truly self-contained and generally don't need a lot of specific OSes or things installed at the OS level. Each recent version of .NET has been working to improve its single-file publishing and there may be advances to come.

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Re:Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful by fuzztester on Monday July 01, 2024 @09:08PM (#40852611)

Thanks, guys.

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