Replies: 39 comments 297 replies
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Hi I'm an AI powered bot that finds similar issues based off the issue title. Please view the issues below to see if they solve your problem, and if the issue describes your problem please consider closing this one. Thank you! Closed similar issues:
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Component Vendor Support for WinUI3All the component vendors already know it. Telerik
The two "under review" haven't been updated since about a year. Ref: https://feedback.telerik.com/winui SyncfusionThe WinUI roadmap for 2024 includes only improvements to shared components (i.e. improvements are made for multiple platforms) but nothing specific to WinUI3 controls. Ref: https://www.syncfusion.com/products/roadmap/winui-controls DevExpressThey are explicitly stating that their WinUI3 components are dead:
Ref: https://supportcenter.devexpress.com/ticket/details/t1206625/winui-3-the-roadmap-in-2024 |
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I think that the comments on the link above are the most telling:
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@NicholasChrzan Wow... |
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Honestly their a lot of reasons, maybe the client do not want anymore a GUI who look like Windows XP ? And DevExpress WinUI component is free while WinForm cost 999$/year, so Devexpress will not push clients to use a free component |
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Hardly anybody uses the built-in WinForms controls for professional applications these days.
Probably you haven't read everything: They stopped development. And they always do like this when they are starting to target a new platform: The initial versions are free for a while until it's mature enough to charge for future versions. MAUI controls are free as well, for example, as it's still in development. |
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Ho, was not aware about this. My bad. |
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ConsequencesIf this turns out to be true, this would be a severe incident: 1. You owe me two days of workFor creating the Pull Requests, since I didn't know that they'll be never even looked at due the product being abandonded. Same goes for the effort that so many people have taken in order to submit bug reports or create design proposals. 2. Have Microsoft Representatives been Lying to the Developer Community?This needs to be evaluated. Behaving as if all would be fine and the product would be continued is quite close already. And I recall statements like "all developers are working on WinUI3 now" which I think were made after 2022 and after stopping development (largely), When the UWP bugs were all closed, it was promised that issues will be better handled in the future and it won't happen again. |
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WYSIWYG for WinUI3 says looking into it... but the only "official" microsoft feedback is the automated message when creating a topic, and a bot message for a deleted message. MS fixed a Co-Pilot bug that was reported witin ~a week, can't we be notifed that at least they are doing something? |
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Let's think about the crazy future where blazor rules next. There's also a possibility that they really have very few resources, and it's hard to be convinced that it's really production usable until ms actively migrates the existing own app. I'll wait until it supports NativeAOT before I try it. |
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If WinUI3 would be the future #1 desktop UI framework, then they wouldn't be assigning 20 times more dev resources on MAUI. The required qualification is not that different and MAUI cannot be a higher priority project than a native Windows UI framework which neither MAUI nor Blazor is. |
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They also once said that Win10 is the last desktop version, but the person who said this has been fired. |
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I don't think so, it looks like a technical reorganization, nothing is brand new (uwp equivalent). Apart from the fact that I can't figure out why the designer isn't being offered, but it's very much trending the blazor of the dotnet community looks like it's going to win this one. |
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If you read through the issues here about it, you'll find some comments from a (now Ex-)MS developer exlaining why it's a huge task and why the UWP designer cannot be built upon. |
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WinUI is mismanaged and woefully understaffed. I wrote a post up a while ago which got a lot of traction. Either close this repo and make it internal only and pretend that it's under active development or put it out of its misery. I love WinUI and it had great potential and traction but all good will has been lost by the lack of comms out of Redmond. Remember as well this whole UI framework and stack (WinRT) is as old as Windows 8. DPs of Win8 were available in 2010 or 2011. That makes the tech at least 13 years old. Appalling when you consider how much Android and iOS have iterated over that time. |
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I know it very well. ❤️ Your post had "inspired" me actually. After I had read it a few days ago, I had started investigating the actual dev activity which ended up in this: Great News: All Bugs Will be Fixed In the Year 2041, after which I dug deeper as it all didn't make sense to me.
Maybe that's one of the reasons for the decision to create something new (which I'm inclined to believe). |
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My suspicion is that they have pulled off the majority of developers to work on something new. Maybe they'll call it WinUI4 to make the whole story not appear even worse than it does already, but it must be on a very different technical basis. If it was a continuation only, they could have backported fixes and wouldn't have to invest into Xaml Islands. Also the component vendors wouldn't have had to pull their efforts if it wasn't something technically different that is coming. And it's clear that something must be coming: the framework gap on Xbox needs to be filled. App development for xbox is not abandoned, WebView2 for Xbox has just been released in November and UWP is been given up, so there's an obvious gap as Xbox is meant to stay. |
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The strongest evidence of all is the component vendors' behavior. I mean, MS doesn't make a call to DevExpress like "Oh, we just wanted t let you know that WinUI3 is dead. Sorry for your wasted effort. Goodbye". It would rather be something like "We want to have you on board from the early stages on while we are developing a successor technology to WinUI," Another reason from which I find it very plausible that they switch onto something new is the WinUI3 source code and build system; When you see that and move a little bit around everywhere, then - at least in my case - you'll just want to run away and do something else... ;-) |
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This could be a good thing, the future could be the realm of declarative UI frameworks and blazor, which could be echoes of Longhorn from twenty years of unfinished visions (everything is dotnet). I have no doubt about that with their now frantic embrace of web technologies. |
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Now and in the future, there are and will be many UI frameworks. But this is about the operating system's native UI framework, i.e. by which the OS components themselves are developed, so I doubt that it will go in any such direction like web. But a .net-based rewrite of WinUI3 is something I could well imagine. It's actually my nr 1 theory. |
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Also the fact that they even converted this serious issue to a discussion to show us how much they don't care: #9154 ...Or at least they don't care that this UI framework is only usable for simple mobile-like apps and don't care that it's unusable for any complex business application. I seriously doubt that something like Visual Studio could be made with WinUI 3, so it's not a replacement for WPF. |
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PredictionWhenever they will respond to this, directly or indirectly, one of the first statements will of course be saying that WinUI3 is not dead and will continue to be supported till the end of days (or at least according to the OS support periods). (Yet, that's what I mean by saying that it's dead) NoteI have no insider information on this subject. If I had (like at some occasions in the past), I wouldn't post about it. It's solely based on observation, inference and deduction (and experience from similar cases). There's a chance that I could be wrong, but I don't think so. |
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Unfortunately I think you're right. I just really hope they don't go the web route, even for native apps. But even if they don't, the fact that they're creating yet another UI framework/application model is just... They keep making new and new ones and then replacing them with new ones just 3 years later, and those who invested in the previous technology are s*** out of luck. First (that I remember) Windows Forms, then WPF, then Silverlight, then Windows Phone + Windows 8, then UWP, then WinUI 3… all incompatible with the previous ones. Oh and in parallel, Xamarin and then MAUI. I’m afraid it’s going to happen again to WinUI 3… And then Microsoft says that they "care about compatibility".... while leaving developers who are stuck on the previous thing behind. This isn’t how to treat your developers well, Microsoft… Can’t they for once stick to a single framework and work on making it the best it can be, and making the developer experience the best it can be? |
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Yes, but not always a monetary one 😉 |
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Hmm...could that be the news: MS buying AvaloniaUI? The Avalonia site is also prominently advertising support for the component vendors' controls. I'm sure they cannot solve everything from their own side only, it requires collaboration with them, which means in turn that those parties are investing effort in this direction. |
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It would also fit into the timeline. I dug out whe roadmap document from the history where it was said that there's a new team: https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/blob/be08c08b0cddfe075b8535ab7b3b591113d2f3c2/roadmap.md |
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I really don't think so. And even if they did, they probably wouldn't abandon their flagship native UI framework. Lots of people write native apps. There isn't just .NET out there. And Windows apps themselves need to use something and most of them are not C# (although I know Microsoft Store is (was? not sure if it still is)) |
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Agreed that it cannot be a replacement. It's merely a question of focus. |
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I should mention that the WPF team has recently been activated and is providing WinUI 3 styles and controls.
Also, I must mention that there have been good changes since wasdk v1.5 and we will have good changes in 1.6. |
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Yea, in no other Windows UI framework I had to send WM_CLOSE to my own window to close it |
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And more importantly, it can be run cross platform, even on Linux, thanks to Avalonia XPF, like I said in #9417 (reply in thread) |
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It's a civil war at Microsoft, and the winner is the WPF |
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This is false. At least for C++ :p |
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WPF is aging, and unless they rewrite the backend to directx 11/12 and fix the performance issues, it is unlikely to be the framework of the future, as much as I would like that. Supporting the styling of winui is just a solution to make legacy Microsoft WPF apps blend in with the new stuff. |
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Yes, it is sadly, but kind of my fault, wanting to use the latest technology for some UI improvement and specially trusting MS on new tech perennity. |
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Despite of all ranting about WinUI3, I need to say that 99% of such "crashes" are due to the way you are coding. In most cases, these are caused by threading and the way you handle events. private void UISettings_ColorValuesChanged(UISettings sender, object args)
{
this.DispatcherQueue.TryEnqueue(this.UpdateTitleBarColors);
}The DispatcherQueue is often presented as a measure to perform tasks on the UI thread. But another important use case is decoupling of event callbacks, which means that you should even use it in cases when the callback is on the UI thread already. It's not always needed, but unless you have gained some experience in which cases it may be needed and in which it's not, your best bet is to follow this rule unconditionally. When you are interacting with hardware and there's COM somewhere in-between your application code and the hardware, and you are receiving events from the hardware, keep this in mind as a general measure. A while ago, I've been working for a company who have a WPF application that is inferfacing with a range or hardware through different interfaces and in one case, they've been struggling for years with instabilities in hardware interaction. When I told them how it can be fixed, no one believed me, saying they had tried everything already and it would be MS' fault (and between the lines kind of "none of your business anyway"). |
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@softworkz unfortunately, the |
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@matthewacme - I think you are a bit confused. UWPIn UWP, there was no DispatcherQueue originally, just the Dispatcher property on the CoreWindow which gave you a CoreDispatcher. Same properties available on any DependencyObjkect. WinAppSDKIn WinAppSDK, both properties are available on the Window, but the Dispatcher property is always empty. Same availability with the WinAppSDK version of DependencyObject. So it's the same situation as with UWP. Framework-Agnostic WayInstead of passing around the queue, there's another way which works universally (UWP, WinUI, WPF..). All that it takes is that you need to set this up at a moment where you are sure that you're on the target thread ("UI thread"). For example, when you know that a class is instantiated from the UI thread, you can grab the System.Threading.SynchronizationContext: class MyClass
{
private readonly SynchronizationContext synchronizationContext;
public MyClass()
{
Debug.Assert(SynchronizationContext.Current != null, "SynchronizationContext.Current is null => not on UI thread");
this.synchronizationContext = SynchronizationContext.Current;
}
public void ExecInUiThread(string cmd)
{
this.synchronizationContext.Post(
_ =>
{
this.DoCmd(cmd);
},
null);
} |
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You should be cautious of the SynchronizationContext. Error handling is harder to do properly, especially if you also have async calls in there, since it doesn't natively support async/await. It would be cool if it did support though. |
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What's the point of this post? Don't think anything meaningful would come out of this. WASDK 1.5 and 1.5.1 was just out. Community call on 1.6 roadmap is posted. Are you some kind of PR guy to sabotage WinUI just to advertise WPF? |
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Not at all. I've been frustrated that my PRs are ignored and no action is taken on my and others' bug reports. And what I want is to be informed earlier in order to avoid investing into a technology with a limited future. |
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Also consider the following: Until 2022 they've been pretty responsive here to all kinds of posts, which has ceased almost completely. Lastly: I have no intentions to paint a false picture and just talk things down. You have my word that I will deeply and sincerely apologize to the whole team and fellow developers in case when it would turn out that I've been largely wrong. |
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I feel the slowdown in WinUI 3 fixes and new features is because WinUI 3 is also the Windows component of MAUI. So in this process many bug fixes get postponed and new features/fixes are delayed due to the testing cycle on all platforms. Plus of course the most important is the compatibility between the management of these teams. |
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If you would be right, then this would be reflected in actual code changes to WinUI3 in this regard, which don't exist. Aat least not at a scale that would match your theory. |
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Why would that delay fixes and features? If anything, it should accelerate them because they're needed for MAUI. |
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Hello everyone, Mik from Windows team is here, thanks for starting the conversation. Now, it's obviously our platform is not in the place we want to be in the future - there is a big backlog of items that we need to triage and prioritize among different internal and external customers. One of the strongest feedback items we've heard consistently that Microsoft is not using the same technologies we are recommending to developers, and we are working on that too. I think one other area your feedback attributes directly is that our platform is not fully open sourced, we make source code available, but there is not currently a way for community to directly contribute to the release. You can watch the discussion about this topic during our latest WinUI Community Call with specific details. We continue to invest in frameworks Windows developers use. For example, we've recently shared our refreshed roadmap for WPF on GitHub - https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/blob/main/roadmap.md Windows will continue to be an open platform for developers. |
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ActiPro - one of Microsoft's partners and often promoted by Microsoft, has said they won't invest in WinUI (have officially abandoned UWP as well) and instead moved their development to Avalonia and WPF :( |
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TBH, despite all the reassurances we get every now and then, it is very likely web widgets will take over Windows UI, and there will be some sort of winRT projection to allow COM usage for hardware device access (like we had in win8). There's little interest at Microsoft to support anything more than that, since the business model under Nadella has been Azure and cloud, and now the AI stuff. C# and dotnet both prioritise web stuff. Consumer apps can afford the performance hit of web widgets, while directx will provide the high performance where needed. There's simply no room for WinUI, or a fully managed UI framework. I personally have no idea what they are even trying to do with MAUI, since Microsoft's misguided mobile efforts are dead. |
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See Blazor being pushed everywhere, and regarding what you mention with Web and COM, Microsoft owns React Native support for Windows, which is what the XBox Dashboard has been rewriten, from its original WinRT implementation. |
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This is the worst part, not using your own native framework for your own first party apps, that should be a showcase of your own technology, it's a really bad that leads devs asking their selves: "why should I use this if not even Microsoft does?" ... especially considering that most of them moved to inferior, slow, heavy, pen&touch unfriendly web tech (including some OS controls). |
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This is absolutely my No. 1 criteria and a potential dealbreaker. In the old days (MFC, etc. - yes I was there) - we knew your developer tools were golden because you were using them. The primary reason I started getting interested in WinUI again is because MS is starting to actually use it more, including in the Windows shell. That plus 1.5 being a huge improvement I feel like things are starting to finally get on track and you have a viable contender for a WPF successor finally. But here's my feedback for y'all - you NEED TO FOCUS. I feel like I'm looking at a menu at the Cheesecake Factory here. There are too many damn options and none of them has everything I need. I love WPF, and if you're gonna go with that one as the winner then go with it and kill RT once and for all. If not, let WPF die and beef up WinUI so it's at par. Or if you think cross-platform incl. web is the ultimate future then go all in on MAUI and for Windows put it on top a Skia or D2D renderer and kill everything else. Regardless, please, enough with having 15 different flavors of frontend frameworks where none of them is rock solid. Even the most valuable company in the world can stretch itself too thin. You're like the Roman Empire, too big to govern itself. You need a single "Frontend Development" czar who can make sense of all this and unify it and assign the resources more sensibly. Instead you have a bunch of independent little kingdoms between Blazor and MAUI and WinUI and WPF and React Native and whatever the heck you guys use internally 10+ years after Windows 8/Metro disappointingly little progress has been made. All there are are more options, layers built upon layers, and none of which is the whole package. |
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I'm interest in WinUI for about 3 years. But I don't see any advantage compare to WPF yet. |
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apparently it is being tracked here #6527. but to be honest this does not really affect my case since what i want is to overlay winui controls over the webview which other alternatives cant provide. |
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Do you know if this applies only to the WebView2 in WinUI or to WebView2 generally? The IE ActiceX WebBrowser control not only allows transparency (by keying out a color) but allows mouse events (click & hover) to selectively fall through to the window below. I was able to get transparency working in WebView2 (outside of WinUI context) but never the desired mouse behavior available in the old WebBrowser controls. |
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It's not a limitation of the WebView2, but of WinUI3 composition. The WebView2 sends its content with transparency, but on the WinUI3 side, transparent areas will be painted on top of the window background color. Due to the same limitation it's also not possible to have transparent content in a swapchain panel. Transparency works in all cases where the WebView2 is rendered to a Win32 window (with hWnd) and also in case of UWP (DirectComposition). For input event forwarding, there's no built-in way. Since no simple color keying is used, there's also no yes/no regarding whether an input even should be handled inside or outside. I see three ways to do that, though:
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Wow, thank you for this very knowledgeable and helpful reply! I appreciate you pointing this out:
It had not occurred to me that transparency via color keying (which is visually inferior, as you pointed out) was the very reason why the natural selective mouse fallthrough behavior I observed was so easily achieved in IE WebBrowser, and so there's a genuine tradeoff here, not just a bug waiting to be fixed by the WebView2 team. I recently saw this Electron demo (must wait for gif to load, then click play) of exactly the mouse behavior I wanted (note how the mouse cursor is IDC_HAND when it hovers over the non-transparent regions in the Electron window, and how it changes to IDC_IBEAM (as that's the appropriate cursor for the vscode window below) when it hovers over the transparent regions. electron/electron#1335 (comment) Unfortunately its impact on performance is probably too great for the app I'm developing. Your option 2 is probably more suitable for my case. Thanks again for the great explanation! Edit: the link has been corrected. |
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Well - in case of the demo - and assuming that the webview window has focus, there isn't much communication needed for changing the mouse cursor, because as long as the webview has focus, it's the browser alone to be in charge of changing the mouse cursor, so you don't even need to communicate with the outside for this. Option 2 would make sense if you want to use hit-testing functionality of the native side, but it would fail when elements inside the browser can overlap controls on the outside - which you can't know from outside code. Last: Use web messaging for communication between browser and outside world (like PostWebMessage). It's async and capable enough to even transmit pointer-move events to the outside. |
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Technically, WinUI is not dead because it’s also used within Maui. However, from a practical point of view, I will not touch it with a barge pole. I have more chance of surviving running through a forest fire with a wooden leg than surviving another dead horse. Coming from UWP with significant investments in the platform, I realized that Microsoft is just bad with UI frameworks. For that reason, I will stay clear of all Microsoft UI frameworks. For WinUI to be usable, two things need to happen: **It must be open-sourced. I was extremely reluctant to use yet another framework like Blazor when I was happy with native development. Looking back, my requirements were not such that I had to use a native platform; I was just not familiar with web frameworks. I made the switch to Blazor and can truly say I love the idea that I have many UI frameworks that I can use in one codebase covering all devices. As I mentioned, my use was not overly technical, so fortunately, I could make it work with web tech. .NET is probably one of the best products that Microsoft has ever made, so you can’t go wrong there, especially if you want to stay within the .NET & C# ecosystem. Blazor is not perfect but I would say definitely the best choice in terms of commitment by MS. The only web UI framework that Microsoft is indirectly involved with is the FluentUI framework in Blazor, which was recently started by Microsoft employees, I think in an unofficial capacity. I personally prefer MudBlazor for my UI needs but FluentUI speaks volumes regarding MS intensions regarding new UI frameworks. |
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Having been used Webview solutions all the way back to the IE ActiveX control introduced alongside Active Desktop, I don't understand the craziness to trying to push Blazor everywhere, beyond its original goal of being a WebAssembly framework for .NET. 30 years ago, it kind of made sense as migration to the Web as in its early days, Web apps as concept were barely starting. Nowadays, if it is to be Web based, everyone has a browser already installed, so I rather target browsers, not Webviews. |
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Agree, MS could have had a strong & vibrant native desktop platform but they have always been reluctant to open source anything on the Windows front and they don't have a good track record of unifying the ecosystem. Needless to say, I'm not pushing anything just giving my opinion do take into account that I have always been looking for a unified codebase with cross platform functionality, so I was "forced" to follow the path of least resistance not by choice. Running a separate desktop app only makes sense if you want to access native platform features that is not available in the browser. |
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This needs differentiation because there are two entirely separate divisions at Microsoft with different mentality and culture and very different results and success rates:
And for those who have read my initial posts here: Intertestingly, the time of when a new WPF team had been formed and new development on WinForms had been announced, roughly coincides with the time at which work on WinUI3 had been apparently de-emphasized. |
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As short addedum DevDiv is now under Azure, so it isn't only about .NET, rather all programming ecosystems relevant to Azure, and also responsible that Microsoft now takes part into Go, Java (there is some irony that they are again a Java contributor), Python, Rust, node ecosystems. |
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@pjmlp - Oh yea that's right, thanks |
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Another Prediction: A WinUI3 Visual Designer is ComingDisclaimer: I have no insider information about this. If I had, I wouldn't disclose it. It wouldn't be interesting to speculate anyway. So the below is solely based on observation, deduction and knowledge about designer implementation. Update: Prediction confirmed true!I had recently explained a bit how designers work in VS and what it takes to implement a visual designer for WinUI3 in the feature request at devcommunity. When you look at the WinAppSDK/WinUI3 progress made throughout the recent bi-yearly releases of the WinAppSDK, I see two notable aspects:
It’s the second part which has caught my attention. For those who don’t know what XAML Islands is and what it’s meant for, here’s a short breakdown: The development focus on this specific scenario seems largely inexplicable to me. When you want to promote and push the adoption of a new UI framework, you would usually try to ease migration by allowing developers to integrate their prior work done in other UI frameworks in the new one without needing to re-develop everything at once. But XAML islands goes for the exact opposite direction: Including WinUI3 content in non-WinUI3 apps while no effort is being made for allowing non-WinUI3 content to be embedded inside WinUI3 apps. The WinUI3 Roadmap just briefly mentions this as "Cross-process Islands". So, there are use cases without doubt, but these are all rather of the nice-to-have kind. These aren't things that peoply are desperately waiting for to get unblocked in their adoption of WinUI3. So why is so much effort spent on "Cross-Process Islands"?...and why even cross-process? There is only one major use case for cross-process islands that I can think of: A Visual Studio Designer for WinUI3 (for this case it has to be out-of-process indeed) This week I've taken a look at the new APIs in the experimental channel of WinAppSDK 1.6 (1 and 2), and there are loads of new APIs in this area ( When you look at those APIs and their names - most of which are giving a good idea of what they are doing - and you have just a little understanding of how those designers are working, then it's obvious (at least to me) that these APIs are exactly what's needed in order to create a Visual Studio designer. Hence my predition: A VS Designer for WinUI3 is actively being worked on Though, looking at the API changes between 1.6_1_exp and 1.6_2_exp, I think it's still in an early stage and more than a year away. |
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Somewhat earlier than expected, but maybe my posts here helped to accelerate a bit... |
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Now let's see how long it will take until it's actually released... And hopefully without slowing down the speed of bugfixes even more 😥 |
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Can hardly slow down more, but there has been slight improvement with 1.5 at least. |
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Wrong link, I think you meant #9417 (comment). But yeah, let's hope they'll keep it up and they can focus on development instead of bureaucracy etc. |
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Oops, fixed it. thanks!
Yup! |
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Visual Designer Experience ExampleWhen reading the discussions in the feature request and recently here, it can be seen that there is a huge gap between those people which are saying that they don't want to work without a designer and others which are don't consider it important or are even deeming hot reload as "superior" like above (again, hot reload is great, but a very different thing). I believe this gap is due to the fact that many have never seen what kind of design-time experiences are possible, because - to be honest - the built-in component designers are not that much exciting. Sometimes things are difficult to convey in writing, so I've created a little video to demo what it's about and how far this can go. To make it interesting, in this video I'm creating a
3-Minute-App1.mp4Whoever is able to do the same with Hot Reload in the same amount of time, please raise your hand..! 😆 |
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Devexpress is amazing with Winforms, however you don't have the same experience with Wpf and non with WinUI. |
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We certainly have it with WPF and UWP, including Blend integration, ComponentOne as well. |
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@softworkz : Your observation about "Cross-Process Islands" being the most invested area is very interesting. Although I do not share your optimism about a WinUI3 Visual Designer, this triggers some other 'crazy' thoughts in my "have optimistic visions-brain". Lets speculate. Why one could not plan to:
Somewhere between step 2 and 3 your Visual Designer for VS203x could be part of the 'Proof of concept'-path and the fat client IDE could be refactored step by step to a modern App architecture using WSL/Container for things like (remote)-debug (already implemented!), visual designers, code compile/refactor/assist, and so on all as local or cloud connected remote microservices. (BTW: since I heavily used an exotic 'really integrated and distributed development environment' back in the 1990ies, I personally do think the 'E' in IDE was never really fulfilled in all the VSs, Eclipses and IDEAs we used to have...) At least the namespaces already allow to go that road. No 'Windows' mentioned in the UI modules 😄 . |
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You missed the important part that what I wrote was not based on optimism. When you read this topic from the start, it should be clear that this is not a "let's make a wish" conversation. None of the things you listed is matching the API changes that I mentioned and about which I said that they are preparations for a designer. The namespace change is because WinAppSDK is no longer tied to a Windows OS release (like UWP), and also - well - "Windows" is already used for UWP, so "Microsoft" is the next best choice anyway. Finally, this is the Windows team, surely these are the last ones from which you can expect anything cross-platform. |
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Ok, I am not that deep into the code and APIs of this repos as you seem to be. So let's close this off topic discussions here and wait patiently for the announcements you asked for in your Title. |
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Yea, we'll see what's gonna happen - thanks and cheers to Austria. |
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Very useful topic. In the past, I worked with WinAPI windows and controls, then with WinForms, and a little with WPF. I built a project on MAUI, and now I am studying WinUI3. I feel very cool. WinUI3 is very beautiful. If it does not become a massive technology (only for cool and hard coders), it will be great. |
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I also like work with WINUI3, but every single time I try to do or implement something there will be always some problem, bug, incompleate feature etc..... |
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yes, from my experience too, I can say that not everything (controls) in WinUI3 is MVVM ready or made MVVM in mind. |
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I feel like I really dodged a bullet when I found this post. I was following MS guidance when I started the rewrite I'm currently working on, and chose WinUI. Very soon I started to notice all of the things that have already been discussed here. I quickly ran into bugs that had been reported two years ago and still not fixed. Then I started looking at third-party components, and two of the three (major) vendors I investigated started on WinUI support but ostensibly dropped it. Unfortunately, despite what I read hear about MAUI getting all the attention, my experience with it has also been nothing short of a struggle. This feels like Silverlight all over again. Thankfully I'm only a little ways in. Back to WPF! |
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Oh I loved Silverlight. The reason I mentioned Silverlight is simply because it was a great product that I invested a fair bit into and then MS dropped it. And now my fear is that I'll invest in WinUI and it will get dropped, so I'm going back to a product that, despite maybe being a little long in the tooth, is much more likely to get continued support simply due to the "installed base". I'm with you: the big difference is that Silverlight was MUCH more bug free than WinUI is likely EVER to be! |
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Welcome to OpenSilver. https://opensilver.net/ |
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MAUI doesn't help here because on Windows it uses WinUI3 under the hood, so you're even farther away by another abstraction layer providing less control and less features.
Yea, welcome to the big mystery this is all about: They're saying it's not dead, and they're actually doing a bit of work, but this is essentially so slow and so little (opposed to what would be needed) that it's hard to believe that there's any priority set on it. So the big question remains: "MS, what are your plans for WinUI3 ?" |
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In case you missed there was a WinDev community talk, where as usual things were shown as if everything is alright, the usual "you can use C# and C++" without any mention of the actual warts when one tries to use them, C++/WinRT being in maintenance and so on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43rwZpcKtCA So glad that I have refocused on other technologies. |
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They lost the chance with MAUI to move and align to UWP/WinUI XAML |
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It was said to be dead in the early days of WPF. It experienced the same fate in UWP and now I think it is living in WinUI. Why do developers in this ecosystem enjoy cutting the branch they are sitting on instead of supporting it? |
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@mcyenikoylu WPF is still alive |
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WinUI3 Bugfix RateWhen I had started this discussion, it wasn't about bashing WinUI3 in the first place - it was about looking at facts and figures and drawing conclusions from all information that is available, specifically the implicti kinds of information which isn't spelt out but can acquired by looking a little closer and doing the Math. With the release of WinAppSDK 1.5, there's a positive tendency regarding WinUI3 bug fixes, and that's why I wanted to share those new figures:
For those figures, I went through the WinAppSDK release notes and counted all "fixed" entries which are referencing a bug in this repo, omitting those without a reference and omitting those referencing issues in the WinAppSDK repo. 42 bug fixes is surely an improvement over 17 or 8, but with 763 open bugs as of today, it would still take 9 years until all bugs are fixed (assuming no new bugs coming up added). My conclusion: It's an improvement for sure, but what hasn't changed is that a massive increase of effort is required to drive WinUI3 into a position where it won't be candidate to a sudden death (ceased by MS due to lack of adoption). |
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For Microsoft it matters not, cause the winui2/uwp they use is not the same gimped down version the rest of us mare morals use. It may as well be a different framework altogether. |
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It is the same.
Nope for the UI side. Though, the apps and components are not all running containerized, like UWP apps do by default. |
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The lack of container changes things significantly, even for the UI stuff. |
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The key reason I guess is that maybe winui3 is not mature enough to carry large-scale commercial use before, the resource manager team ate the first crab, but at present it is still pending further maturity of the framework and functionality to complete. |
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One important aspect that needs to be considered in this context is the timeline. Most of those OS components which are implemented with WinUI2/UWP had development started way before WinUI3 even existed or when it was still too new to rely on it. A key factor for such OS components is maturity. An elementary OS component like the settings app must be perfectly reliable and bug-free and it's a long path to get there. It's not something that you would begin to re-develop just because a newer UI framework exists. This doesn't make any sense. For components which are showing up in Windows OS right now, I would estimate that they've started development 1.5-2 years ago at minimum, and when judging the choice of framework, it must be seen in the light of the situation at that time rather than current time. |
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WPF is a great choice for LoB applications. However, it doesn’t have till today a reporting engine, neither do WinUI. MS should have provided it long ago. They intended to but shelved it in favor of providing a third party component which also has not come forth. Extending WinUI3 for WPF was a great news. I tried sample App for WinUI3 with WPF but it requires Windows 11, perhaps due to map control. They should have released sample WinUI3 - WPF app for Windows 10 in the first place. Non-WPF app for WinUI3 works fine on Windows 10. It seems that Microsoft is in the habit of taking one step forward and other backwards. Regarding WPF vs WinUI vs MAUI debate, AvaloniaUI seems to be the winner with cross-platform support using SkiaSharp as its rendering engine. |
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For cross platform, you could use native WPF and use Avalonia XPF for MacOS compatability. |
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XPF Awesome |
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Let us hope WebView2 may not be another Silverlight. |
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Download Winui Gallery app, click some tabs, app crashes. Everything you have to know about winui right now :). |
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Now that you already made those nice animated GIFs, maybe you could report it here: https://github.com/microsoft/WinUI-Gallery |
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This is the reason that stops me from using WinUI 3. |
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Well, it may not be fault of NavigationView. Since WinUI lacks integrated support for navigation (The top reason it can't replace Pivot), and the NavigationView is just a dumb switcher, it may be the manual navigation handling code crashing. |
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This is not the root cause. It's just the interop layer wraps exception through WinRT boundary. |
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Oops.. Not dead :o Check out the community call here.. https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/discussions/9946 for for more upcoming improvements.. |
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Maybe not pathologically dead, but still like a patient being kept alive by machinery rather than by natural and intrinsic strength and growth. |
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This seems incredibly snarky considering all the issues that WinUI apparently has (at least according to this lengthy thread) |
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Unfortunately this didn't happen. They presented results from a survey from which I wasn't aware that it exists and which had only 58 participants. The results were very general, not much conclusive in any way. The unfortunate outcome was that the Q&A part handled just 2 or 3 questions. I'm not sure how others feel, but besides the general part about what's coming and what not, I would have traded any of the individual parts for a longer Q&A part. |
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Reading this is depressing. Not because I care specifically about WinUI or whatever, but just the state of desktop UI has become such a mess. And it seems like the only things we're seeing from MS are platitudes. I have an editor in my project, and that editor makes use of Now, you're probably thinking "Why not use WPF or Avalonia or etc...". The integration of WPF and Avalonia with my swap chains is a pain (I know, I've done it). And they lock me to 60 FPS, so I can't slow it down or speed it up as I'd like. I can't speak to the ability UWP or WinUI for swap chain integration, but if it's as complicated as WPF or Avalonia, then it's a non starter. Also if the basic components I need are not available (this is an open source project, I can't use DevExpress or ComponentOne to fill the gaps), then I'm out of luck and back to Windows Forms I go. I would just like a focused, and complete UI (at least as complete as Winforms) solution to work with. I want to be able to hook in a swap chain as easily as I can with a Windows Forms application and without any potential airspace issues. And I especially don't want to be spending my time writing controls in XAML that should have been there in the first place (I've experienced this with UWP and WPF - but that was admittedly a long while back). I know my use case is not important or common, but I just feel like everyone only thinks of LOB apps and those of use who do specialized things are kind of forgotten about. |
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Without SwapChainPanel, a Microsoft.UI.Composition.CompositionDrawingSurface can be used to draw transparently over WinUI3 controls (same drawing with ID2D1DeviceContext or other interfaces) |
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Yea, Microsoft.Composition is fine as long as everything is in-process. |
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Thank you, I replied to your PR. |
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I never said anything about XBox? And I'm sure the DX team wasn't necessarily saying not to use C# for D3D work (at least, this is what I'm taking the quote of "everyone should use C++ and the GDK" to mean). I have no desire to work on Xbox or anything other than Windows Desktop. Why should I be excluded? |
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Please note my new proposal to improve WinUI3 interoperability with other win32 components: #10050 |
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@softworkz Also I did not like the whole discussion tone, making it seem that WinUI 3 is a disaster and shame. I think MS devs deserve some respect for their job and dedication with such limited resources. @gitmixen |
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Yes, it is true. Terminal is a console app with tabs, please. Store is an UWP app, not WinUI 3. Windows Explorer uses some islands only for the toolbar, address bar and gallery, the rest is pure old Win32. PowerToys is mostly Win32, go check out the source code. The new Photos is WinUi3, but the editor is Web-based, i.e. hosted into WebView2. The new Windows app is a pure web-app, that works and looks like ass. Microsoft phased out the perfectly serviceable UWP Weather app with a Web-based slow resource hog. They phased out the fine UWP Mail & Calendar and are replacing them with a web-based half-assed misconception, so pathetic that it insults common sense. |
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The UWP revival announcement is really weird. I don't think Microsoft is using UWP on a large scale in their own apps. This was one of the main criticisms of UWP in the first place. Most inbox Microsoft apps are webview wrappers with 💩💩💩 performance. |
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@pjmlp , @nikolayvpavlov Listen, all these issues and slow progress break my heart, too, but saying/implying that nothing is done is not right. |
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We have been at this since 2012, and have lived through all changes of management regarding what WinRT programming model is supposed to be like, the rewrites, the deprecations, the loss of functionality in Visual Studio, seeing most known faces leave the team to join Amazon, Google, Azure, the new AI efforts,... Really aren't 12 years long enough? Or if you prefer to settle the Project Reunion reboot as baseline, announced in 2020, 4 years. Not counting that WinUI 3.0 strategy also changed mid-flight from Project Reunion original message as communicated at BUILD. |
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Please don't put words in my mouth. "Adoption" means that new applications are wriiten in WinUI 3. Here, I emphasized it for you, but let me repeat it just in case: new. Like, the new Outlook. Like, the new Teams, which they rewrote from scratch from Angular + Electron to React + WebView2. Like the absolutely new Windows app, which is a web-app. Like, using Direct2D for the image editor in the new Photos app instead of hosting a web-app inside. Do I need to go on? |
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Damn. So MS tells you WinUI is the future, you bet on WinUI and then if you find something wrong with it (like, let's say the input validation support or the designer)... it is your fault that WinUI is not that good? I guess now we know why teams at MS are picking Electron over WinUI. |
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Yesterday I made a post (Great News: All Bugs Will be Fixed In the Year 2041) which was meant to be a somewhat funny complaint about the lack of activity in terms of development progress and dealing with user issues submitted here.
Then I made a comparison of activity between WinUI3 and MAUI and those figures are quite revealing when thinking about it:
How can it be possible that MS is investing 20 times more effort into MAUI than into WinUI3 - the new and designated primary UI technology for Windows desktop?
Simple answer: It can't. It can only be possible in case when WinUI3 is no longer the "designated primary UI technology for Windows desktop".
Now I'm shocked to realize that it's way more serious than I thought as so many details suddenly fit together and make sense when being viewed in the light of that premise.
It all fits together
Smaller Bits
Xbox Development
=> but Xbox is not dead. So the must be something for Xbox which is not WinUI3
Cpp/WinRT in Maintenance Mode
as noted by @pjmlp (thanks!):
Component Vendors
DevExpress are offering a few free components but these haven't been updated since mid-2022.
Their blog entries about WinUI3 stopped in mid-2022 as well (https://search.devexpress.com/?m=Web&q=winui3)
They probably know already about the end of WinUI3.
Timely Coincidence
Wasn't it at the same time (2022) that WinUI3 development had started to be driven down?
XAML Islands as a WinUI3 Exit Strategy
When looking at the changes that were made during the past year, then there's only one area where significant work has been put into: XAML Islands. Even though it had been requested by users earlier, it's not a most-wanted feature, but still, MS picked exactly that part as the one major subject of work.
XAML Islands allows to integrate WinUI3 content as "islands" when using other UI frameworks. Why is this so important? Who needs this other than a few with very specific use cases?
When customers want to modernize their applications, who would start by implementing something in WinUI3 which is then shown like a control/window within a WPF or WinForms app? Normally, such migrations would rather go the other way round: starting with a new application framework and subsequently migrating legacy components. But that's what is not being worked: There's nothing like a hWnd-Panel (which had also been requested by users).
Bottom line: When establishing a new framework for app development, then it's usually crucial to provide ways for developers to integrate legacy components into the new framewrok to allow subsequent migration, but not the other way round. Provisioning for the other direction only (and also as the only major change) can only mean that this is the end of the road for WinUI3, and XAML Islands are just implemented to soften the impact for affected developers enabling a life-after-death existence for WinUI3 components.
MS, when did you plan to make the RIP announcement?
And what will be the replacement?
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