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> All I wanted to build was a native windows app.

You can't have it both ways. As you found out, building native apps is very complicated and slow. Young devs don't have the pain tolerance of old school devs which had no alternative but to suck it up, endure the pain and march on.

But today you have a choice - be immoral and productive with Electron, or moral, slow and out-of-the-comfort-zone with the native toolkit.

The answers to all of the problems you listed are in the Microsoft online docs, but it does requires hours of reading to learn how all the pieces fit together. Native app development in C++/C# is not like "build a to-do web app in 10 minutes". Which is why very few build native apps anymore, because devs want instant gratification and native development is anything but.




> You can't have it both ways. As you found out, building native apps is very complicated and slow.

You certainly can; Visual Basic and Delphi send their regards. If "modern" tools have regressed then they're deficient.


Modern non-web tooling has regressed. For example, in 2018 you could download and install Qt and pyqt, make a UI in Qt Designer, run it through pyuic and have a working UI. I'm not sure when it changed but now once you find the installer, get through the Qt account requirement, and actually install, Qt Designer is nowhere to be seen. It may be hidden away in their IDE somewhere now, but I couldn't find it.




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