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Microsoft sticking to XAML is one of their biggest mistake ever WRT native UIs, no wonder it's a dreaded target

Then you have both Google and Apple who invested massively into new languages and framework to facilitate the developments of apps and therefore native UIs

- Compose for Google in partnership with Jetbrains for Kotlin

- SwiftUI with Swift for Apple

Flutter in the way to make things cross-platform, all of them declarative, all of them native, all of them doesn't require learning a dedicated markup language



The problem isn't XAML, it is great.

The problem are the politics between DevDiv (owns VS and .NET) with WinDev (owns COM, WinRT, C++).

WinRT came to be, as WinDev kept redoing Longhorn ideas in COM since Vista reboot, having .NET and C++ as the re-invention of .NET had it been fully based on COM instead of CLR (Ext-VOS original idea).

The new Windows 11 widgets started out as COM and C++/WinRT (which uses a primitive ATL like tooling), because only WinDev could come up with the idea of using COM, C++ and XML inline strings, for what Apple and Goole use nice Swift/Kotlin/Java APIs. Only after some backslash did they come up with the C# version of the API.

So we have WinDev doing WinUI 3.0/WinAppSDK, porting UWP out of the sanbox into regular Win32 stack, with lesser tooling (.NET Native, C++/CX deprecated, no designer), while DevDiv is focused on MAUI and Blazor (apparently putting into Web widgets is also a good idea).

First Microsoft needs to get rid of their internal GUI civil war.




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