WinForms and its Visual Studio designer are still broken, WPF is still riddled with bugs and was declared obsolete in ~2017 in favor of UWP, UWP is marked obsolete in favor of WinUI, and WinUI's OSS release was postponed just two days ago because it's not ready.

Microsoft is marketing .NET 6 as the replacement for .NET Framework but you still cannot properly do desktop UI with it. I honestly don't understand why they are pushing more and more features when they cannot complete the ones they started years ago. Not to mention that porting WinForms from .NET Framework to .NET 6 requires a rewrite for anything more complex than a Hello World.

The UI story on Windows is completely broken but that has been the case forever.

Has MS basically released anything sustainable on the UI side since MFC?

It feels like they’ve constantly provided a new new replacement every few years that replaced the new replacement from a few years ago since then.

tomnipotent

Is there a UI story that doesn't suck?

jcelerier

I'm mostly doing my UIs in Qt and I'm always happy, sure it's not perfect but it consistently allows me to do what I want in a cross-platform way with minimal effort (especially when I compare with the royal empirical pain that is webdev)

whoknowswhat11

For windows what's your hello world workflow / stack. I've wanted to get into QT, but there seem to be a bunch of different flavors out there. I'm more a winforms guy then an HTML/XAML/CSS type person.

jcelerier

I'll be honest I don't think that doing C++ on windows is a good idea. The language needs to do a lot of file access for includes, and on NTFS those are super slow, my builds on Linux are something like 1/3 of the time on windows (building the same software with the same commit of clang 12 and lld, same computer, same SSD).

But if you don't want to install a Linux partition, then just use aqt to install Qt: https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall

You want win64_msvc2019_64 as a platform.

Way too often I see everyone clicking on everything in the installer which amounts to a 30gb download, but for the immense majority of Qt apps you just want the core libs for your platform which is like a couple hundred megabytes (and even then in practice you're going to use only a small part of those unless you have uncommon needs such as serial port, modbus or NFC communication, XML parsing, ...)