Yay, it's the latest attempt at Project Centennial!

(For context, Microsoft has been trying for 7 years various methods to get developers to please package their apps in some way. Almost nobody has ever bit - to the point the Microsoft Store only has been having some recent success by promising packaging isn't required.)

https://petri.com/microsofts-project-centennial-unsuccessful...

If Microsoft would make it easy and free to package apps (and without combining it with sandboxes) all developers would do it.

I really doubt that at this point. Developers have learned that everything Microsoft says to do for Windows, since 2012, will be garbage within a few years. Guaranteed.

Learned Silverlight for Windows Phone development? Too bad, it's UWP now. And the XAML is incompatible.

Learned WinRT for Windows 8/8.1 app development? Too bad, it's UWP now. And the XAML is incompatible.

Packaged your App for APPX? Too bad, it's MSIX now.

You learned how to develop UWP apps? Too bad, the User Interface layer has been ripped out of UWP, it's now called WinUI 3, and it doesn't even run on UWP. Better port your UWP app back to Win32 now, I guess. Why did you even learn UWP again?

You went and learned WinUI 3 like we recommended? Well, unlike WinUI 2, it doesn't have a visual designer, and it doesn't have input validation, or a bunch of other WinUI 2 features. So, depending on what your app needs, you might have a mix of UWP and Win32, because WinUI 2 is UWP-exclusive and WinUI 3 is Win32-exclusive and neither has all the features of the other. Progress!

You built your Windows 8 app with WinJS? Well, sucks to be you, rewrite it in entirety, WinJS was scrapped.

You ported your app from iOS with Project Islandwood? Well, again, that sucks. It was brilliant, it made pulling apps over from iOS much easier, but it's dead. Rewrite!

You decided to hang it all, develop for good old WPF, but wanted to use the Ink Controls from UWP? Great, we developed a scheme for that called XAML Islands which made so you could have some of the best UWP controls in your old app. Then we released WinUI 3, completely broke it, and made it so complicated nobody can figure it out. So broken; even the Windows Team doesn't use it and is writing the modern Windows components for File Explorer with the old version.

But of course, that would require WinUI 2, for UWP, inside Win32 which is the main feature of the broken WinUI 3; which means that the Windows Team has a bastardized version of XAML Islands for their own use that nobody else has (literally), to modernize the taskbar and File Explorer and built-in apps like Paint, that nobody who wants to emulate them can borrow. Their apps don't look modern and their users complain? Suckers, go learn WinUI 3, even though our own teams couldn't figure it out.

You wanted your app on the Microsoft Store? Well, good news, package it together with this obtuse script that requires 30 command-line arguments, perfect file path formats, and a Windows 10 Pro License! Oh, you didn't do that? Do it 5 years later with MSIX and a GUI this time! Oh, you didn't do that? Forget the packaging, just submit a URL to your file download location. Anyone who bothered with the packaging wasted hours for no real purpose.

Did I mention Xamarin? A XAML dialect of its own, that supports all platforms. But it runs on Mono instead of the authentic .NET, so you'd better... work around the quirks. Also it's called MAUI now, and runs on .NET now. But that might break a few things so hang around for over a year's worth of delays. We'll get it running for sure!

Oh, and don't forget about ARM! The first attempt to get everyone to support ARM was in 2012 with a Windows version called... No, no, no. Go past this. Pass this part. In fact, never play this again. (If you want to imagine pain, imagine running Windows and Microsoft Office on a ARM CPU that came three generations before the Tegra X1 in the Nintendo Switch. Surface RT ended with a $900M write-off.)

And so on...

Or, you could just ignore everything, create a Windows Forms (22 years strong) or WPF app (17 years strong), and continue business like usual. Add in DevExpress or Telerik controls and you are developing at the speed of light. And if you need a fancier UI, use Avalonia, Electron, React, or Flutter.

Everytime I ponder getting into Windows desktop development I see a portion of this picture, think about doing all this in Java instead, then remember that that is its own UI mess (although overall less storied but worse functionality wise), then think Electron would be better, try to get Typescript and Vue.js to play nice in Electron, run for the hills, briefly consider if building a desktop UI in Unreal or Unity would be the easiest, then just go back to playing video games.

Edit: Thank you for giving such a nice summary of the current landscape of UI dev in Windows native development.

Modern JavaFX theme: https://github.com/mkpaz/atlantafx

Modern Swing theme: https://github.com/JFormDesigner/FlatLaf

And these days Compose Multiplatform: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/compose-multiplatform/

I tend to use Kotlin rather than Java but of course Java is perfectly fine too. You can also use Clojure.

If you use any of those frameworks you can distribute to Win/Mac/Linux in one command with Conveyor. It's free for open source apps and can do self-signing for Windows if you don't want to pay for the certificates or the Store (but the Store is super cheap these days, $19 one off payment for an individual). Also supports Electron and Flutter if you want to use those.

From those frameworks you can then access whatever parts of the Windows API you want. Flutter even has WinRT bindings these days! So it's not quite so bad.