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Ask HN: How to get into Windows app design/development in 2016?

1 points by retendo ↗ HN
For me, the whole .NET/Windows development cosmos seems like an even weirder world than the one that I faced when I started iOS/Mac development a few years back.

So how do you get into it in the year 2016?

I heard there is a thing called UWP and apparently MS wants it to be the only thing around, right? On the surface(haha) it sounds to be a nice thing to have one platform to rule all device sizes.

I cannot use Sketch on Windows, so what do you use for app design? I don't want to go back to Photoshop to be honest.

Visual Studio seems complex. Should I use it? I do not mind IDEs in general but there are so many new terms all over the place. (PCL, Solution, Visual C#, why not just C#?)

Why are most of the learning resources for C#? What about F#? It seems like an awesome language. Microsoft should promote it in the same way like Apple does it for Swift, right?

I don't know, but a lot of stuff just seems weird in windows land...maybe someone can open the door and give me a nice tour.

3 comments

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meira
I'd go with Electron. I think it's better to have your system running well and uniform across multiple platforms than investing in perfect fit in each.
retendo
I'm pretty sure that is a smart option for a lot of people, especially web developers, but me personally, I'm not so interested in HTML/CSS/JS.
sp33der89
I'm not a great programmer, so don't stop looking for information!

It mostly depends on what you want to do. Xamarin would be a great fit for cross-platform mobile applications, WPF(https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/ms754130(v=vs.110)....) for big desktop programs and WinForms for tinkering with old software.

UWP is indeed the big thing for MS now, but it has lots of programming languages support(so not only JS)! I don't know anything like Sketch really; maybe this will help https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design

You should try VSCode(which is a lot like Atom, has excellent .NET support through OmniSharp) https://code.visualstudio.com/

C# is getting more attention because a lot of F# features got into recent C# versions, people not wanting to make the switch to FP and not getting full attention of MS.