Anyone who tried to do serious native windows dev has been burnt so often by Microsoft. I really wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt with WinUI 3 but I really cannot anymore. Until proven otherwise I expect absolutely nothing to improve meaningfully. It’s extremely sad for those of us who were dumb enough to think Microsoft take on modern GUI would be interesting to follow closely, we are in 2026 and WPF is still the way to go IMHO.
The only people that still buy into this are folks that never developed anything with WinUI, aka WinUI 3.0.
Since Windows 8, they messed up the development experience so bad, that they managed to turn many advocates like myself into vocal critics.
We avoid anything WinRT unless there is no way to do the same with Win32, classical COM (WinRT is an evolution of COM), or regular .NET (Forms/WPF).
And also post regularly about the actual state of the tooling unlike Microsoft's marketing posts.
Example, they keep mentioning about WinUI being supported in C++, but never mention how bad C++/WinRT dev experience has become, or that the framework is in maintenance, and has been superseded by WIL.
Is there any reason I would use this over something cross-platform like EGUI? I am kind of over software being OS-specific; this is one of the biggest compatibility mistakes we've made. Along with the related process of making drawing pixels on a display a complicated process!
I agree. If the OS vendors want application developers to target their native UI framework, they have to put in that work to make it seamless. As of right now, every OS vendor has an incentive to make their UI toolkits incompatible with each other to ensure vendor lock-in.
Will any of this translate to Windows programs like File Manager? Whatever their Image viewer is even called? For some ungodly reason, on my last remaining Windows Device, which is a Surface Book 2 (a Microsoft made laptop!) with very vanilla configurations, everything slows to a crawl in the file manager and if I try to view images on a directory and do the "right arrow" for next or "left arrow" key for previous. It baffles me how something that never had so much slowness can be completely FUBAR'd I miss when Windows had standard apps that were very optimal and didn't slow and ruin my experience. I find myself opening that laptop less and less, and one of these days I might just slap Linux over it.
The user experience of WinUI 3 isn't the worst I've seen but the developer experience is absolutely awful. I tried to make a simple app with it and the number of hacks I needed to get it to look and feel the way I almost wanted was horrible. And the documentation sucks. I had to read the system level implementations of controls in order to figure most of it out. It's great those implementations are available to read, at least, but OH MY GOD
Also seeing stuff like text fields re-implemented from scratch in XML scares me. I don't like to see that.
The user experience is the way it is because they want it to be. This is at best optimizing one small component which as we all know can be done infinitely well and still have a negligible effect on the use of the system.
I've turned into a bit of a data hoarder lately, I have a folder with over 43k images. Finder and File Explorer both struggle to even open the folder and load all the thumbnails, but XnView MP can load the folder without much issues.
It's a shame the system file managers feel so ignored, I would love to manage collections of files and folders rather than putting all my data into dedicated black holes with better viewing features such as Raindrop.io, Apple Photos, and Eagle 4.
> benchmarks (like this one: https://github.com/Noemata/XamlBenchmark), WinUI 3 is currently measurably slower than both WPF and UWP. WPF is 20+ years old and even it is not native!!!.
Older stuff is generally faster because it had to be built in a more resource poor time. Maybe the WinUI devs should be forced to work on systems with the Minimum System Requirements. Heck, maybe all Microsoft development should be done like that, so that some focus on performance is there from the start, instead of as an afterthought.
I'm stilll shocked that we're reinventining the wheel of things that were solved 20+ years ago, like UIs, and somehow making them massively more resource intensive
Out of sheer curiosity I gave it a quick "search" how one goes from client code instrumenting WinUI to then pixels appearing on the screen, and it seems like quite the indirection-ridden and generalized journey, which I fundamentally can't imagine being particularly cheap. Maybe it's just my unfamiliarity with this world though, never wrote a graphics application end-to-end (i.e. rasterization included) on my own.
I always laugh when some inexperienced developer, or an academic who has never built software for real customers, claims that “performance doesn’t matter.”
I spend a significant amount of time improving performance for our paying customers because performance absolutely matters to them. They might use a single simple feature hundreds of times during a normal workday. When we make that experience even 10% faster or smoother, they notice immediately and are genuinely delighted by it. That creates an enormous amount of goodwill.
And sometimes we can go even further and completely automate tedious workflows they hate doing manually. That’s even more valuable.
Developers with experience from the games industry understand this instinctively. Even when the software has nothing to do with games, they tend to have a deep appreciation for responsiveness, efficiency, and user experience. That’s why I’m always excited to hire people with that background.
24 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 46.7 ms ] threadThe only people that still buy into this are folks that never developed anything with WinUI, aka WinUI 3.0.
Since Windows 8, they messed up the development experience so bad, that they managed to turn many advocates like myself into vocal critics.
We avoid anything WinRT unless there is no way to do the same with Win32, classical COM (WinRT is an evolution of COM), or regular .NET (Forms/WPF).
And also post regularly about the actual state of the tooling unlike Microsoft's marketing posts.
Example, they keep mentioning about WinUI being supported in C++, but never mention how bad C++/WinRT dev experience has become, or that the framework is in maintenance, and has been superseded by WIL.
I also wish that they’d make WinUI work on macOS as well similar to Avalonia, but I think they probably won’t.
Is there any reason I would use this over something cross-platform like EGUI? I am kind of over software being OS-specific; this is one of the biggest compatibility mistakes we've made. Along with the related process of making drawing pixels on a display a complicated process!
Also seeing stuff like text fields re-implemented from scratch in XML scares me. I don't like to see that.
This might be off topic, but wish Apple would focused on Finder performance (app loading, window refresh, etc) like this blog post by Microsoft.
And in case you're curious, my disk is only using 250GB in use (50GB for Apps, 150GB for System Data, 50GB for macOS)
It's a shame the system file managers feel so ignored, I would love to manage collections of files and folders rather than putting all my data into dedicated black holes with better viewing features such as Raindrop.io, Apple Photos, and Eagle 4.
Older stuff is generally faster because it had to be built in a more resource poor time. Maybe the WinUI devs should be forced to work on systems with the Minimum System Requirements. Heck, maybe all Microsoft development should be done like that, so that some focus on performance is there from the start, instead of as an afterthought.
I spend a significant amount of time improving performance for our paying customers because performance absolutely matters to them. They might use a single simple feature hundreds of times during a normal workday. When we make that experience even 10% faster or smoother, they notice immediately and are genuinely delighted by it. That creates an enormous amount of goodwill.
And sometimes we can go even further and completely automate tedious workflows they hate doing manually. That’s even more valuable.
Developers with experience from the games industry understand this instinctively. Even when the software has nothing to do with games, they tend to have a deep appreciation for responsiveness, efficiency, and user experience. That’s why I’m always excited to hire people with that background.