People stop believing in anything related to WinUI coming from Microsoft marketing machine.
Besides examples like this one.
The amount of issues on Github across all WinUI related tools, keeps increasing all over the place, there is almost no visible activity, the community calls have been a disaster with Q&A being ignored, team rotation, whatever.
Native AOT still cannot do what .NET Native did (there is a CsWinRT 3.0 that supposedly is going to fix that). Additionally it requires all classes to be marked partial classes.
C++/CX was killed, replaced by C++/WinRT without any Visual Studio tooling, meaning using it is similar to using ATL during the Visual C++ 6.0 days. The experience promised at CppCon 2017 never came to be.
Additionally hidden in a comment thread on its Github repo, the original devs that are now working on windows-rs, mention that C++/WinRT is in maintenance mode, it won't be further developed.
Ah, and they are open sourcing WinUI, guess how many devs are still left to work on this.
Really, from someone that used to advocate using WinRT back in the Windows 8.x/10 days, stay away from any technology that is somehow related to WinUI.
Microsoft themselves can do whatever they feel like with WinUI, it comes with the job, the rest of us, better use Win32, Forms, WPF, Avalonia, Qt,...
EDIT: I forgot to mention in its present state, the application identity and COM reference counting required by WinUI, makes the "blazing fast C++" components actually run slower than typical .NET applications. The irony from the folks that kind of sabotaged Longhorn efforts, and went ahead redoing the ideas in COM.
Not allowing to move the taskbar to a side was inconsiderate to begin with. Most screens are 16:9 so the vertical space is at premium while the horizontal space is often wasted anyway.
Buried in this announcement about Windows 11 improvements is a fascinating admission: the Windows 11 Start menu has been built using React this entire time. Microsoft is now migrating it to their native WinUI3 framework to improve performance and reduce interaction latency.
This explains a lot about why the Start menu has felt sluggish compared to Windows 10.
The React → WinUI migration is the most technically interesting detail imo.
Did the headline get updated since this comment? At the time of writing this reply, the headlines is “windows 11’s start menu was built using React …”, which I agree is super interesting.
People tend to forget that React != React-DOM (i.e. HTML).
React is just a framework for declaratively defining components and reactivity, the end result can be whatever you want. That’s what react-native is for mobile apps, and as another commenter pointed out, in this case it was using React Native for Windows[1], which apparently calls native Windows APIs in the background.
I like to jump on the MS hate train as much as the next guy, but React itself is not the reason the start menu is bad.
If MS really wants its users back, many of which have left for Linux and Mac, it should seriously consider going back to the Win7 era UI, or at least restore the Windows Classic theme.
my guess is many junior developers without guidance and perhaps a little vibe coding. could be that these new developers are not comfortable anymore with C++ and MFC so they use what they learned in their courses directed at web standards
Come on. Are you an employed developer? If so, even if you have that much power over the flagship product of the company, that you can use it to pad your résumé, do you think the same happens at Microsoft? By all means, the bugs may speak of skill issues (or may not: there's also crunching, mandated AI... Who knows), but the Cloud-first, push-ads, force-account etc. enshittification is the implementation of a vision I doubt was collectively composed by devs, let alone a single dev.
The ads pushing would be just as possible with a fully native start menu.
Using React for it was probably done since it's just objectively easier and faster to tweak a React app than native components (see various folks complaining about WinUI).
It's not React. A small part (recommended apps) was built using React Native for Windows, which is not React Native but an offshoot that uses native Windows APIs.
I fully expect that the "native" rewrite will be substantially slower than the current version ;) Software performance (or lack thereof) is mostly not a technical problem (e.g. the technical part of software performance is trivial to solve), but organizational.
Plenty of stuff nowadays uses Webview2 across Windows.
Not only has Project Reunion been a disaster (moving UWP regular Win32), apparently Microsoft new employees lack Windows experience, being raised in Chromebooks and Macs, apparently they aren't getting the trainings they should.
You can go watch recordings of the community calls, and see puzzled faces when asked about Windows capabilities not yet supported on WinUI/WinAppSDK.
apparently Microsoft new employees lack Windows experience, being raised in Chromebooks and Macs, apparently they aren't getting the trainings they should.
They should be given Petzold's famous book on the subject, published by Microsoft Press itself.
considering that they have still Russinovich and Raymond Chen in their midst it shouldn't be too hard to have a two week boot camp for those who write programs for the OS
No one left who can use whatever half deprecated native actually-not-that-native windows ui framework is currently undead state of the art and not enough examples in the llm‘s to vibe code it.
This is what I'm wondering. How dysfunctional is microsoft that they shipped a react-based start menu? It reads like satire, "Windows 11 is so bad that even microsoft doesn't use native controls".
MS also made one of the most hated IM and audiovisual meeting applications with web tech, replacing a previously (not great but much better) native one: Teams.
It's still baffling, since the core idea of React only makes sense as a workaround for limitations of the browser DOM. Wrapping much more flexible 'native' widget frameworks with a React layer is pure cargo culting (same with SwiftUI).
Besides examples like this one.
The amount of issues on Github across all WinUI related tools, keeps increasing all over the place, there is almost no visible activity, the community calls have been a disaster with Q&A being ignored, team rotation, whatever.
Native AOT still cannot do what .NET Native did (there is a CsWinRT 3.0 that supposedly is going to fix that). Additionally it requires all classes to be marked partial classes.
C++/CX was killed, replaced by C++/WinRT without any Visual Studio tooling, meaning using it is similar to using ATL during the Visual C++ 6.0 days. The experience promised at CppCon 2017 never came to be.
Additionally hidden in a comment thread on its Github repo, the original devs that are now working on windows-rs, mention that C++/WinRT is in maintenance mode, it won't be further developed.
Ah, and they are open sourcing WinUI, guess how many devs are still left to work on this.
Really, from someone that used to advocate using WinRT back in the Windows 8.x/10 days, stay away from any technology that is somehow related to WinUI.
Microsoft themselves can do whatever they feel like with WinUI, it comes with the job, the rest of us, better use Win32, Forms, WPF, Avalonia, Qt,...
EDIT: I forgot to mention in its present state, the application identity and COM reference counting required by WinUI, makes the "blazing fast C++" components actually run slower than typical .NET applications. The irony from the folks that kind of sabotaged Longhorn efforts, and went ahead redoing the ideas in COM.
Since then they have largely lost the AI race (you can argue they were never in it as they never had a SOTA model and are piggy backing off OpenAI).
Now I read that Win11 is based on React, even a junior developer can tell you that running React natively on any platform will always suck.
This explains a lot about why the Start menu has felt sluggish compared to Windows 10.
The React → WinUI migration is the most technically interesting detail imo.
Its seems a very strange decision to write it in React in the first place.
Windows 11 sounds terrible. Flicker in the file manager? How does that happen?
React is just a framework for declaratively defining components and reactivity, the end result can be whatever you want. That’s what react-native is for mobile apps, and as another commenter pointed out, in this case it was using React Native for Windows[1], which apparently calls native Windows APIs in the background.
I like to jump on the MS hate train as much as the next guy, but React itself is not the reason the start menu is bad.
[1] https://microsoft.github.io/react-native-windows/
If MS really wants its users back, many of which have left for Linux and Mac, it should seriously consider going back to the Win7 era UI, or at least restore the Windows Classic theme.
Using React for it was probably done since it's just objectively easier and faster to tweak a React app than native components (see various folks complaining about WinUI).
If you can't make it better, make it worse, it seems.
Not only has Project Reunion been a disaster (moving UWP regular Win32), apparently Microsoft new employees lack Windows experience, being raised in Chromebooks and Macs, apparently they aren't getting the trainings they should.
You can go watch recordings of the community calls, and see puzzled faces when asked about Windows capabilities not yet supported on WinUI/WinAppSDK.
They should be given Petzold's famous book on the subject, published by Microsoft Press itself.
That leaves „web technologies“.
React Native is a way of orchestrating a UI comprised of native controls.