Lazy tweet. Are there any really great Windows desktop applications built with 100% .Net?
— Rob Fahrni (@Fahrni) June 14, 2022
E.G. something as amazing as Visio, Excel, or Photoshop folks could point to and say “This is how Windows apps should be built.”
I can’t think of any, but I haven’t used Windows in years.
I asked this on Twitter a few days back and got a few replies from folks I know to be died in the wool Windows Experts. The list of modern day Windows Desktop apps I got back was appallingly tiny. Yes, the apps listed are amazing examples of what can be done on Windows using the .Net platform, but where are the modern versions of Word, Excel, Pagemaker, Visio, or any of the Adobe Desktop Windows Apps? Why hasn’t someone stepped out of the shadows with richer applications built entirely on .Net with a modern look? Look, I’m an old Windows developer and I still care for, and believe in, the platform and rich desktop applications. Is the notion of building native, complex, rich, Windows apps lost or no longer worth the dedication and effort to do?
I changed direction in 2009 to focus on building iOS applications. I’m thankful to say I’ve been gainfully employed as an iOS developer ever since and I’ve managed to release some of my own iOS Apps in that time and started a native Mac App, but I still want to build for Windows. I’ve held onto the idea of building cross platform code in C++ to get Stream to multiple platforms, but now my thinking is changing.
How about I build a C#/.Net version of Stream for Windows? Is it worth the effort? Is it something I could hang my long term hat on?
Could I be the guy who builds iOS, Mac, and Windows Feed Readers for a living? I’d like to try. My biggest problem has been time, it’s probably fair to say time management is my biggest problem. I have a few updates to Stream for iOS that I’ve been sitting on for, what, a year now? And I still haven’t done any additional work on Stream for Mac so why on earth would I embark on Stream for Windows? I don’t have an answer for any of that, but I sure do want to.
Other Distractions
Jen, would Apple have any interest in throwing money behind a small group to bring a modern WebKit based Windows application to life?
— Rob Fahrni (@Fahrni) June 24, 2022
Just a couple days back I asked Jen Simmons, from the Safari/WebKit team at Apple, I’d Apple would be interested in backing a small team to bring a modern version of a WebKit based browser to Windows 11.
Yes, I’d love to form a small team to make that happen, I just don’t have the money to pull it off.
My thinking is this: all C#/.Net using the WinUI 3 framework for user interface with WebKit underneath. I have no idea how the WebKit rendering engine looks on Windows but I’m confident I could find a small team of developers, hi David, to make it world class (assuming it isn’t already.)
So, yes, there are those types of distractions I’m serious about.