👩‍💻☎ December WinUI Community Call (Dec 16, 2020)

[anawishnoff]

This call has now finished but you can watch the recording at the following link. Feel free to open up issues on this repo for any follow-up questions!

https://youtu.be/RGmm341kJMI

Details

Date: Wednesday December 16, 2020
Time: 17:00-18:00 UTC (9:00-10:00am Pacific)

Anyone and everyone is welcome - no pre-registration is required.
This will be an informal interactive live stream directly with members of our engineering team.

Format

This month's call will be a Fireside Chat edition! It'll be a super casual, direct conversation between the WinUI team and you! We won't be welcoming any guests or making any big announcements this time around, but rather sharing some smaller updates and leaving most of the call time for Q&A.

Leave your questions below as well as any general topics you'd like to hear about on the call!

[mdtauk]

Asking again as its almost a tradition now...

Progress on Acrylic and Reveal.

On a more serious issue - There have been a few visual updates proposed, for individual controls. Is there a high level set of concept designs you could share, showing how you envisage the whole visual style looking for apps?

The roadmaps mention updates every 4 months, but is that set in stone, or could some missing features come out earlier as and when they are ready?

Oh and one final thing. What is everyone's Christmas Day tradition/routine

[wjk]

What is the progress on open-sourcing WinUI 3? I see no reason why we cannot use a tiered model of source release (where only pieces of the codebase are released at a time, as they are ready, like what happened with WPF). Waiting until all features are ready before allowing third-party contributions to any of them does the community a great disservice. Many of the unhandled issues on this repo could probably be quickly and easily fixed by the community, except that we still don’t have access to the any of the code. You said WinUI 3 would allow community contributions. Prove it.

Furthermore, WinUI 3 preview 3 does not support use in a UWP CoreWindow anymore, meaning I cannot make a .NET 5 app that runs in an AppContainer for security and privacy purposes (since the two are codependent). I must still use the Frankenproj UWP project system, and by extension to the long-since-deprecated .NET Native compiler. I do not appreciate being told I have to program using only 2013-era technologies and forego any of the innovations in the ecosystem since then.

Most importantly: By now Microsoft has announced years and years’ worth of technologies and projects, and then time and time again has been too lazy to follow up on any of them. Remember that some of the things listed under the “Coming in WinUI 3.x” column in the roadmap were originally promised to be available by the end of 2018. I, as a community member and a .NET evangelist, am quite fed up with being told “Please wait, coming soon.” Put up or shut up. Follow through on your promises to the community or stop making new ones. (The ideas and issues under the ProjectReunion repo also suffer from this problem, but they don’t do community calls, so I am asking here.) I apologize if I sound unfairly harsh, but this is how I feel. Thank you for your attention.

[pjmlp]

The current contenders against WinUI are:

Visual Control Library and FireMonkey with C++ Builder.

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/cbuilder

With graphical designer VB/Delphi style and cross platform support, no need to manually copy files around or mess with IDL files, a couple of extensions similar to C++/CX are required. No big deal, latest versions of C++ Builder make use of clang anyway.

Qt/Qtcreator, just released version 6 this week:

https://www.qt.io/product/development-tools

https://www.qt.io/product/ui-design-tools

With graphical designer VB/Delphi style, a Blend like tool with integration to Photoshop, Sketch among others, cross platform support, no need to manually copy files around or mess with IDL files, a couple of macros on the same file cpp are enough, build system takes care of the grunt work of binding everything together.

WinUI 3 with C++/WinRT, currently a developer experience reminiscent of using Visual C++ 6.0 with ATL and is Windows 10 only.

Going forward, what are the roadmap items that would make WinUI a viable option in regards to tooling, given that those C++ frameworks ping back on top of Windows APIs anyway, while offering a .NET Windows Forms/WPF like developer experience for C++ developers.

Because for 2021, with the growing list of Project Reunion issues, and lack of support for C++/WinRT GUI tooling, and being Windows only, it is starting to be really hard to advocate why WinUI and not VCL, FireMonkey, Qt, where such GUI tooling is available with the benefit of being cross platform as an added bonus.

[niels9001]

Agree with @mdtauk - would be super nice to see some "concept art" of how the new control styles would look like in context.

[aerojam]

Are they any plans if or when will be WinUI 3 adopted by Windows Shell and apps like File Explorer or Microsoft Office desktop? Thanks!

[cirrusone]

Is it possible now or in future to automate WinUI through COM Interop? For example can Excel/Word/Powerpoint add-ins use WinUI?

[nnemkin]

Will WinUI 3 ever support unpackaged (plain .exe) desktop applications?

Have you considered the possibility of exposing WinUI to other languages like Python or Java? With the current build and deployment requirements, it doesn't look good.

[nnemkin]

It seems that WinUI 3 carries its own copy of Windows Composition. Does it run in-process now? What about system-wide DWM integration? Has the development of built-in composition stopped?

[Pinox]

WinUI 3.0 desktop apps.

In UWP you obviously create an appx packages, but there is also an option to create an eappx package ( encrypted appx package - this carries MS enterprise encryption). Is something like an encrypted single file exe package possible with WIN 3.0 desktop apps ?