⭐️ Some more shots of all the working aspects of this Pastel for Windows project, using .NET 8.0 and the Windows App SDK (and Community Toolkit), ported from the iOS codebase and my original UWP prototype by OpenAI's Codex 5.3.

It's not a full app yet, but it's dangerously close.

It's hard not to think that agentic programming, or agentic porting, could have outright saved Windows Phone, had this all been possible a decade ago

When you search for Microsoft's Fluent design docs for Windows apps, you get a 404 on Microsoft's main site 🤡

You have to really know where to look to find them again, and they're buried as the last option (behind Web, iOS, and Android) on their design site

I'm pretty familiar with the .NET/XAML app building process; all my apps were ported to Windows Phone 7, then migrated to Windows Phone 8, Windows 8 and UWP, and I know my way around Visual Studio and the publishing system. I've even been through WinObjC for aborted ports of some of my apps. I'm familiar with the APIs, pitfalls, the 3P libs.

I won't pretend that somebody with zero experience would be able to just drop themselves in to Codex and easily build something like Pastel (but I hope so)

I updated my copy of Visual Studio and now 'GitHub Copilot Chat' is the first tab in the project explorer, replacing the project file list ('solution explorer') 🤡

Yeah no thanks

Drag and drop reordering, drag and drop colors into palettes.

This kind of (Mac-like?) behavior is not common to Windows at all. I am pleasantly surprised at how robust the Windows App SDK is, considering nobody in their right mind is building apps this way outside of Microsoft 🤪

Codex has no problem going deep into the weeds implementing things I would never have had the faintest idea how to begin, like this eyedropper button that calls into Win32, captures the screen and steals mouse events, and creates a mouse-tracking overlay crosshair window with GDI+, a task far outside the bounds of most WinUI apps. In minutes, without complaint.

This particular behavior is built-in on macOS, but not on Windows, so it all has to be done from scratch

And, since the usage stats part is always worth mentioning:

I've used maybe 40% of my weekly Codex credits building this Windows port of Pastel (never hit the five hour limit), I'm on the $20/mo ChatGPT Plus plan, and I've only used 'gpt-5.3-codex medium'

TIL, the Windows App SDK back-deploys to older versions of Windows 😯

With just a little finagling I was able to remote-deploy* Pastel to a Windows 10 VM, and it appears to be fully-functional.

(*Hey Apple, would it kill you to add remote-deploy tools to Xcode? Or… macOS VMs?)

Going back to Windows 10 after not having used it for a while is quite a shock. It's a lot closer to Windows 8 than I remembered 👀

I do not miss this design language at all. Windows 11's Fluent is such an improvement