Tomas Karban

Brilliant summary article of all the things that MS did wrong with UI frameworks.

https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/03/13/microsoft-hasnt-had-a-coherent-gui-strategy-since-petzold/

I lived through most of that. Started with MFC, jumped back to Win32 (which made me appreciate how MFC lifted/wrapped that tech). Jumped to C# during beta, used WinForms, joined Microsoft in 2005, worked with WPF to ship Expression products. Didn't understand why the Windows org hated us so much. Then, worked on WinJS support in VS for Windows 8 in 2012. Could not believe how bad it is, compared to all the nice things we already have. 1/2

Microsoft Hasn’t Had a Coherent GUI Strategy Since Petzold

A few years ago I was in a meeting with developers and someone asked a simple question: “What’s the right framework for a new Windows desktop app?” Dead silence. One person sugges…

Jeffrey Snover's blog
Mar 19 at 11:39pmWeb
Show threadTomas Karban3d ago

I was miserable in that position. I left MS in 2012, joined a company that worked on mobile security, and worked on Windows Phone apps (Silverlight and XAML, so nice!). Then another company, their internal software used WPF, so pleasant. All that time, I watched and followed the C++/WinRT, UWP, WinUI. Could not believe what madness I am seeing...

BTW, I played with Avalonia for a bit, it feels genuinely brilliant. Just a handful of people. 2/2

#WinForms #WPF #XAML #Avalonia