Ask HN: Why is building Windows apps so complicated

1

Avalonia

#Development Tools #Rapid Application Development #Cross-Platform Development 146 social mentions

2

Gui.cs

Https://github.com/migueldeicaza/gui.cs "A toolkit for building console GUI apps for .NET, .NET Core, and Mono that works on Windows, the Mac, and Linux/Unix.".

#URL Shortener #IDE #Bookmark Manager 10 social mentions

3

Scoop

Https://scoop.sh https://github.com/ScoopInstaller/Extras/blob/master/bucket/visualc.json Might be something via chocolaty/winget too?

#Windows Tools #Package Manager #OS & Utilities 162 social mentions

4

Ardour

> every year I try to learn how to create an XCode basic app and it’s different. https://ardour.org was first ported to then-OSX in 2006. Almost nothing in the codebase that relates specifically to now-macOS has changed in that time. XCode is a tool, not a platform. Cocoa is the platform, and it changes very little and very infrequently.

#Audio & Music #Audio #Audio Recording 110 social mentions

5

Visual Studio Community

This is probably the easiest way. The tragedy is that this explicitly rejects all the subsequent developments since WPF - UWP, WinUI3 - because they don't work nearly as well. If you want an installer BTW, use "Wix". If you are eligible for VS Community, do give it a go: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/community/ since that has the WPF designer in (the WinUI3 designer is inexcusably broken).

#Text Editors #IDE #IDEs And Text Editors 146 social mentions

6

Label LIVE

Another option is to use an Electron boilerplate and then start learning a web framework of your choice. Electron development is incredibly rich. The UI is web tech, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s RPC back to a node process. You can call into native code on any platform. There are tons of NPM modules for both the browser and Node. There are bindings for whatever languages you want to use, and if you find yourself SOL (outta luck) you can even package “one file” python projects into a command line callable (via electron’s child exec) to work magic. It’s almost a limitless environment to build - I’m absolutely addicted because the puzzle solving is immensely gratifying. For example, my electron app is used to design and print labels, and it integrates with excel and CSV. Mac users of Apple’s Numbers app have been SOL because the only way to export CSV data is using the UI (either manually or pseudo manually with AppleScript). When I wrote the app 3 years ago nothing existed to read .numbers files, let alone convert to CSV. Every holiday I get a flurry of emails from sad Numbers users because manually exporting is high friction. This morning I woke at 4am and thought I’d look again and huzzah! Someone published a Python project this year to read .numbers files. Awesome. It took me about an hour to write a python script that accepted two arguments: the .numbers file and a destination .csv file. Then I spent 4 hours trying to package it up because damn if apple’s code signing isn’t a nightmare. But I digress. I built a beta and now my poor users (wife included) can finally hit save in Numbers and boom, their labels immediately update with data. Very happy! I know electron isn’t for everybody. I was (and still am) a mobile app dev writing native swift/kotlin. But I’m absolutely in love with JS/TS, warts and all! My app is https://label.live and I’m always looking for interesting cross-platform app ideas, partners, etc.

#Office & Productivity #Productivity #Printing 15 social mentions