Ask Paul: March 12 (Premium)

One year ago this week, we were shutting down for “two weeks” because of the pandemic. Well, Happy Friday, everyone. Things are looking up.

This week in March 2020, my kids were off in Jamaica helping a church group make improvements at a school for the deaf. Richard Campbell was in town visiting, and we took him around the area, and he got to see our favorite restaurants and other haunts. And then the lockdown happened. Richard ended up having to leave like a thief in the night so he could get home to British Columbia while there were still available flights, and he barely made it. My kids flew home to a world in which school had been canceled, we thought, for 10 days. Instead, my daughter never returned to school, never had a prom, and had a sort-of graduation outside with no crowds, months late, that was a quick drive-through affair. The world had changed.

This week, Spring is in the air, my first vaccination appointment is scheduled for Tuesday, and there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I can’t wait for the world to return to, if not normal, then to something close to normal. Whatever. I feel good about the future, finally. What a crazy, crazy year.

Dark mode

ChrisG101 asks:

On WW713 you had a great discussion about dark mode on Windows. I wanted to know what dark mode browser add-in you use and if it works well with Office 365 web apps? I’ve had mixed experiences with Dark Reader. Midnight Lizard seems better but has way too many options so wonder if there are better alternatives.

I am using Dark Reader. It’s not perfect, of course, but displaying the web in a dark mode is so key for me because my eyes are very sensitive to light, and it’s easy enough to toggle.

I don’t really use the Office Web Apps, but looking at this now, what I see is actually pretty close to the new Dark mode in Word for Windows (which I love).

From Windows to the Store

wright_is asks:

You mentioned on Windows Weekly that some of the built-in apps would disappear in coming versions (I think the discussion was around Paint and Notepad?) and that they would migrate to the Store.

So the good news is that the apps that are heading to the Store are Paint 3D and 3D Viewer (not Paint and Notepad, though it’s probably valid to wonder about them going forward). These are apps that are used by only some tiny minority of users, and along with getting rid of the default 3D Objects folder in Explorer, those removals go a long way towards ending the silliness of the “Creator Update” years.

How will business users get hold of these standard apps? The App Store is often disabled by policy, so no apps, no updates. If it wasn’t delivered with Windows, you don’t get it and if it was, but it is updated through the Store, it won’t get updated. I had a user recently, where the Calculator mysteriously disappeared. The only way to get it back, in the end, was a complete re-install of Windows – command line tricks didn’t work, because they still pulled it from the Store and the Store was disabled, refreshing the PC didn’t help. I spend a couple of days and probably a dozen different tricks trying, before I finally gave up and did a fresh re-install.

Given that we’re talking about Store apps and not the built-in Win32 utilities, this is a worry for another day. Thinking about the upcoming “Sun Valley” UX overhaul, I can’t imagine Microsoft will do a thing to bring these legacy apps forward (let alone legacy UIs like Control Panel and MMC), but I don’t expect them to be deprecated or removed that quickly either. Hopefully never.

Feedback app

hrlngrv asks:

Out of left field, have you used the Feedback app? If so, how often?

I’ve used it, yes. But I don’t use it as a matter of course because I have a more direct connection with people at Microsoft and that often makes things happen more quickly (or at all).

Time to action

navarac asks:

Do you think that Microsoft will ever take notice of their failures like the slow response (4-month) to take notice of “Exchangegate”? Will they take that as an incentive to sort out Windows as it is, before introducing more silly things that only get junked a couple of years down the line? As an example Paint 3D, and the 3D folder in File Explorer.

I see those as two very different things, and obviously, they come from different parts of a very big company.

The time-to-patch issue is serious and concerning, and it’s hard to understand why Microsoft does this so often. I sort of assume there is a risk calculation related to whether it makes sense to publicly discuss vulnerabilities that a) are not yet patched and b) are not yet being exploited en masse out in the world. And that in this specific case, the time delta between when Microsoft knew about the problem and when it fixed it were related to that. But after SolarWinds, taking two months to fix this? It’s hard to just justify.

Regarding the 3D stuff that’s getting removed from Windows, this is a curious issue too. The problem is that once something gets put into Windows, it enters into a very specific support lifecycle, and it’s hard to remove them. I saw an interesting tweet response from Miguel de Icaza that addresses this issue. He was asked why Visual Studio Code couldn’t just become the default editor in Windows, with PowerShell 7 replacing Windows PowerShell and Windows Terminal replacing Command Prompt.

“The burden of shipping inside the OS [is] too big, and locks the release cadence,” he wrote.  “We are still paying all sort of engineering cost for the decision to bundle .NET framework in the OS.”

We sure are: There are .NET Framework updates in Windows Update all the time. And they’re the most convoluted and time-consuming of the lot.

Fortunately, those 3D bits aren’t quite as integrated. But it’s still a big issue deciding what gets in the OS and what doesn’t.

Project Latte

peterc asks:

Do you have any news/thoughts/ideas on “project Latte” and quite how MS may implement android app compatibility on both Win10X and desktop Windows.

No, no news, and I keep waiting for some Insider Dev build to finally spill the beans, purposefully or not, on what they’re doing. All I know is that Microsoft is planning a Windows event for sometime soon—I’ve since heard it will be tied to Build, which is in late May—and that that would be the ideal time for this disclosure.

From a thoughts/ideas perspective, I keep wondering how they plan to implement this, in particular the Android app acquisition bit. If they decide to use the Microsoft Store for this, it will be one of those slow boil things, and not an immediate explosion of Android apps on Windows. Should Android apps require some modification to run properly on Windows—perhaps similar to the optional features that app developers can add so that they work better on Chromebooks and/or big-screen Android devices, it could be even slower.

I also think we need to be clear-headed about the impact of Android apps on the Windows 10 app ecosystem. That is, will this even matter that much, especially on a platform (traditional Windows 10) that is more desktop-focused than mobile? Maybe it will have more impact on Windows 10X, for example.

We can look at how Android apps have affected Chrome OS for an idea. And there, honestly, I see as many negatives as positives, and that’s on a platform where the actual Google Play Store app is available. The primary issue there is confusion—should I use the Word Web App or Word for Android?—and the resulting complexity, the UI and usage differences, and so on. Just slapping an Android app on another platform doesn’t necessarily mean we’re done.

Also, what problem does Android app compatibility even solve? Is there some top 20 list (or whatever) of gotta-have-it apps that Microsoft can curate for the Store that will provide real value here? Maybe there is, I’m just asking. But I worry that we always think some future thing will put Windows 10 over the top somehow and return Windows to glory. I don’t see things changing much whether this happens or not.

I don’t know, basically.

Programming Qs

helix2301 asks:

I am a regular windows weekly watcher and I know Leo talks about coding a lot. When is your next coding project? Would you ever do like Leo does and do the 100 days of code challenge or year of code challenge? He bought a laptop just for that.

I’m still not 100 percent sure what my next coding project will be, or even what language(s)/framework(s) I’ll use. But I had been working on a Udacity-based nanodegree in Intermediate JavaScript in December/January when I finally realized I had overextended myself. Between my normal writing and podcasting (including a stack of review hardware I was behind on too), the need to fully update the Windows 10 Field Guide for version 20H2, and then the programming stuff—and the rest of life, too, of course—I had just taken on too much.

Put simply, this is a time management problem.

What I decided was that I would break up my time each year so that I wasn’t working on the book and programming projects at the same time. So I quit the nanodegree program and have been working on completing the 20H2 update to the Windows 10 Field Guide first. (I’ve completed through the People chapter so far, so I’ve got 14 chapters plus the introductory material completely updated and 9 chapters to go.

I’ll move onto some coding project next. I don’t think I can do a 100-day challenge per se—unless it was timed just right—but I think I prefer making a “thing” as opposed to solving x number of days of challenges. For beginners, especially, there’s a certain magic to duplicating a well-understood app. (I suspect this is like a musician figuring out how to play a favorite song.)

There are a few possibilities for the next go-round.

The first is Flutter. I talked to Google’s Tim Sneath about Flutter 2 right before that announcement and he mentioned that he had worked up what he called a Petzold-style Notepad app in Flutter and he had used Dart FFI (foreign function interface), which lets you access C-based APIs, to use some Win32 APIs to make it as faithful as possible. Naturally, this caught my attention because of my own experiences recreating and improving on Notepad where possible.

I had previously investigated making a Cocktails app—which is your basic database-driven app—in various environments, including Flutter, web, Xamarin, and UWP/Desktop (Reunion). That’s still a possibility, of course, and I think heading in a web direction could make sense and maybe expanding to mobile over time. Longer-term, I’m curious to see how Project Reunion and then MAUI pan out and I could see returning to the Microsoft sphere at some point.

But first I need to finish updating the book.

Will you ever put out the book or continue programming windows series like you talked about in early 2020 before pandemic?

Yeah, most likely. The Programming Windows thing is tough because it’s such an expansive project and in reading over what I’ve already written, I can see how it could easily be expanded further. Also, I’ve repeatedly stalled on the second half of it, which focuses on .NET, because I’m waiting for Richard Campbell to finish his authoritative book on .NET and I don’t want to step on any toes. But that is way over schedule by this point.

I’ll look at the Programming Windows book idea this year for sure either way. Again, the existing book first. And then we’ll see.

Getting past traditional Windows

erich82 asks:

I’ve been patiently waiting for Microsoft to fork Chromium OS, and do something exciting. Although I’m rooting for Windows 10x, I have my doubts. During the pandemic I bought an iPad, and since then I’ve installed Peppermint OS to replace Windows 10 on my only Windows laptop. I have not regretted this, as the web version of Office is more than enough. Why hasn’t Microsoft satisfied this need of a snappy lightweight OS, without the hassle and the tracking of the other options? It seems like it would be simple for Microsoft to do this.

I kind of obsess over this topic myself, but I think Microsoft is caught between its desire to move past what I’ll call “traditional” Windows, with its old-school desktop applications and limitations (and forward to a mobile- and touch-first system of which Windows 10X is the latest attempt) and the needs/demands of its users, for which it has now established decades of expectations around backward compatibility. We’ve got people (including me) worried that Microsoft will remove Paint and Notepad from Windows. And people who worry that Windows 10X doesn’t go far enough or goes too far in separating itself from the legacy past. Where Microsoft will land on all this stuff is unclear.

Sometime this year, Microsoft will release Windows 10X. If history is any guide, the first version will be lackluster in some ways, and there will be complaints. Microsoft will improve it, will expand its availability, and time will go by. Windows 10X “stick” in ways that Windows RT, Windows 10 in S mode, and Windows 10 on ARM have not (so far at least)? We can only speculate.

But I do feel this is Microsoft’s best chance for a more future-leaning platform. And that whether it’s through a Win32 container and/or Cloud PC, we can get traditional Windows desktop apps running on there somehow, and that that could help us make the transition. The native Windows 10X app platform isn’t really “a” platform, it’s several platforms—web apps, primarily, but also UWP/Reunion apps, React Native apps, and more. And in that way, it is very much Windows, when you think about it. The way forward is heterogeneous.

And as with the Android app compatibility thing above, I think we need to be realistic about where this is going. It’s much more important to Microsoft as a business that its customers adopt Microsoft 365 and use it across whatever platforms they want than it is that they use Windows. That said, Windows is still a cash cow to the tune of $11-ish billion a quarter, and having something in that space for a wider range of device types makes sense too. It should care about this enough to make it successful.

I feel pretty good about Windows 10X even though I know it doesn’t exactly meet my needs right now. I feel that it will over time.