<p>UWP is a remarkable technology – and .Net Native, which only worked for UWP, is amazing – but it was also <em>hard</em> to write properly. The version of XAML was different from WPF and WinPhone <em>and</em> Xamarin, the standard UI controls were half-baked at best (which necessitated the Toolkit package… itself a bit of a mess), and there were two different types of data binding which worked completely differently. Tooling was questionable at best.</p><p><br></p><p>UI development is always a time-consuming business, but doing even the simplest things in UWP took three times longer than anything else. And Paul is right that creating an application that <em>looked </em>like a traditional Windows application was hellishly tricky. Not impossible, just hellishly tricky.</p><p><br></p><p>The problem is that right now, if I want to write a windows UI program for something (let's imagine… just imagine) where is the guidance on which option to choose? UWP is apparently dead, and for non-tablet applications it's awfully clunky. WPF is still there, but it has stagnated really badly in performance because the focus was on UWP. And it's definitely not suited for running on a tablet, even with the new "islands" thing (which is a contemptible hack). So what do we do?</p><p><br></p><p>I suspect guidance will soon be to have a web application in an ASP.Net Core 3 self-hosted service, maybe written with Blazor, maybe compiled to Electron… maybe a PWA compiled to Web Assembly? Who knows.</p><p><br></p><p>I just want a clear path. Preferably one that doesn't double-back on itself and loop around into a drain in 18 months. </p>