Microsoft pulls MSIX discussions into Windows Tech Community

Microsoft is "realigning" the MSIX tech community and cramming all the existing discussion spaces into a single place within the Windows Tech Community. Unlike the infamous Great Technet Deletion, Microsoft has promised that existing discussions and blogs will remain intact, but simply be moved somewhere else. Affected will be …

[Nick Ryan]

Splendid. Yet another brain dead implementation of convenience (simple malware distribution) vs common sense from Microsoft.

How long until this becomes yet another abandoned almost-half-finished release from Microsoft that some foolish developers will use to the exclusion of sense?

[PriorKnowledge]

Another dead “modern” technology which MS won’t use

Almost everything good about programming for Windows is in the deprecated APIs. The rest is modern - better known as dead on arrival. Microsoft barely uses their modem APIs themselves because nobody really cares about them. OneDrive uses Qt, Office forks parts of Win32, .NET Framework devs still embrace WinForms, the new Windows 11 shell makes extensive use of Chromium (WebView2) in place of WPF and WinUI already has two versions replicating identical functionality in separately incompatible ways.

As much as folks like to crap all over Linux distros abandonment of old runtimes… Microsoft has become far, far worse since it started down the open source route. For example, MS now considers 3 years to be “long term support” on the latest .NET. Likewise, their Chromium fork changes every 4-8 weeks. Developers are expected to choose between a fixed version (with unfixed security holes) and “evergreen” which will be patched constantly but could break their apps at any point, as there are no firm guarantees made about backwards compatibility between releases.

The current state of affairs means that even GTK is starting to look like an attractive UI toolkit!

[AMBxx]

Still life in MSI!

I have a little application that I sell a few hundred copies of a year. Upgraded to latest VS and decided it was easier to muck around adding MSI installers back in rather than try to work out how to MSIX.

Good decision!