People stop believing in anything related to WinUI coming from Microsoft marketing machine.

Besides examples like this one.

The amount of issues on Github across all WinUI related tools, keeps increasing all over the place, there is almost no visible activity, the community calls have been a disaster with Q&A being ignored, team rotation, whatever.

Native AOT still cannot do what .NET Native did (there is a CsWinRT 3.0 that supposedly is going to fix that). Additionally it requires all classes to be marked partial classes.

C++/CX was killed, replaced by C++/WinRT without any Visual Studio tooling, meaning using it is similar to using ATL during the Visual C++ 6.0 days. The experience promised at CppCon 2017 never came to be.

Additionally hidden in a comment thread on its Github repo, the original devs that are now working on windows-rs, mention that C++/WinRT is in maintenance mode, it won't be further developed.

Ah, and they are open sourcing WinUI, guess how many devs are still left to work on this.

Really, from someone that used to advocate using WinRT back in the Windows 8.x/10 days, stay away from any technology that is somehow related to WinUI.

Microsoft themselves can do whatever they feel like with WinUI, it comes with the job, the rest of us, better use Win32, Forms, WPF, Avalonia, Qt,...

EDIT: I forgot to mention in its present state, the application identity and COM reference counting required by WinUI, makes the "blazing fast C++" components actually run slower than typical .NET applications. The irony from the folks that kind of sabotaged Longhorn efforts, and went ahead redoing the ideas in COM.

Buried in this announcement about Windows 11 improvements is a fascinating admission: the Windows 11 Start menu has been built using React this entire time. Microsoft is now migrating it to their native WinUI3 framework to improve performance and reduce interaction latency.

This explains a lot about why the Start menu has felt sluggish compared to Windows 10.

The React → WinUI migration is the most technically interesting detail imo.

I don't know anything about React. I used to do everything in C++, and I was really happy when I could do embedded projects in C instead of assembler.

With that said, I really like C#, even if I can't stand some of the directions it's grown into, and I think that the start menu could have been written in C#, WinForms, and have been far less troublesome.

WinUI is still a bloated pig compared to Win32.

If MS really wants its users back, many of which have left for Linux and Mac, it should seriously consider going back to the Win7 era UI, or at least restore the Windows Classic theme.

The big headline for our household will be to pause updates as long as needed. My wife is a CPA and having to manually delay and delay updates during the end of tax season(s) (March for corporates, April for personal, then again six months later) is an extra, unnecessary stress during those times for her.

People tend to forget that React != React-DOM (i.e. HTML).

React is just a framework for declaratively defining components and reactivity, the end result can be whatever you want. That’s what react-native is for mobile apps, and as another commenter pointed out, in this case it was using React Native for Windows[1], which apparently calls native Windows APIs in the background.

I like to jump on the MS hate train as much as the next guy, but React itself is not the reason the start menu is bad.

[1] https://microsoft.github.io/react-native-windows/

I was hopeful for M$FT after they seemed to be ahead in AI compared to other large software co.

Since then they have largely lost the AI race (you can argue they were never in it as they never had a SOTA model and are piggy backing off OpenAI).

Now I read that Win11 is based on React, even a junior developer can tell you that running React natively on any platform will always suck.

It's not React. A small part (recommended apps) was built using React Native for Windows, which is not React Native but an offshoot that uses native Windows APIs.

Not allowing to move the taskbar to a side was inconsiderate to begin with. Most screens are 16:9 so the vertical space is at premium while the horizontal space is often wasted anyway.

Why it was necessary to rewrite start menu in React at all? Why rewriting what works fine?

Coca Cola famously improved its position when New Coke flopped and it reintroduced the original flavor as "Coca Cola Classic."

If you can't make it better, make it worse, it seems.

Lords be praised. Microsoft is bringing back native performance .

How does this happen? How do you build a fundamental OS control in react?

making it nice and fast; hello. it was nice and fast on windows 2000 and they've been fucking it up ever since.