On Windows native components can be in C++/WinRT or C#, which is quite nice. Typescript for the glue, managed C++ for the heavy lifting. That's a great compromise IMHO, at least in theory. I'm still a bit skeptical because I haven't seen yet WinUI or UWP applications with a passable user experience.
Agreed, you can see how I have been an heavy advocate of it, and see it not only as a much better COM, but also what .NET v1.0 should have been (it was the original idea anyway, Ext-VOS).
However nowadays I have become quite sceptical on what it will ever be, and looking forward to what news BUILD 2021 might bring.
C++/WinRT tooling still doesn't match C++/CX, doing UI in .NET or ReactNative (QML style) seems to be the workaround for it, endless list of Github issues on WinUI, Reunion and all WinRT bindings, community talks with lots of previews, and state of current tooling.
Then the various UI teams seem to be competing to which of them will get more developer mindshare.
So it is a mess, that I hope BUILD will get a more clear picture.
totally understand that kind of pain : actively thinking about writing driver primitives to shim into the ui library layers to get the eventual sensibility we need.
I've spent a inordinate amount of time on figuring out how to hire a truly dedicated windows native interface team and the only solid conclusion that I've come to is it's necessary to also recruit to write tooling for the designers to work with. we have a application that happily doesn't need a gui but to be used widely needs a excellent gui. it looks like we'll need at least as many people on interface as for our core application. the tooling, oh the tooling..
Woz dug the windows phone in the earlier lumia stages prior to the wp8 NT kernel with everything else gutting.
this is the one book I most want for Christmas - the true account of what happened to the windows phone interface. I was constantly in awe to behold the developments as they happened ; literally "too good to be true" electrocuted me in my chair every time I read the latest.
