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Very interesting! I feel like all the OS components are now written in DirectUI too. Did it turn out to be the way to go, or did it happen because it was shoved
by wfunction 9y ago
Very interesting! I feel like all the OS components are now written in DirectUI too. Did it turn out to be the way to go, or did it happen because it was shoved down everyone's throat?
- pacaro 9y agoI left the Windows division shortly before Vista shipped, so I couldn't say. But from native code, the choices were to do things directly on the win32 API or to use DirectUI which, for all its faults, was much easier to use, and produced much more modern UI/UX. There were also the obvious advantages of everyone using the same technology. At the time, the look and feel of a windows release was a closely guarded secret until fairly near the release, so the team that owned that experience needed to be able to apply that theme to everything fairly quickly.
- contextfree 9y agoAIUI, DUI was the standard toolkit for first-party Windows UI from XP through 8.0 (this includes the "Metro" shell components in that release like the Start screen). Starting with 8.1, new components have been written using the same XAML toolkit that's promoted for third-parties, but there's still lots of older DUI stuff in the OS, like File Explorer and the taskbar.