Native Windows Apps

Windows Latest Microsoft is already putting effort into dumping legacy Win32 and WebView2 code across Windows 11 in favor of WinUI, and also admitted native apps still use more RAM than they should. I still like Windows and owe much of my long career to it. When I started writing Windows applications I was using C and the Windows API — most folks call it Win32 API but when I started on Windows 3.1 it was 16-bit. It’s not a bad procedural API. It’s pretty feature rich and works the way you’d expect. We had a little GUI tool for building dialogs and the like that allowed you to make pixel perfect UIs and the API would load it from resources using an ID you defined. You had to write all the code to hook it up and answer messages to it. It was very straight forward. In 1995 I wrote a C++ wrapper around Window and Dialog creation along with other helpers, like a String class, and started using that for writing apps. It used a dynamic map for defining message handlers as methods on your…