Don't worry, once enough people come back, they'll roll back in the ads and the intrusive performance-killing features and the cycle will repeat all over again

Anyone who tried to do serious native windows dev has been burnt so often by Microsoft. I really wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt with WinUI 3 but I really cannot anymore. Until proven otherwise I expect absolutely nothing to improve meaningfully. It’s extremely sad for those of us who were dumb enough to think Microsoft take on modern GUI would be interesting to follow closely, we are in 2026 and WPF is still the way to go IMHO.

Nah, mostly marketing.

The only people that still buy into this are folks that never developed anything with WinUI, aka WinUI 3.0.

Since Windows 8, they messed up the development experience so bad, that they managed to turn many advocates like myself into vocal critics.

We avoid anything WinRT unless there is no way to do the same with Win32, classical COM (WinRT is an evolution of COM), or regular .NET (Forms/WPF).

And also post regularly about the actual state of the tooling unlike Microsoft's marketing posts.

Example, they keep mentioning about WinUI being supported in C++, but never mention how bad C++/WinRT dev experience has become, or that the framework is in maintenance, and has been superseded by WIL.

Their recent post about explorer performance was “we raise clocks when you launch explorer” rather than an actual fix