C++/WinRT still not ready to replace C++/CX

Almost two years ago I had a blog post entitled C++/WinRT not yet ready to replace C++/CX, about my disapointment regarding the lack of tooling in C++/WinRT, specially when compared with other C++ GUI frameworks.

Sadly it seems that these years in between have hardly brought any improvement in this regard, other than Microsoft acknowledging in their March WinUI Community Call that this is indeed a common complaint.

Common or not, it is quite clear looking at the updated roadmap, that improving such tooling will be very low priority and if it comes, it will be late 2023.

When we look at the public activities across WinUI 3, AppSDK, C++/WinRT, CsWinRT, Rust/WinRT repositories on Github, one must question where are the teams, as it seems they are clearly underresourced with very low commits per day.

So not only do C++/WinRT users have to wait a couple more years for an experience that they can enjoy today in competing development stacks, the overall future of WinUI as alternative to classical Win32 based development keeps unclear, with many Microsoft teams migrating to Web technolgies instead.

Sometimes I wonder how product management decisions take place.