New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Why is building Windows apps so complicated

Ask HN: Why is building Windows apps so complicated
6 by vixalien | 0 comments on Hacker News.
So I decide to build a windows 11 app. I already know some .NET and C/family from school and look through the source of C# and it doesn't seem too complicated. However, building Windows apps is very complicated even when you know C++ or C#. 1. I wanted to build Windows 11 apps and I had to choose between Windows Forms, WinUI3, Win32 and WPF I think. I don't really know the difference between the 3 and no one really explains that (unless Win32 which is obvious). 2. Apparently, WUP is no longer recommended. A few years they were pushing it to the max. Bummer. 3. I installed Visual Studio overnight (it comes with all the tools that building apps need). It downloaded 6GB of data and used 20GB of storage. All i want to build is a hello world app. 4. I create a project following a guide from Microsoft. 5. The app is extremely resource heavy and way too over-featured. I build the boilerplate app and Run it and it takes minutes to build (most of the time is downloading dependencies so not such a big deal). 6. I open the newly created app in Sublime Text (my editor) and I can't find a way to build the app anymore. 7. Because Visual Studio is so bloated, I download Visual Studio Code, which is far more simple but I can still not figure out how to build my app even with the various extensions VS code boasts. 8. After hours of googling, I formulate a script that can build the app from the command-line. 9. But I stil don't know how to build the app as the .exe file created does not execute. 10. I'm very disappointed. The worst of all is that there is not even one good guide on the whole clearnet on how to do develop a Hello World windows app from scratch.