> Guess what, I am 100% sure they do the basic for Win32
The Win32 widgets have been updated but apparently they don't want to mess with the metrics, hence those controls are much more compact, don't use rounded corners, etc.
Is there any public UI toolkit in Windows now that offers the canonical widgets?
Looks like WinUI 2.6 is the way to go then. But I'm surprised that there doesn't appear to be any sort of official built in canonical thing with standard widgets (like what Win32 used to be). All these separate frameworks are implementing everything for themselves.
WPF is nuts. It appeared to have native controls but in reality they reimplemented everything, with a unique style definition for every control on every supported version of Windows. It would have been a huge amount of work. It seems like they haven't bothered to keep up with it as control styles have evolved though.
If you check the github issues and community talks on YouTube, it is quite clear that when Microsoft went full steam with WinRT, most likely the remaining UI teams got ramped down.
As they pivoted back into Reunion and merging Win32 and UWP worlds, new teams were created, so....
In fact already during the Win16 days, many of us were already jumping into C++, Delphi and VB frameworks, instead of suffering through plain C programming.
Borland common controls used to be quite easy to spot with their green check mark.
Win32 has very few built-in controls, and Windows always enjoyed a good ecosystem from commercial vendors selling custom controls, like Telerik and ComponentOne to refer to two well known ones.
As historical info, modern COM traces back to Visual Basic VBX components.
The Win32 widgets have been updated but apparently they don't want to mess with the metrics, hence those controls are much more compact, don't use rounded corners, etc.
Is there any public UI toolkit in Windows now that offers the canonical widgets?