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After you decided to kill C++/CX in name of C++/WinRT, the Windows developer community lost the only tool on the Microsoft stack that offered any kind of RAD tooling for C++ GUI development comparable to C++ Builder and Qt/QML from the competition.
These products not only offer a .NET like development experience to C++ developers on the Windows platform, they also allow us to create cross platform applications with such tooling.
The teams responsible for the introduction of C++/WinRT and respective deprecation of C++/CX keep ignoring the tickets on Developer Community and Github, that we want a proper developer experience when writing IDL files (hardly changed since MDIL 1.0 was introduced), not having to manually copy and merge generated files, or manually connect XAML with IDL written components.
Will Visual Studio 2022 finally bring a C++ Builder / QtCreator developer experience to C++ developers on Visual Studio, catching up with 25 years of delay, or this is a lost battle and we should just move on to the platforms that actually care about our productivity?
marianluparu
Microsoft
MicrosoftHello, thanks for sharing your thoughts. I can assure you that Visual Studio 2022 will continue to support C++/CX too. Work on improving the C++/WinRT experience is still ongoing and I hear you that the experience is not yet there when compared with C++/CX.
Since at this time, work on Reunion and WinUI are progressing primarily with C++/WinRT support, one important piece of news I can share is that C++/WinRT support will be available in the VS 2019 version 16.11, as well as VS 2022 (directly through the VS installer). This is the vanilla experience that you are familiar with, but we hope that this will lead to more widespread adoption and more feedback from the community on C++/WinRT's dependency on MIDL
- Thanks for the update. It would already be a gold improvement if IDL files had support for syntax highlighting and completion, I would expect that when you decided to replace C++/CX with C++/WinRT care would be taken for such simple stuff before deciding C++/CX was going out. Right now I am advocating customers to keep using MFC or migrate to C++ Builder/Qt if within their project budgets.
- marianluparuQt is a good cross-platform framework. XAML with C++/CX also continues to be an option for you, right? Some incremental improvements to the IDL editing experience might be the next step, but I am curious to understand whether you see that as sufficient for parity between C++/WinRT and C++/CX. Feel free to reach out over email at mluparu at microsoft dotcom if you'd like to continue the conversation offline.