If you’ve ever developed for Android or iOS, I bet using Android Studio or Xcode wasn’t your favorite part of the experience. It’s a fair guess that Java or Objective-C didn’t blow your socks off either (maybe you were lucky enough to use Swift instead).

Microsoft Store developers, on the other hand, can’t get enough of their development environment. They rave about Visual Studio, XAML, C#, and the ability to target multiple platforms with the same code:

The Developer tools in Visual Studio and the supporting tools are brilliant. I get to reach a diverse user base in Windows Mobile, Windows Laptops and Desktops as well as Holographic and Xbox. — Voyer

But most of all: they love UWP.

I love how UWP is structured — Fast Ink! B ecause UWP allows me to target any device category I can think of, while using what is IMO the best tooling available. — Keystroke

Pundits, competitors, and users alike love to hate UWP. Their complaints — some fair, some not — focus on performance and capability differences between UWP apps and traditional Win32 programs.

But UWP — its design, multiplatform capability, and polish— was the most-cited reason for developing for the Store by developers, and Microsoft sees it as someday displacing Win32.

There are great tools available to build UWP apps and Visual Studio has everything a developer needs. The platform is still young and needs time to mature but in its current state, it is powerful. — Short.y […] I think UWP will likely replace Win32 programs and become the standard for Windows development. — 8trX

The Win32 API is now more than 20 years old. If you want to spend an entertaining evening at home, just fire up The Old New Thing blog by Raymond Chen and admire the contortions Microsoft has performed over the years to keep this ancient API happy and ticking along.

After two decades of pain at Microsoft, there’s a silver lining: there is no other company (including Apple!) that knows so excruciatingly well what functionality users demand of their computers, and exactly how far developers will push the boundaries of a sandbox.

UWP is the product of that pain. It matured through .NET, Silverlight, WPF and a few other stages, arriving as a a complete reimagining of how a Windows app should behave, from window management to file operations.

Today, after a rough start with Windows Runtime 8.x, there are apps that would shine in any app store — but they’re being released on Windows 10 first. And Microsoft keeps adding to what UWP apps are able to do, while maintaining backwards compatibility with the original Windows 10 release from two years ago.

C# is my preferred programming language, UWP is a great framework, [and] Visual Studio is the best IDE. — Diarium — Private Diary / Daily Journal

UWP development is like a comfy couch compared to yesteryear’s iron benches of Win32. C# is a great language — it’s like Swift, before there was Swift. Visual Studio is the best IDE on the market today, and I’ve tried them all. Everything on the platform is well-documented with sample code, and you can now build almost any app within a UWP sandbox (yes, there are still exceptions — but that’s what Desktop Bridge is for).

Unlike the Mac App Store, UWP completely reinvents desktop apps with an eye to the future. It is unnerving for us old-school developers, but very exciting at the same time. And Microsoft is confident enough in it to release a version of Windows 10 that’s locked to the Store.

Nothing’s perfect