Twenty years ago, on June 6, 2006, I defended my graduation thesis.
That date is hard to forget. The topic was RUP (Rational Unified Process), and the information system I built was based on .NET 1.1: Windows Forms for the interface, ADO.NET for data access, and MySQL as the database. And I have been doing development on .NET ever since.
Most of the time I use Windows. My first notebook came with Windows XP Home. Then I used Vista, 7, 8 (only for a short time), then 10, and finally 11. Even when I had a MacBook before, I still ran Windows 7 in Parallels most of the time. I also spent about a year using Linux Mint just to manage Windows servers. So yes, times have changed.
I decided to switch to Mac as my personal computer. No Windows means no Windows apps. So my hobby, writing Windows apps, is gone as well. I write in C#. I have done it for more than twenty years. I learned it from Richter’s book back when .NET 1.0 was new. I still use C# for my job. That will not change. But for my hobby projects, I want to try something else.
If you read my first blog post, you know my hobby was always writing Windows apps. I used almost every .NET UI framework: Windows Forms, WPF, Silverlight, WinUI3. I wanted to write more about Windows App SDK. So here is the question, no Windows means no hobby apps?
The short answer is not exactly. But it is complicated.
I am looking at other options. I remember learning Swift back when I had a MacBook. It looks interesting again. Maybe I will write a few small apps with it. I also use Blazor at work a lot. The idea of running .NET as WebAssembly (WASM) feels both genius and crazy to me. I need to learn more. Maybe build a mobile PWA with it.
I am writing this post on a MacBook. No virtual machines. No Windows in the background. For the first time in a long time. Lately I have worked a lot with Linux terminals. So using macOS is surprisingly easy for me. I set up GPG (for code signing), SSH, command line tools, and everything else. One interesting thing, Microsoft’s own software often works better on Mac. For example, Outlook is a native app on Mac, not a PWA like on Windows.
So am I done with Windows as a hobby platform? For now, yes. But I never say never. I am figuring things out as I go. So there will be things to talk about, from someone who used Windows most of his life and now tries something completely different.
Stay tuned.