I’ll tell you why UWP is suffering.  The UWP flavour of XAML is a mere shadow of WPF and the emulator is shockingly hard to get working or working reliably.  For all the warts and problems Xamarin has at least the emulators work.  At this point I’m approaching 10 straight days over the course of three months doing nothing but attempting to debug a UWP application in an emulator running on my development machine.  That’s an inordinate waste of my own life and valuable development time.

Imagine that, a Windows machine with a Windows IDE and a Windows VM engine fails to just work, WTF??  Microsoft, there is no excuse for this.   From all my hours of reading it seems droves of developers are failing to make meaningful use of their own freakin emulator.  I’ve been plugging away at trying to get this to work, on and off for over three months.  I find myself with regained enthusiasm for the problem to start trying again.  Go through the same pain and exasperation and give up again in complete and utter frustration.

Utterly ridiculous.

I’ve tried every solution I’ve found online and nothing has fixed the problem.  You can see long posts on StackOverflow discussing a shit-ton plethora of potential solutions.  The very fact there are such a vast array of potential solutions points to this entire feature of UWP and Windows Phone development needing a lot of TLC from Microsoft.

Why can I debug an iOS application crossing not just the network for compilation but also across operating systems with ease yet I cannot do the same internally to my development machine?  This is a seriously stupid situation.  Some of these discussions span years and multiple Windows OS versions and emulator versions.  Threads starting in 2012 and running through to today, with developer after developer failing to get a proper solution.  Or finding a solution that works until you reboot the machine and have to perform a load of random steps to get it working again.  I’ve wasted a day here and a day there trying to get this to work and it looks like I’m very close to just throwing in the towel – permanently.

In fact this is making me completely reconsider continuing any work with UWP at all.

You can see from threads like this one and this one and this one and this one (you can see a pattern here?!) that lots of people either had (the lucky ones) or are still having issues.  This post in particular was originally written in September of 2012, it has comments up to January 2016 and here I am looking at it March 2017 trying to solve the same problems.  5 years later people are still struggling with Hyper-V and emulating a Windows Phone.  This smacks of a stupid and a hugely counter-productive situation to put your developers in.

It also shows that it is a severe and very real point of pain for many and far from an isolated obscure networking issue.  At least give us some better useful exceptions, or things to Goolge Bing.  At this point I’m seriously underwhelmed with UWP development to the point where I really don’t care about it being a success or not.  Is that really where Microsoft wants me or other developers to be?

I can emulate ALL THE OTHER PLATFORMS with nothing more than a press of a button, but using a completely Microsoft owned tool-chain fails miserably.  It’s no wonder the Windows Store shelves are threadbare and the UWP platform is thus-far an utter flop.

I guess you can tell from the tone in this post that I’m far from happy with this situation, it’s an insanely frustrating situation all round.  I don’t give up on problems easily but this one has me utterly beaten.  I would list all the solutions and voodoo that I’ve tried in order to get this working but frankly I’m struggling to even keep the enthusiasm to finish this blog post explaining my own personal failure.

I guess I’m going to leave this rant alone now unless I find more energy or enthusiasm for the task, this maybe my first and last ever post on UWP.  Frankly, I’ve got better things to do with my time and lets face it, even if I could be arsed to dive into this again and finish my UWP application it’s not going to make me a millionaire anytime soon …

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