DeadLock Update?

[Bamajon1974]

Are there any plans to update Dead Lock to ensure compatibility with later builds of Win 10 and Win 11? The program has not been updated in over 5 years.

Thanks!

[CodeDead]

Great question.

I have concerns regarding the future of the .NET ecosystem on which DeadLock and many of our applications are built on.

Using .NET is fine for Windows only applications, but with the recent releases of Windows and more specifically Windows 11, the GNU/Linux application space is one that needs to be respected as well since there are too many advantages to running Linux as a daily operating system versus Windows 11, unless when it comes to gaming, even though Proton is well on its way to make that a non-issue.

This is why I have been experimenting with different technologies and languages such as Java, Rust and JavaScript with Electron to port applications that can be ported to run on a myriad of platforms and hardware.

Noted that this is less of a concern with an application like DeadLock, since a Linux port will never be required, but the thing I am waiting on now, to start working with .NET again, is a framework called MAUI to handle the user-interface side of things. They are close to release, and might spark interest again in developing DeadLock further.

This means that in the future, you could expect to see a DeadLock update that no longer requires users to have to have .NET installed.

In terms of features though, DeadLock is still compatible with Windows 11, because Microsoft goes through heaps of fire to ensure compatibility with 'older' software. The Windows API's that DeadLock uses are still there, still relevant and still do the exact same thing. DeadLock is essentially just a UI in front of Windows API's. Easy, still usable and still perfectly fine.

An update at this stage would only be a refresh of already existing UI elements, which is, simply put, not worth the time and energy until the MAUI platform is ready.

Reason being that Microsoft has a history of providing UI frameworks but never really doing anything worth of interest with them. We now have WinForms, WPF, UWP, Xamarin and soon MAUI and many more frameworks which is quite frankly too much and all except WinForms have stood the test of time, except that WinForms is missing a LOT of functionality when compared to the other platforms. UWP is now essentially worthless, and not worth it to re-build DeadLock or any other application in because it would tie it to the Windows Store which is something we absolutely do not want or need. Plus Microsoft somewhat pulled the plug on UWP. WPF is unfinished and probably never will be finished. It misses a lot of features that Winforms has, while offering new features that WinForms doesn't have. This all means that this is a fractured ecosystem when it comes to desktop application development in .NET. MAUI will hopefully solve these issues going forward.

I hope this answers your question and instills faith that DeadLock is still perfectly fine in its current state, today.

I also hope that Microsoft addresses the issues concerning their desktop application frameworks and makes it interesting and worthwhile again to work with their ecosystem, which, today, is no longer the case as technology is steadily moving over to cloud-based infrastructures and less desktop-oriented than they used to be back when DeadLock was just starting out and before that.

I might just re-build the entire UI in Java and JavaFX because that seems to be the one framework today that isn't too demanding, stands the test of time as well and is relatively easy to work with.

[BinToss]

a framework called MAUI to handle the user-interface side of things.

dotnet/maui#339
MAUI has no official support for Linux. There are some forks that add GTK bindings for Linux desktop support, so they might be merged upstream eventually. From what I understand, this is because there's a ton of work to do to implement the workflows in the SDK.
Because of the lack of official support, cross-platform third-party UI frameworks are appealing alternatives e.g. Avalonia, UNO, GTKSharp, (QtSharp or Qml.NET).

[CodeDead]

MAUI has no official support for Linux. There are some forks that add GTK bindings for Linux desktop support, so they might be merged upstream eventually. From what I understand, this is because there's a ton of work to do to implement the workflows in the SDK.

The (many) file-systems that operate on GNU/Linux are entirely different when compared to NTFS. The concern is not about getting it to work on GNU/Linux, because it doesn't need to work on Linux due to files being locked not being a general issue like they are on Windows.

At least, this is not an issue for the DeadLock application, specifically, but it would be very nice of the dotnet team to include the ability to create desktop apps for GNU/Linux (be it with GTK or Qt,.. anything would be nice at this point).

[CodeDead]

For any developers using .NET; you can now make use of the deadlock library:
https://github.com/CodeDead/deadlock-dotnet-sdk

It is available on NuGet and allows you to customize the functionalities to your liking, in addition to allowing developers to create their own UI-based applications, if they want to do so.

This library will be rewritten entirely in Rust and JavaScript using both Tauri and React. This will produce tiny binaries with a responsive user-interface that does not require the .NET Framework or .NET (Core) to be installed on a user's machine. WebView is an excellent alternative for modern Windows desktop application development because Internet Explorer is being phased out and the time is right. Do note, Tauri does not produce binaries that are as big as Electron applications like Discord, which is why Tauri (WebView) is ideal for the particular problem of updating this application.