I'm not sure that it uses React Native, but modern add-ins for Office are JS, so any injected modern add-in will be using JS rather than COM/C/C++. This gave add-ins portability between all supported Office platforms, increased security, and made administration much easier.
Shouldn't devs be allowed to select what they feel is the "best" choice for a given component? While I wouldn't expect to see a SwiftUI in Windows from Microsoft, Microsoft hasn't been adverse to various NIH web frameworks for quite some time now.
If it fits and meets the goals of the project, why not?
If Microsoft developers' "best" choice for a tiny UI component like this is not it's flagship native UI framework, then that's a problem for Microsoft. That is the criticism.
> Shouldn't devs be allowed to select what they feel is the "best" choice for a given component?
To some extent, yes. But if they choose React Native, something's probably wrong, because (despite what the article says) that requires throwing in a Javascript engine, significantly bloating a core Windows component. If they only use it for a small section ("that can be disabled", or in other words is on by default), it seems like an even poorer trade-off, as most users suffer the pain but the devs are making minimal advantage of whatever benefits it provides.
If the developers are correct that this is the best choice, that reflects poorly on the quality of Microsoft's core native development platforms, as madeofpalk said.
If the developers of a core Windows component are incorrect about the best choice, that reflects poorly on this team, and I might be inclined to say no, someone more senior should be making the choice.
There are two possibilities: Either it’s really the best choice among the available frameworks (very questionable), or they picked it regardless. Both reflect badly on Microsoft, given what React Native is, and given how central the Start menu is to the Windows experience.
Here's one: Microsoft management heavily incentivizes their developers to use LLMs for virtually everything (to the "do it or you're fired" level) and the LLM (due to its training data or whatever) is far more able to pump out code with React Native than their own frameworks. This makes it the right choice for them. Not for the user, but you can't have everything.
I don't have any inside information; I'm running with the hypothetical.
Exactly this. And it is on a portion of the Start menu that can be fully disabled. Heck, my start menu looks like the Windows 10 start menu (yes, this is OOTB) as I wasn't fond of the "new" look of the Windows 11 start menu.
But we'll always hear "it's React!". Like most things, the masses must feed on the Internet outrage without critical thought.
This isn't an NTFS thing. The I/O Manager implements NtLockFile. Applications can request exclusive byte-range write access to a file. And perhaps it is lazy programmers, or defaults, but they generally do.
I don't think Microsoft sees client machine reboots as an issue, and it used to be much worse when they used to be released weekly. On the server side, Microsoft expects that you'd implement some form of high availability.
NTFS on non-Windows follows the locking semantics of the underlying driver model/kernel, e.g. you can replace an in-use file on Linux. Likewise, using FAT on Windows you cannot replace an in-use file. This is just to demonstrate it isn't a file system-specific "issue" (if you feel it is one). It was a design decision by the original NT OS/2 development group.
Ultimately, the NT byte-range locking is a holdover from NT OS/2, where in OS/2 byte-range locking was mandatory.
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