Paul Thurrott (133:44)
Yeah. Now I'm going to look to the future. So I've been working on this series of kind of notepad clones, having a lot of success, but also a lot of defeats. Mostly lately, because the Windows app SDK is so terrible. I've tried all kinds of AIs. I told you about the thing from last November where it kept making so many mistakes that I ran out of credits. Like what? You know, which is insane, but. And I had also said in the past, like, look, I would never pay for. I just said it today, I will not pay for AI. If I was a developer, I would absolutely pay for AI. And that's a different thing, right? So there's different ways to go with this, but Stardock, the company that my friend Brad works at, which is run by Brad Wardell, another friend of a sort, a great guy, they make start 11, window blinds, fences, et cetera, came up with a. I guess I'll call it like an AI, kind of a front end. It's not just for developers. I have only used it for developer stuff, but in the sense, like OpenClaw is for agents or Cursor was like a year ago, you can point it at a code base and it can help you with it. Right. So you do code review, which is incredible. Literally to this point, and this has been a month and a half, maybe month, over a month. Anyway, it has never screwed me over, not one time. It has never created code that did not compile, which has been a huge problem with the GitHub copilot stuff. It has fixed some embarrassing problems with my code base, including a couple of Async issues like I mentioned, which I can't understand because you always use async for file operations and what the hell. Anyway, I can't explain that one, but there are features I had in old versions of the app that were on WPF that I could not implement in the Windows app SD because it's so hard. And it did those. It added new features I've just wanted to add. And this has gone so well that I finally decided. I don't know why I kind of jumped the gun, but I was like, look, I want to build the thing I always wanted to build, which is that multi app, sorry, multi document, multitab version of this app. I meant to have it build it from scratch just to see if it could and to see what it would look like, but it actually used my code base to do it. And it did it. God damn it, it did it. And it's wonderful. And part of the reason it's wonderful is because I had actually solved the architectural issue of managing the state of multiple documents and tabs, but over a year ago. It's just that the Windows app SDK is so terrible that this is a hard thing to explain. I don't want to go into too much detail, but if you think about switching between tabs in an app and maintaining the state of whatever it contains, in wpf, there are events that fire before you switch, and in Windows app SDK they only have events that fire after you switch. So it's actually very easy to lose state. Anyway, it took what I did. It fixed spit out a version of this app. This, I swear to God, this kills me. I'm just gonna mention one more thing about this because this kills me. There were things I started working on this, some version of this app, starting with Visual Basic, by the way, several years ago. So I'm gonna say 7ish years ago, I don't remember. I've made multiple versions of it over time. So Windows forums with the vb, Windows Forms with C Sharp, Windows Forms with C Sharp. And then at the time, modern like. Net core versions. I did a universal Windows, Windows, what do you call it? UWP version. But the best version I ever did was wpf. It was fantastic. But one of the things dating back to literally V1, if you look at Notepad today, if you look at like, this is just an esoteric kind of. There's two. Those two things in the bottom right of the Corner it says UTF8, which is an encoding format. This is kind of the modern text encoding format, but it supports multiple formats. And it also says Windows crlf, like carriage return, line feed.
