Squirrel.Windows

Looking into how this is built. I see they use something called Squirrel.Window for managing installs. I can't believe I've never heard of this until now! https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows. Fastest loading electron app I've ever seen. As a long time user of Ballsamiq. This is FANTASTIC!! Everything is super smooth, nice drawing styling, well thought out. My only problem with Ballsamiq Desktop was the price. I just don't use it enough to pay $150 for 1 license. Something like $60 for desktop would be better. Good luck with the business. I will definitely be using your app. P.S. I just noticed it groups things automatically....HOLY SMOKES! P.S. 2 As a map user. When switching to the pan tool (hand). The scrolling up/down should zoom in/out. P.S. 3 It definitely needs a pdf export option

I sometimes see Squirrel[^1] used in Windows apps. Looks like it's used by Electron[^2], so maybe that's why. [1]: https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows/tree/develop/do... [2]: https://github.com/electron/electron/blob/main/docs/api/auto...

As soon as Office 2007 didn't use MSI the format was doomed. I assume the Here in NIH refers to an individual team, not MS as a whole. Teams is entirely NIH https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows for updates to the Electron app. I would use winget, but MS made it weirdly hard to run as a script on multiple computers, it installs per user, because... who knows. So still using chocolatey

You can have that with updates using Squirrel; https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows.

That's correct -- we chose to do this because it allows users to install ST without admin privileges. We use Squirrel, which is an incredible library btw (https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows)

As /u/DanielStraight said, it all depends on the requirements for your project. In the meantime though, I would recommend working out some prototypes, both to brush up your skills and also to get some ideas on the architecture/design. Since you mentioned that this is a desktop app, maybe try out some tools/frameworks that you might end up using in the final project. Here are a few recommendations: https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows https://github.com/akavache/Akavache http://reactiveui.net/ http://mahapps.com/ https://github.com/MvvmCross/MvvmCross

The Alt.Net movement is a powerful force; always looking for better ways of doing things no matter where that alternative might come from. So if it's something new from Microsoft, that's great - if it's an approach from the open source world or an alternate language or somewhere else entirely then that's great too. Xamarin deserves particular mention as the ability to share 80-90% of your core codebase between all mobile phone platforms is just stellar. It makes absolutely no business sense to re-write your core business logic for each platform and in that platforms language. So much less project risk, merge three/four code bases into one. Do it once then implement native UI's for each platform and bind back to the core library? Spot a problem in the core library on iOS? Android gets the hotfix for free. Just ask Rdio ;-) Other hotness: -