well people do complain, but i think the point is that windows has one UI framework (win32/user32) and (most) everyone uses that. It provides all of the primitives and norms that people expect
Do you actually use windows? That's not my experience at all. The difference between even just the stuff windows ships with is staggering. Just compare control panel to settings app, they look like they belong to different OS's, and you have to use both to access all configuration.
IME real users don't care about the app being aesthetically different, but they do care if the common idioms have changed(e.g. position of OK/Cancel). That shouldn't depend on your toolkit, though.
I exagerate, but: win32 GDI, windows.forms, MFCs, ATL and that is just from microsoft off the top of my head. There are way more when you start looking at all the solutions that a typical user might actually have running on their machine.
MFC, ATL, and the .NET stuff with the exception of XAML all use win32 controls under the hood. XAML still uses user32 albeit not the control toolkit. Because everything shares the same common core things work together better than on Linux.
> MFC, ATL, and the .NET stuff with the exception of XAML all use win32 controls under the hood.
Oh, I wish that were true. I have twice been a test automation engineer and stopped exactly that not being true for all widgets. Some are, but many of them, including some styles of buttons are not. A simple heuristic to tell is that when a UI widget does something the win32 can't, its probably not a win32 widget.
Even using UI inspection tools like Spy++ panels with .Net buttons that aren't backed by win32 buttons just show don't show up as an item is the tree of UI elements. There are also applications that just do silly things like use GDI, DirectX or OpenGL to draw a thing that looks like a button and isn't controlable of adjustable via external calls at all.
