What is the fact of DirectUI? [closed]

Question

I am working on a windows desktop application which needs a great UI. I use Visual studio and MFC now. Then heard of DirectUI technology is a good solution, but I can not find some articles on "DirectUI". Can you give me some tech. points on "DirectUI" ? If it's possible to implement a DirectUI library for future use? Thanks.

Answer 1

It is not surprising that companies want to name their product or technologies as "DirectUI", popularized by Microsoft's Messenger, Windows XP, Office, IE and Windows Media Player products. However there are other old names that can be used to describe the behavior, such as windowless and code behind, which may be seen in other mature, well-tested UI components.

There are a lot of UI frameworks from Microsoft, like WPF, Silverlight, Windows Forms, MFC and ATL. In various windows accessibility and automation documentations and job advertisements, DirectUI is referenced to be having equal status with Windows Forms, WPF and Silverlight. However it looks like the library called DirectUI in Microsoft won't be usable for third-party, given how much change are made in each version of DUI.dll and DUser.dll. (Update: Windows 8 opens the door to DirectUI for programmers)

There are third-party who advertise very different products under the DirectUI name, from Nokia's Meego Touch to various GDI-based class libraries which are even windowed and should not be branded "DirectUI". However, DirectX programmers are likely to choose DirectX for performance and use highly sophisticated game engines instead of having a UI class library overhead. In the area of business products, WPF, Silverlight and IE's trident engine are used for windowless, code behind programming, but windows, GDI-based MFC may just work fine, as the fancy UI is not a selling point to business users. Think about the visual studio product for an example, how many programmers would pay more to get 3d animation or even think about free theme downloads?