If you’re like me, trying to use one of the available UI design frameworks provided by Microsoft can be a challenging experience. From Metro to Office UI Fabric to Fluent UI, it’s hard to keep up with, follow, and maintain Microsoft’s Fluent Design System in your custom apps. Microsoft also created React controls that implement Fluent UI, known as Fluent UI React which have had their own challenging track record.

Most of us want to use what Microsoft provides so our projects look like the rest of the Microsoft products like SharePoint, Microsoft Teams and Office. This simplifies adoption with your users as they’re already familiar with the hosting apps. While the promise of Fluent UI and it’s predecessors is awesome, the implementation has been challenging.

I’ve seen enough issues submitted by the community where the Fluent UI team has made a breaking change in a version that wasn’t obvious and either created some weird UX bug or completely broke their solutions. Remember the whole debacle with the Office UI Fabric JavaScript package? Yeah… me too…

In this post, I cover:

• there are more “solutions” coming…
• what do I do in my projects
• A change is in the air: hTWOo

@hTWOoUI: Microsoft Fluent Design in pure HTML & CSS - Finally a great alternative to Microsoft's challenging Office UI Fabric, @fluentui (& now @FAST_UI?) offerings... and from a trusted resource in @StfBauer & @StudioN8D ! https://t.co/ajNI1Yr1QR

— Voitanos (@voitanos) April 27, 2021