Programming Windows, the Series (Premium)

I’m starting a new series of articles that will examine how Windows application development has evolved over the years. This may be too technical for some readers, and perhaps not technical enough for the developers in the audience. But this is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and I believe that you can’t truly understand any platform---and in this case, how that platform has evolved over time---unless you understand how to create software for it.

No, I’m not going to teach you how to write software. As I write this in 2019, I’m about 20 years removed from my heyday as a software developer, though I continue to devote a lot of time to this endeavor, at least from a high-level, enthusiast perspective. But I’m no expert.

Instead, I am going to go back in time, so to speak, to as far back as the late 1980s, eventually. And I will examine what Windows application development has looked like at specific points in the intervening 30 years. I’d like to say we’ve come a long way since then---OK, we really have---but in many ways, it is the mistakes and errant side-trips that occurred along the way that are the most interesting. Why those things happened is a big part of the story. As is how Microsoft recovered from its mistakes. Or at least tried to.

And no, this isn’t about nostalgia, though nostalgia plays a role: I certainly have a lifetime of experiences and will be discussing my personal interactions with these technologies when appropriate or possible. It’s fun to look back, but it can also be instructive. It can help us understand why certain things happened when they did. And why some inexplicable vestiges of the past remain in Windows today.

In other words, this is the story of Windows, just told in a different way. From a different perspective.

More broadly, it is the story of the collective aspirations that Microsoft had for the platform over time. Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) in the era of “Cairo.” The brief moment where the .NET craze had so thoroughly engulfed Microsoft that the platform was to be renamed as Windows.NET. And the mobile app or touch-first mania of Windows 8. To name a few.

It’s about how Microsoft scaled a product that was originally just a thin presentation layer on top of MS-DOS into a full-fledged platform of its own. About how that platform now spans across a variety of product types, most of which are not particularly PC-like, and yet it still sees its greatest success, by far, on the PC. About how it failed in mobile.

I have a broad range of topics I’d like to cover, each in its own article. These may not appear in the order listed, as I need to do some research for each of these topics, but they include (and will not be limited to) such things as Win16, Win32, Visual Basic, the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), COM/DCOM/COM+, .NET, Windows Forms (WinForms), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the Windows Runtime (WinRT), Metro and XAM...

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