Programming Windows: Windows API Wrap-Up (Premium)

At Build 2019, I surmised that Microsoft had killed the Universal Windows Platform (UWP), its most recent application development framework for Windows. And then I found out how right I was: A source high-up in Microsoft’s Windows developer business said privately, point blank, that Microsoft had literally killed UWP. We can speculate about what happens next. But UWP’s fate is not speculation. It’s real.

Despite having figured this out on my own, the news hit me pretty hard: UWP is basically the second-generation version of the Metro app platform that debuted with Windows 8 in 2012, but it has its roots in the Windows Phone app platform, also called Metro, which had debuted two years earlier. Had Microsoft really just wasted the previous decade? My head was spinning.

But as I know all too well, Microsoft has bounced from developer framework to developer framework over the years, responding to both industry and software development trends each time. This is something I’ve thought about a lot. And I’d likewise been thinking about a series of articles about these topics, too. I just wasn’t sure whether this would resonate with readers. Non-programmers, I felt, would find this topic a bit too dense. And actual developers would likely mock my surface-level understanding of their careers. And so I waffled.

But with my declaration that UWP was dead---a fact that Microsoft has never publicly acknowledged---readers and podcasts listeners began doing some thinking of their own. And I started getting the same questions again and again. Since UWP is dead, does that mean that it would rewrite the in-box apps that come with Windows 10 as “Win32” apps? After all, the firm shouldn’t be promoting a dead technology.

These questions made me realize that most people don’t quite understand what terms like Win32 even mean. And that killing off a developer framework like UWP doesn’t mean that Microsoft can take a Magic Eraser to existing products and just remove anything and everything UWP-related from existence. Software code, like the life in Jurassic Park, continues. It has a life cycle and, in many cases, a support life cycle that corporate customers rely on as well. In some ways, it never dies.

And I thought, what the heck. Maybe it was time for a little bit of history.

As I noted previously, Windows was a reaction to two things: Microsoft’s secret involvement with the development of the first Macintosh and a related and broader industry adoption of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and other windowing solutions, many of which on MS-DOS were initially text-based. The earliest GUIs didn’t technically provide true multitasking capabilities. But one could run two or more applications side by side in floating windows and could, in some cases, even exchange information between them. The future was suddenly very clear.

In the early 1980s, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was seduced by the GUI as quickly as was Steve Jobs ...