Programming Windows: We Fought the Web and the Web Won (Premium)

Microsoft dragged its developer base into a losing battle against open source and open standards that lasted for decades. And yet, despite its recent and thorough embrace of openness, Microsoft continues to provide new proprietary solutions to its developers and customers alongside its more open offerings, especially in Windows and other legacy products. Doing so seems like an unnecessary delay to the inevitable shift that has happened elsewhere in the company and in the broader industry.

It’s been a while since I’ve written a post in the Programming Windows series, and this entry is most decidedly out of order with the rest. It could, in fact, be viewed as a potential summary for the entire experience. The first---and completed---half of the Programming Windows story concerns the pre-.NET days, and I played an active role in that world as it unfolded between 1985 and 2001. The second half, of course, concerns .NET and everything that has happened since, and I was more of an outside observer during this period.

Reliving the pre-.NET days was, for me, a joy, something I could almost manically communicate quickly and almost effortlessly. But the .NET era has required more research and more time. I’ve had to retroactively experience languages and developer frameworks I never really used professionally and try to make sense of them years after their releases. You’ve seen some of my efforts along those lines in the Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and Universal Windows Platform (UWP) versions of my .NETpad app.

But I haven’t yet written the story of those advances, and the series is currently stalled right at about the start of the .NET era. But I have been thinking a lot about the underlying industry changes that drove the decisions Microsoft made during this time. And a sweeping narrative is beginning to reveal itself, one that spans not just the .NET era, but the entire lifespan of Windows. It’s the story of programming Windows, sure. But it’s also the story of Windows and Microsoft as well.

I think of this history in terms of inflection points, of how Microsoft reacted to what was happening elsewhere in the industry. From its start, Windows itself was a reaction to the Graphical User Interface (GUI) and so-called WIMP (“windows, icons, menus, pointer”) user experience. This type of interaction was invented in research labs in the late 1970s, and it was first brought to the mainstream consumer market by Apple. But it was popularized, of course, Windows, which Microsoft created as a hedge to ensure that its platforms, and not those made by Apple, IBM, or others, would continue to dominate.

The next inflection point was the rise of UNIX, arguably the first major open platform (though, yes, that only occurred over time). Microsoft’s reaction to this platform was to create a platform-agnostic UNIX killer, originally called NT and built by a skunkworks team hired away from Digital Equipment ...