Programming Windows: The Windows 7 Developer Story (Premium)

After the first public demonstration of Windows 7 at PDC 2008, Steven Sinofsky ceded the stage to Scott Guthrie for a tour of new developer features. Guthrie, as always, arrived with an in-depth understanding of the content he was presenting. But after the revolution that developers had received with Windows Vista, the Windows 7 developer story was decidedly minor.

On the one hand, this wasn’t surprising: since releasing the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, formerly Avalon), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF, formerly Indigo), and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) alongside the .NET Framework 3.0 (formerly WinFX) alongside Windows Vista in 2006, Microsoft had understandably shipped only minor updates to each. For example, .NET Framework 3.5 shipped in November 2007, providing integrated support for Language-Integrated Query (LINQ), a new way to access backend data sources using .NET languages like C# and Visual Basic rather than forcing the developer to learn Transact SQL or whatever interface was native to the data source.

But the software giant was also experiencing a troubling new trend. For the first time, the adoption of its latest Windows platform technologies had moved slowly, with few major new apps built on modern frameworks and SDKs (software developer kits). And though we later came to understand that a shift was then starting, and that most new app development was shifting to the web and mobile, it was unclear whether developer fatigue from the ongoing Vista drama had triggered a one-time blip. Or perhaps there were just too many choices, between classic C/C++ (Win32), C++/Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), classic Visual Basic, .NET/Windows Forms, and now .NET/WPF, causing most developers to simply stick with what they knew best.

Regardless of the root cause, the outcome was the same: there would be no major new developer initiatives with Windows 7. Instead, the developer story would follow the same iterative path that Steve Sinofsky had ordained for the platform itself. And Microsoft would simply make the new APIs (application programming interfaces) for the new Windows 7 functionality available across Win32, MFC, and WPF, letting developers again stick with the technologies that they were already using. This was arguably a good thing: as Microsoft would later discover, bifurcating the developer audience and only making new features available in select environments didn’t work out well for them either. But it also led to a further stagnation of its newest---and, inarguably, best---developer tools, like WPF, at a time when developers were already starting to look elsewhere.

“You can take advantage of the new Windows 7 features regardless of the languages you use,” Guthrie began. “You can use C++ and Win32, [and] you can also use managed languages with .NET. We’ve also focused a lot on interop, and [to] making it possible [for] developers to build applications combining both managed and nati...