Recent Programming Windows Stories

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The Universal Windows Platform (UWP) isn’t particularly well-suited to traditional productivity applications.

I decided to port .NETpad from Visual Basic to C# in order to get up to speed on the latter language as quickly as possible.

For much of the past year, I’ve been researching and working with Microsoft’s previous-generation developer technologies.

Originally called COOL, for C++ Object-Oriented Language, this new language would very closely resemble Java.

Anders Hejlsberg has been doing the impossible since his first foray into programming language and compiler design in 1980.

On June 22, 2000, Microsoft co-founder and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates announced the .NET (“dot NET”) platform.

With Sun suing to block Microsoft’s extensions to Java, the software giant decided to create a new programming language of its own.

With Microsoft's legal losses mounting in its U.S. antitrust case, the software giant suffered from an exodus of key executives.

Sun was the more powerful adversary, but Microsoft’s strategy against it was consistent with what it did to Netscape and the web.

During a month’s long mediation process in U.S. v. Microsoft, developer documentation became a key requirement for a settlement.

Heading into the late 1990s, Microsoft sought to consolidate its developer languages and tools into a single, cohesive environment.

Microsoft first came to the attention to regulators a decade before its celebrated and vilified U.S. antitrust trial.

We’re now three months and over 50 articles into the Programming Windows series. Here’s another quick progress report.

When Microsoft announced that the oft-delayed Windows NT 5.0 would be renamed to Windows 2000, it marked the end of an era.

It’s not exactly a road not taken, as each of its constituent parts did come to fruition. But Windows DNA was short-lived as a brand.

With Windows NT 5.0 delayed again and again, Microsoft didn’t notice yet another competitor nipping at its heels.

Two years into its incredible embrace of the Internet, Bill Gates became convinced that the strategy was now threatening Windows from within.

VBScript was best used with the IIS web server and Active Server Pages (ASP) to “activate the Internet” with databases and ActiveX components.

With ActiveX, Microsoft would “activate the Internet” by bringing its COM technologies to the web.

HTML is a simple markup language that describes web documents. But it’s evolved into a powerful platform over the years.

Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson’s Findings of Fact in U.S. v. Microsoft focused largely on Microsoft’s response to the Netscape threat.

In this sidebar, Microsoft once planned three Windows NT versions, called Asteroid, NepTune, and Triton. None came to market.

Microsoft created Internet Explorer to beat back the threat from Netscape Navigator. It would soon dominate the market.

Windows 95 wasn’t as sophisticated as NT, but it ran well on mainstream PCs and offered many advances over its predecessors.

Visual J++ is a historical footnote today, but it’s fascinating to go back and see what Microsoft did with the Java platform.

Microsoft wasted little time usurping the Java platform and creating Windows-only Java technologies that angered Sun Microsystems.

December 7, 1995 was another day that would live in infamy. For Netscape and any other company that got in Microsoft’s way.