Comment by bartread

I do get where you're coming from but I have a more moderate perspective.

I mean we can certainly point to examples where that's the case: Silverlight's a classic here, if that term's even appropriate, and then of course there's WP7, 8, and 10, as mentioned by the grandparent. And these are clearly not trivial examples.

Nevertheless, I must point out that large bodies of code I wrote in the mid-noughties are still running substantially unmodified today. What's perhaps interesting is that these codebases are desktop tools, where it can be argued that Microsoft have achieved true mastery (after WPF came out everything notably settled down, and unlike MFC and WinForms it really hasn't been replaced).

It tends to be other areas where the worst of the churn has occurred: web, mobile, database access (how many versions of EF to get it right?). Of course, these are areas that have seen significant growth over the past few years.

Still, even in their worst period Microsoft did not begin to approach the lunacy of framework churn in the JavaScript world.