Comment by tonyedgecombe
5 days ago
>Win32 is a stable API and I hope they don't let anyone from the Windows 11 modernization team touch it.
I've heard a Microsoft executive talk about win32 as legacy that they want to replace. I don't think that's realistic though, it's probably the last piece of technology keeping people on the platform.
It was the goal with UAP and UWP, but they clearly messed up the execution.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/win32-and-com/win32-an...
Win32, the C API, is stagnant since Windows XP, other than some ...Ex and ...ExN kind of additions.
As mentioned above, the new APIs are mostly delivered as COM, occasionally with some .NET bindings.
There is still a silo trying to push WinRT now on Win32 side, although given how they made a mess of the developer experience only those with Microsoft salaries care about it.
This oldie shows some of the background,
https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt...
Last year I ran into the issue of .NET network bindings not returning all NICs. [0] This issue has been present in the .NET since the genesis and only resolved in .NET 9. I had to create my own Win32 wrapper so everything works properly in .NET 4 frameworks ... still need to maintain Windows 7 pre-SP1 support in some applications.
Smells like Microsoft was trying to create APIs based on assumptions versus a 1:1 method that exposes managed code and hides unmanaged.
[0] https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/100824