Comment by ack_complete
1 day ago
The most offensive part of the Sinofsky response is this part:
> WinRT (2012) - it (or the embodiment in Windows 8) failed in the market but it also showed both the problem and potential solution to building for new markets while respecting the past
I can't express how wrong this is. WinRT was the most destructive thing that the Windows team ever did to the OS. It drove a hard stake into Windows, splitting it in half and declaring that anything previous to Windows 8, oriented toward desktop, or using primary input through mouse and keyboard over touch was dead. Microsoft basically told all existing Windows developers that if they weren't building a new, touch-oriented, mobile-style app specifically for Windows 8, they didn't matter and wouldn't get any support whatsoever, which is exactly what happened every time they broke existing desktop functionality. Calling this "respecting the past" is a crass insult and taking no responsibility for damaging the Windows development experience and accelerating development away from native Windows apps.
I think for Sinofsky the "respecting the past" refers more to WinRT was/is still just Spicy COM under the hood. Most of the article as I read it is about how .NET was a mistake for Windows UI development and a return to (Spicy) COM its savior.
That might have been more significant had the Windows Runtime not been effectively locked off to Metro-style apps. You could technically use it from a desktop app, but almost all of its functionality was only allowed within a Metro-style app, often due to requiring a core window or package identity. Even today the vast majority of useful WinRT APIs, including the entire UI system, require UWP or package identity.
Package Identity isn't that different from Signed COM Registration of the ancient past. Microsoft built up a lot of dislike from it by building it "sandbox-first", but the core of it still isn't that different from COM's ancient footpaths, at least to the COM diehards that hate .NET and didn't learn near enough from .NET's battles with the same things in terms of package signing, CAS (Code Access Security), and the GAC (Global Assembly Cache).
"Sandbox-first" even made some sense as a direction to work because it is harder to add a sandbox after the fact than to start with one, which is one of the core lessons learned from XP trying to sandbox some of the insecurities in Win32 and getting caught in a lot of complications. (The "sandbox-first" of UWP wasn't even that different under the hood from the XP "sandbox" of Folder/Registry Redirection, just a little better hardened.) Microsoft needed a lot better messaging up front if they had expected to allow more apps to leave the sandbox eventually. But Microsoft probably did believe the UWP sandbox was a better and safer experience for consumers.
But yeah, what's left of Package Identity outside of the sandbox feels like it includes several classic mistakes from .NET's CAS/GAC era, and also seems to point out that Sinofsky was wrong about WinRT "respecting the past" when it failed to learn from that era because it didn't trust .NET's history.
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