Comment by pjmlp

Of course you were it predates all the way back to OLE in Windows 3.x, but not the extent it is pervasive in modern Windows past Vista.

After Longhorn's failure, Windows team vouched to replicate all the .NET based ideas for Longhorn, as COM in Vista, followed by the Hilo code sample in Windows 7, how modern Windows applications should look like.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/msdn10/f...

Best quote from Hilo, to show how Windows team sees .NET,

> So overall C++ is a good choice for writing Windows 7-based applications. It has the correct balance of the raw power and flexibility of C, and the sophisticated language features of C#. C++ as a compiled language produces executable code that is as close to the Windows API as is possible and, indeed, the C++ compiler optimizer will make the code as efficient as possible. The C++ compiler has many of options to allow the developer to choose the best optimization, and Microsoft’s C++ compiler is one the best ways to produce small, fast code. WinRT was the next step, coming back to the ideas that predated .NET as the COM evolution, before Microsoft got distracted with J++ and the project pivoted.

https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt...

https://web.archive.org/web/20190111203733/https://blogs.msd...