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It's weird to hear "win32" called "legacy". Last I checked everything from "wininit.exe" to "svchost.exe" to "winlogon.exe" were win32 (or win64) applications. Guess the entire base operating system is legacy! :O

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Actually, a lot of what you see in Windows 10 is running on top of UWP.

Some of the UI apps perhaps, but if you ripped out win32, I don't think you'd have a very usable machine left to log on to?

That's true, but only because there isn't a great story in UWP for underlying services.

Non-sandboxed applications and services are not a sustainable strategy anymore.

I wonder how long they'll stick to UWP. In 2 years they probably have another cool next thing.

Yeah, they dropped that .net thing in less than that .. oh wait

They have abandoned WPF, Winforms and Silverlight. Not sure what happened to WinRT.

WinRT got rebranded to UWP.

WPF was XAML v1. Silverlight was XAML v2. UWP has XAML v3. Your skills are still applicable.

There is a little more to it than XAML. Skills wise it's not too bad but I have looked into porting some WPF apps to WinRT a while ago and those frameworks looked very differently under the hood despite some superficial similarity. I still don't understand why they need to create all this framework churn. WPF could have been extended to what UWP is now in my opinion.

XAML was reimplemented in C++ and now renders with DirectComposition instead of Milcore. It's much faster now and far more capable.

You can also now use it with both native C++ and C# thanks to WinRT.

Windows 10 without Win32 would be comparable to iOS. Eventual root access lost on your "PC" and a cut for Microsoft from the store.

Is that true? They never used Winforms or WPF much themselves. Have they really started using the frameworks they push their users into?

Yes. Windows Shell, Xbox, Office, Skype, HoloLens, etc. are all using UWP.

Windows Explorer is not UWP.

The Office version you get with Office 365 ("Desktop Office"), the one, businesses use, is certainly not UWP.

Skype UWP is a preview announced a few days ago.

"Are all using UWP"? No. They are in a transition of moving to UWP, but every serious business application is Win32.

The only one I know for sure that moved from Win32 to another framework was Visual Studio with WPF. I don't think MS ever used MFC or Winforms for any product of considerable size either.

>Windows Explorer is not UWP.

It's a hybrid: start menu, action centre and some other elements are UWP's XAML frames now.

Yeah, one of the things you'll notice if your Modern apps are broken on Windows 10, is that your Start Menu no longer works either. (Not meaning to be negative, but this is how I realized the Start Menu was using their new framework.)

Visual Studio is built with WPF.

What exactly is win64? The API is still called win32, even if used in a 64-bit executable. Can somebody explain it? Was there a failed win64 API attempt at some point like WinFS and other stuff?

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb496995.aspx uses the "Win32" and "Win64" monikers. I assume it is basically win32 with some types extended to 64bits (memory pointers/handles/whatnot)

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