What I personally do not enjoy as a developer about MS products is that eventually they hit end of life and you are left hanging. With open source stuff, if the project is used enough there will always be some maintainer.
For your own applications you will most likely use a container anyways and that gives you fairly reproducible builds.
If a product is deprecated, it may not receive security updates or fixes and such. As a user that puts you in a tough situation.
Unfortunately as a user there's not a lot you can do to influence the governance of those products or try to do something to keep them around. If the vendor decides to sunset a product that's it. That's all I am trying to say.
Kernel modules need constant recompilation but that's a very separate issue from programs.
Highly ironic for a framework that's called Universal Windows Platform :D
WCF is still being supported, there was a .NET Conf 2017 session.
Many of the .NET APIs became COM based ones on Vista, with plain C Win32 ones being less and less common until we got WinRT, as the sibling comment points out.
Interesting enough WinRT shares many ideas with the genesis of .NET, before they decided to go the CLR route.
Microsoft's incentives still don't quite align with their developer/customers, but Microsoft does an amazing job pushing toward whatever is tossed out for sale as the new & shiny each year. The entire company is an amazing marketing machine.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/
Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? [...] The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features.