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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

The issue with Microsoft until recently, has been the power of WinDev, which are the ones responsible for anything C++ on Microsoft dungeons.

Hence the failure of Longhorn, or any attempt coming out from Microsoft Research.

Ironically, given your Sun remark, Microsoft is back into the Java game, having their own distribution of OpenJDK, and Java is usually the only ecosystem that has day one parity with anything Azure puts out as .NET SDK.

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What is "WinDev"? A quick search didn't turn up much except a French Wikipedia article.

Windows Development, per opposition to DevDiv, Developer Division.

Two quite common names in the Microsoft ecosystem.

As a former MS employee some time ago I don't think I ever heard "windev". It was always referred to as "Windows". Though there were a lot of different groups within that, so sometimes you'd hear an initialism for a specific team. For example during some of my time there was a big organizational split between "core" and more UI oriented teams.

Here is an example in the press, with an email from Somasegar, leader of developer division in the past.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-splits-up-its-xaml-t...

I was an employee in Windows on the date of that email. I left a few months later. Note that the email itself doesn't say "windev". It says "Windows" a bunch of times.

If I'm stretching this "windev" thing, the domain for a lot of employee accounts (including mine) was NTDEV, that had a longer history afaik, nobody called an org that..

The journalist writes it though, as do many other folks.

I didn't come up with this definition myself.

If I am not mistaken, I can probably even dig some Sinosfky references using it.

I think it was sort of externally derived based on "DevDiv", but as another former MS employee - albeit from DevDiv - I can confirm that "WinDev" is not something that was routinely used inside the company the way "DevDiv" is. Usually it's just "Windows", or "Windows org" if the context is ambiguous.

For a moment there I thought you were referring to this trademark: https://pcsoft.fr/windev/index.html Which was known at a time for having young women in light clothing in their marketing material.

aha, that's the windev that comes to mind too. I didn't know they were actually a french company, wild that they're still around... their ads were plastered everywere in the 2000s.

Apparently they have a programming language for which you can "one-click-switch" between english and french for the keywords??? https://pcsoft.fr/windev/ebook/56/

That's actually kind of neat, also I love how the brochure uses the American flag for English...

Yes. I would have preferred that they had used Canadian flags for both.

I use the Microsoft JDK daily - to develop in Maui for Android. Other than that, I'm not too sure what anyone would use it for over the actual OpenJDK versions. I'm pretty sure the MS OpenJDK is mostly there to support pushing people to Azure (hence your observation) and Android. I don't think it is there for much else outside of that, but I'm happy to stand corrected if anyone has another use cas for it.

It was thanks to Microsoft that you get to enjoy the JVM on ARM for example, or better escape analysis.

https://github.com/microsoft/openjdk-aarch64

https://www.infoq.com/news/2023/02/microsoft-openjdk-feature...

Sure, but the first link is surely only benefiting those using Windows on ARM? I do have Windows on ARM on a MacBook under VMWare, but my daily usage of Windows is under x64. Second link - not really knowing much about Java I don't know enough to comment. 99% of my Java use is indirect because it only gets touched by MSBuild when compiling my APK from C#.

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