4 ms·

Ballmer was forced out of MS 8 years ago, doubt he cares. And anyway, IIRC, it would've been Sinofsky and co. trying to squash anything that threatened the Win

Ballmer was forced out of MS 8 years ago, doubt he cares. And anyway, IIRC, it would've been Sinofsky and co. trying to squash anything that threatened the Windows division's power.

pjmlp 5y ago
Sinofsky and co. are also to blame for Longhorn sabotage of using .NET, and most likely trying to bring Midori stuff into Windows. Now Project Reunion, sorry Windows 11, is trying to fix the path started with Windows 8.
- dividedbyzero 5y ago
  Longhorn sabotage, Midori, Project Reunion? Could you give a bit more background for those of us like me who aren't up to date with Microsoft internal projects and politics?
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    To fully get where I am coming from, you have to go back to when .NET was released. .NET was supposed to be the great reunification of VB, C++ and COM runtimes, then also got a Java touch into the mix and .NET happenend (initially was known as Ext-VOS). https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/archive/blogs/dsyme/more-c-net-generics-research-project-history-the-msr-white-paper-from-mid-1999 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/archive/blogs/dsyme/more-c-... Hence why CLR is just like WASM + GC if you prefer a modern comparisasion. If you go back into web archives, when Visual Studio.NET was released, it was going to be .NET everywhere, across the whole stack. However a big management mistake happened, .NET was part of DevTools business unit, while C++ was kept under WinDev, up until Satya started to change the culture, it has been pretty much WinDev vs DevTools. So Managed DirectX comes, eventually gets killed, XNA and Silverlight take over Windows Phone 7, get killed by WinRT and DirectXTK and so on. Going back to the originally statement, if you Google for why Longhorn did not work out, you will find many .NET blaming. https://hackernoon.com/what-really-happened-with-vista-4ca7ffb5a1a https://hackernoon.com/what-really-happened-with-vista-4ca7f... Yet Android, ChromeOS, Midori are examples of what happens when actually everyone works into the same direction bringing an OS into production. Joe Duffy does some remarks on his two talks, where he hints at why it was a failure to fight Windows culture "Systems Programming in C# " - https://www.infoq.com/presentations/csharp-systems-programming/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/csharp-systems-programmi... "Safe Systems Software and the Future of Computing" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuD7SCqHB7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuD7SCqHB7k Note that for some time the Asian Bing nodes were actually running on top of Midori as production test. A big decision of Vista, was to replicate the .NET design using COM instead (hello WinDev), hence why all major modern Windows APIs are now COM based. Windows 8 doubled down on that by introducing WinRT, with AOT compiled .NET and C++/CX using COM as the future Windows runtime, this was a point of friction, as .NET Native isn't 100% compatible with regular .NET, and many C++ devs desliked C++/CX extensions (later C++/WinRT replaced C++/CX, but that is another story). So to sort out all the adoption chaos, Project Reunion was born, which is basically merging the COM improvments brought by WinRT and app sandbox into Win32, and forgeting the split ever happened. Even Reunion has had a couple of hicups, it started as XAML islands, it became eventually clear that that alone wouldn't do it, thus Project Reunion. https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2020/05/19/developing-for-all-1-billion-windows-10-devices-and-beyond/ https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2020/05/19/develo... And now a year later, it was renamed as Windows App SDK. https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/06/24/what-windows-11-means-for-developers/ https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/06/24/what-w... Note that many System C# features now live in C# 7 and later versions, and were also in the basis of C++ Core Guidelines. Also note an example of the internal competition with the pleothora of GUIs being done now, Forms, WPF, WinUI, MAUI, Blazor, React Native for Windows. Maybe if all divisions worked more together in Longhorn, the project would actually happened and Vista wouldn't have been needed, nor the strong emphasis on COM that it started.
    - mastax 5y ago
      Thanks for the context. It's very frustrating as a .NET developer that infighting set back .NET GUI development by 10 years. There's still no supported way to use DirectX from .NET. All the new GUI tech is moving in the right direction but is unfinished to the point that still only WPF and WinForms can meet my requirements. I really wanted to ditch WPF since the DirectX 11 -> DirectX 9 (WPF) interop is so hacky.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Unfortunately we are better off with community efforts, the DirectX team is really deep into C++ mindset and nothing else, no wonder it belongs to WinDev side. https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsAppSDK/issues/14#issuecomment-878453102 https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsAppSDK/issues/14#issueco...
- sterlind 5y ago
  what was wrong with Midori? I wasn't on the team but I played around with it, and thought that the architecture was absolutely beautiful. It's a tragedy that it wasn't open-source. I understand that there wasn't much appetite towards "replacing Windows" when we were losing ground fast to mobile, but it's a loss to the academic community at least.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Politcal feuds if you read between the lines of statements like "The project included novel “cultural” approaches too, being 100% developers and very code-focused, looking more like the Microsoft of today and hopefully tomorrow, than it did the Microsoft of 8 years ago when the project began.". Joe Duffy has similar remarks on his posts and post morten sessions done about the project.
    - chem83 5y ago
      Some extra insight here: https://twitter.com/funcOfJoe/status/1121963970661715968 https://twitter.com/funcOfJoe/status/1121963970661715968

Ballmer was forced out of MS 8 years ago, doubt he cares. And anyway, IIRC, it would've been Sinofsky and co. trying to squash anything that threatened the Windows division's power.

pjmlp 5y ago

Sinofsky and co. are also to blame for Longhorn sabotage of using .NET, and most likely trying to bring Midori stuff into Windows. Now Project Reunion, sorry Windows 11, is trying to fix the path started with Windows 8.

dividedbyzero 5y ago
Longhorn sabotage, Midori, Project Reunion? Could you give a bit more background for those of us like me who aren't up to date with Microsoft internal projects and politics?
- pjmlp 5y ago
  To fully get where I am coming from, you have to go back to when .NET was released. .NET was supposed to be the great reunification of VB, C++ and COM runtimes, then also got a Java touch into the mix and .NET happenend (initially was known as Ext-VOS). https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/archive/blogs/dsyme/more-c-net-generics-research-project-history-the-msr-white-paper-from-mid-1999 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/archive/blogs/dsyme/more-c-... Hence why CLR is just like WASM + GC if you prefer a modern comparisasion. If you go back into web archives, when Visual Studio.NET was released, it was going to be .NET everywhere, across the whole stack. However a big management mistake happened, .NET was part of DevTools business unit, while C++ was kept under WinDev, up until Satya started to change the culture, it has been pretty much WinDev vs DevTools. So Managed DirectX comes, eventually gets killed, XNA and Silverlight take over Windows Phone 7, get killed by WinRT and DirectXTK and so on. Going back to the originally statement, if you Google for why Longhorn did not work out, you will find many .NET blaming. https://hackernoon.com/what-really-happened-with-vista-4ca7ffb5a1a https://hackernoon.com/what-really-happened-with-vista-4ca7f... Yet Android, ChromeOS, Midori are examples of what happens when actually everyone works into the same direction bringing an OS into production. Joe Duffy does some remarks on his two talks, where he hints at why it was a failure to fight Windows culture "Systems Programming in C# " - https://www.infoq.com/presentations/csharp-systems-programming/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/csharp-systems-programmi... "Safe Systems Software and the Future of Computing" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuD7SCqHB7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuD7SCqHB7k Note that for some time the Asian Bing nodes were actually running on top of Midori as production test. A big decision of Vista, was to replicate the .NET design using COM instead (hello WinDev), hence why all major modern Windows APIs are now COM based. Windows 8 doubled down on that by introducing WinRT, with AOT compiled .NET and C++/CX using COM as the future Windows runtime, this was a point of friction, as .NET Native isn't 100% compatible with regular .NET, and many C++ devs desliked C++/CX extensions (later C++/WinRT replaced C++/CX, but that is another story). So to sort out all the adoption chaos, Project Reunion was born, which is basically merging the COM improvments brought by WinRT and app sandbox into Win32, and forgeting the split ever happened. Even Reunion has had a couple of hicups, it started as XAML islands, it became eventually clear that that alone wouldn't do it, thus Project Reunion. https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2020/05/19/developing-for-all-1-billion-windows-10-devices-and-beyond/ https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2020/05/19/develo... And now a year later, it was renamed as Windows App SDK. https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/06/24/what-windows-11-means-for-developers/ https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/06/24/what-w... Note that many System C# features now live in C# 7 and later versions, and were also in the basis of C++ Core Guidelines. Also note an example of the internal competition with the pleothora of GUIs being done now, Forms, WPF, WinUI, MAUI, Blazor, React Native for Windows. Maybe if all divisions worked more together in Longhorn, the project would actually happened and Vista wouldn't have been needed, nor the strong emphasis on COM that it started.
  - mastax 5y ago
    Thanks for the context. It's very frustrating as a .NET developer that infighting set back .NET GUI development by 10 years. There's still no supported way to use DirectX from .NET. All the new GUI tech is moving in the right direction but is unfinished to the point that still only WPF and WinForms can meet my requirements. I really wanted to ditch WPF since the DirectX 11 -> DirectX 9 (WPF) interop is so hacky.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Unfortunately we are better off with community efforts, the DirectX team is really deep into C++ mindset and nothing else, no wonder it belongs to WinDev side. https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsAppSDK/issues/14#issuecomment-878453102 https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsAppSDK/issues/14#issueco...
sterlind 5y ago
what was wrong with Midori? I wasn't on the team but I played around with it, and thought that the architecture was absolutely beautiful. It's a tragedy that it wasn't open-source. I understand that there wasn't much appetite towards "replacing Windows" when we were losing ground fast to mobile, but it's a loss to the academic community at least.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Politcal feuds if you read between the lines of statements like "The project included novel “cultural” approaches too, being 100% developers and very code-focused, looking more like the Microsoft of today and hopefully tomorrow, than it did the Microsoft of 8 years ago when the project began.". Joe Duffy has similar remarks on his posts and post morten sessions done about the project.
  - chem83 5y ago
    Some extra insight here: https://twitter.com/funcOfJoe/status/1121963970661715968 https://twitter.com/funcOfJoe/status/1121963970661715968