Hello nielk and welcome to the software industry. Microsoft (like any other major software vendor) has popular products and not so popular products. The popul

Hello nielk and welcome to the software industry. Microsoft (like any other major software vendor) has popular products and not so popular products. The popular ones survive, the unpopular ones don't die off, they end up still being supported just not in such a way. See MSFT's data access libaries, you ado, ado.net, entity framework, linq to sql and zeus knows what else now. You also have COM+. While it's an overcomplicated mess, and not as popular as it once was, it's still supported.