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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
