It came back with a vengeance in windows 10.

marcus_holmes · on Aug 9, 2016

really? I must have missed that... I stopped doing windows dev around Vista, because Vista.

Any details?

pjmlp · on Aug 9, 2016

The UWP programming model, which was introduced in Windows 8 as WinRT is COM.

Basically it is the original idea of .NET, which as called COM+ Runtime, before they decided to create the CLR.

WinRT is nothing more than COM+ Runtime, but with .NET metadata instead of COM type libraries.

Also since Vista, the majority of new Windows native APIs are COM based, not plain C like ones.