On: Kernighan and Pike were right: Do one thing, and d...

[noelwelsh]

Wow, I didn't realise. I haven't paid attention to Windows APIs for a long time. I really thought it would have died a long time ago.

[pjmlp → noelwelsh]

That is what people outside Windows keep thinking.

After WinDev managed to botch Longhorn efforts, its .NET ideas were redone in COM for Vista, and it has been like that ever since.

WinRT/UAP/UWP, is basically COM with a new base interface IInspectable, .NET metadata instead of TLB files, and app boxing.

And it is the foundation of WinAppSDK, whose goal is to port UWP subsystem into plain Win32, although their current execution leaves a lot to be desired.

[dist-epoch → noelwelsh]

The core of COM is about allowing binary code to be used from any language through a standardized interface.

As pjmlp mentioned, this part was very successful and all new Windows APIs are based on it.

The COM which failed and which you are thinking about was related to OLE and the idea of embedding Excel sheets inside Photoshop drawings, ...

[abwizz → dist-epoch]

> the idea of embedding Excel sheets inside Photoshop drawings, ...

that's still a thing isn't it?

[zweifuss → abwizz]

Microsoft ported OLE 1 to Macintosh, but never OLE Version 2, because Apple guidelines forbid programes to start other programs. Because of that Photoshop had a not supported version of OLE. I don't know if it is still available in up to date Photoshop.

On Windows it works both ways with OLE 2.