Win7 Metro also had ALL CAPS in a few places, which is where I believe this was copied from since it was used there on the top of the screen, so where the menu bar is in a desktop app. The MSDN blog post that announced it also specifically cited Zune: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/a-design-with-al.... That said I have no idea why they actually did this, only that it was not a popular decision among devs working on VS at the time - so much so that they snuck in that registry key that'd let you disable it (I bet the management really appreciated that when they had to back out after overwhelmingly negative feedback). The monochrome icons were also unpopular on the team, but there was little they could do about that one.

I'm the person who wrote this StackOverflow answer: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7416826/how-does-windows...

You might note that I had to forcibly reiterate that, no, Win8 apps don't have to be written in HTML/JS, because people genuinely got that impression from what they saw at BUILD back then. It's not that the "COM 2.0" and the "this also works on .NET" parts were completely missing, but they (.NET especially!) were de-emphasized to the point where it genuinely created confusion and alarm among the developers. And, ss far as I can tell, this was entirely Sinofsky's idea, and one that he still refuses to admit was an epic failure.

And for US and/or Israel to prevent it, they would have to occupy the correspondingly wide strip of Iranian coast. At which point we're talking about a massive ground invasion (and of course then the same artillery would be firing at those troops, so you can't really just stop there either).

Buy time to do what?

So it would still be a theocracy, same as before, but now also run by people who are conditioned to believe that more violence is always a solution to any problem.

If you're going to play the utilitarian card, you need to actually compare the numbers.

How many kids does Iran government execute every year?

How many kids have died in that one single school that was hit by US? How many more of that will happen if the war continues?

That's precisely why you don't just start wars to show the world that your dick is still bigger than everybody else's.

Even at $200 monthly subscription that kind of stuff burns through tokens at a rate where it's very difficult to believe that they are even breaking even, never mind profit.

It's also unclear whether tight coupling is actually a problem when you can refactor this fast.

That was at least in part due to the aforementioned obsession with iPad and generally mobile. One thing that Sinofsky is not wrong about in his post is that the classic Win32 app model is not conductive to good battery life - there's very little there to properly handle things like automatic background suspension or low-power push notifications. WinRT was designed with that in mind, but that would make no difference if the apps would just ignore it, hence the heavy-handed push for WinRT apps only (AFAIR it wasn't restricted to Store, although you had to jump through some "developer mode" hoops to deploy apps directly).

With WinForms, we actually got something that was convenient without shackling you. And the whole cross-language story was great, too, especially around .NET 2.0 - with C++/CLI you could very easily wrap any random native code C or C++ library for consumption from .NET, with end-to-end integration in the build system, IDE etc.

I was in DevDiv during his great WinRT push and the overall feeling I remember was that the guys in Windows had zero clue as to what the devs actually wanted, but were hell bent on scorching all the ground that wasn't theirs. My team actually did some prototyping for Python/WinRT support, and we had it working to the point of the visual WPF designer in Visual Studio even. Unlike JS, it was full fledged - you could use anything in WinRT same as C#, extend classes etc, while JS limited you to a "consumer" surface of the API. That prototype was killed because Windows (i.e. at the time = Sinofsky) said they didn't think developers cared about anything but JS so they didn't need another high level language.

It was also when Windows was aggressively pushing their Metro styling on everything in the company, sometimes to ridiculous lengths - e.g. Visual Studio at the time "aligned" with Metro by, I kid you not, making the main menu bar ALL UPPER CASE so that it looked like Metro tabs! You can still see the blog posts announcing this "feature" when it shipped in the first public beta of VS 2012, and the comments on them.

And then there was Windows RT (not to be confused with WinRT, because Microsoft product naming!). Aka the Windows-on-ARM that ditched decades of backwards compatibility because Sinofsky decided that rebooting the ecosystem is the only way to compete with iPad or whatever. What actually happened was that the users went WTF because none of their native apps - which, contrary to his take, were very much alive and kicking! - worked there, and devs went WTF because they were told that they'd need to rewrite everything yet again in some new thing that was kinda sorta but not quite like WPF, because Windows just hated .NET that much and couldn't accept that the devs liked it over their stuff. So the app store was a barren waste, and without apps there would be no users.

Some of the technical details in there are plain wrong, too. For instance, .NET 3.0 actually shipped in Vista, contrary to his claim that it was shipped in Win7 (and that it was the first time .NET shipped in consumer Windows - in fact, that would be .NET 1.1 shipping in WinXP SP1).

It's just that it's a piece of tech from back when Microsoft corporate dominance on the desktop was at its peak, and many large companies bought into the then-current tech stack, including VB6. So now Microsoft is stuck maintaining it because those are the customers that bring consistent revenue.