Software that solves an actual problem has the tendency to stick around, no matter how much time elapsed.

Just remember, cobol is still in active use, today

I was going to ask about Win32. I haven't had to do it in a while, but if I had to write a desktop app in windows, that would be what I would reach for. It's still supported... is their any indication that it won't be for many years to come?

Also, it looks better, in my humble opinion. It's probably lacking features that I'm uninterested in.

Still works fine. High DPI stuff is a dick but that’s about it.

Eh, high dpi has always been a mess given the hacks adobe and windows assumed in the past.

I implemented a WPF control to look like a winform control and ran into a issue of the vintage control looking perfect at an odd (9px by 9px) native pixel size that gets distorted by WPF when rendered at different scaling.

Visual Studio's + sign expanders have had this bug for years that was finally fixed by changing to a chevron shape in 2022. Clearly this problem bugged someone on the dev team hence the fix. =)

MFC support is still in the latest Visual Studio, and it looks like ATL as well.

I was surprised to see ATL/MFC received security updates such as Spectre mitigation. So there is still some support for these 30 year old components.

That’s only because half office hangs off it. If it didn’t they wouldn’t have just left it.

Which so much better tooling than XAML C++ with C++/WinRT, it is a tragedy.

It’s in there because it’s a cockroach. It is throughly abandoned though, frozen in time.

You can observe this looking at the state of old outlook.

The state is wonderful, versus the new kind of Electron junk.