What's Wrong with Win32?

By most measures, Microsoft’s 32-bit API for Windows, popularly known as Win32, has been tremendously successful. Microsoft ships hundreds of millions of copies of Windows each year and millions of corporate and commercial developers build Win32-based applications. But as successful as it has been, Microsoft believes that Win32 faces some technical hurdles that require a new architecture and new API based on the .NET Framework.

Some of the problems faced by developers using the Win32 API include the following:

Age. The Win32 API is itself an extension of the earlier Win16 API, which dates back to 1985 and the introduction of Windows 1.0. Win32 does not embody recent principles of good API design, such as object-oriented development.

C-based. At the time the Win32 API was developed, virtually all application development was done using the C programming language. But today, many programming languages are used, including Visual Basic (VB), C++, and C#. Tool vendors are forced to write extra code on top of the C-based Win32 APIs before developers using those other languages can access new features.