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surajrmaltoday at 2:12 PM1 replyview on HN

I'm not sure new windows APIs use COM as people remember it. Nowadays they are written against WinRT, which is arguably an evolution of COM.


Replies

pjmlptoday at 2:17 PM

Not at all, the WinRT APIs that exist, which is indeed one additional interface (IInspectable), .NET metadata instead of type libraries, application identity, is a minority constrained to WinAppSDK and WinUI 3.0, that barely anyone uses other than Microsoft employees on the Windows team.

If not using WinUI 3.0, or Windows ML with CoPilot+, there is no reason to submit oneself to the pain of using CsWinRT or C++/WinRT bindings with lesser tooling than their UWP counterparts.

The large majority of new APIs, since Vista are based on traditional COM, with the biggest exception being UMDF that in version 2.0 rolled back its COM API from version 1.0, back to a C based one.