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This seems to be Microsoft's pattern. Make the APIs super low level and difficult to use, and build tooling on top to make it palatable. If you're doing simple stuff with Visual Studio, no problem, but as soon as you need to go deeper, good luck.

I think it's probably embedded in MS developer culture, leftover from the old days when the ulterior motive was to make Windows "easy to develop for, difficult to port away from".

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"If you're doing simple stuff with <insert high level tooling here>, no problem, but as soon as you need to go deeper, good luck."

This is how technology works in general. The deeper you go, the more abstractions you remove, the more difficult the job becomes.

Funny how for me this works completely the other way. Often people try to make things simple but in the process achieve exactly the opposite.

The point is that there was no effort to use meaningful abstractions and a coherent interface at the API level. The art of building a good product is finding the right level of abstraction for your audience, and I don't think 3rd party developers are well served here, although internal Windows performance engineers might be.

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