Talk about a back-handed compliment!
WinForms is the original and best... and I think the only widget kit from it's generation still around and maintained
WinForms is the original and best... and I think the only widget kit from it's generation still around and maintained
The part that you are referencing was part of the CLR (nee COM+) organization. This native compilation didn't happen for a couple of reasons:
1. Serviceability - the idea was that we wanted to be able to roll out new assemblies with fixes (remember this was in the "oh shit" phase of security awareness at MS)
2. Optimizations - there was an idea that you wanted different JIT to happen based on end machine architecture, server vs client, etc.
3. Size - at this point the size of the resulting binaries (for distribution) was still a concern. At that point it seemed better to have fat frameworks updated by Windows Update, and smaller apps that depended on that.
Many of these reasons seems less compelling now. MS was often a bubble in those days. I left in 2012 but it seems better now and it shows in their products.
I was there during the early days from the customer side, my employer was one of the selected MSFT Partners to get access to the pre-betas as a way to provide early feedback and be in the position to announce .NET based products on .NET 1.0 launch day.
Still remember all the .NET early docs full of red paragraphs, WIP sections or big warnings that some areas were still in the process of being fully defined and subject to change.
I always love to hear these stories.