From: Randall Parker 

Can Rich or someone else tell us what the likely future is for various
Win32 APIs? My guess is that .NET will have fewer calls than Win32 but that
all (or at least 99% of them) of the Win32 calls will continue to be there.
I can't imagine an OS vendor pulling large numbers of calls out of an OS.

Elsewhere I'm arguing that there is no way MS is going to remove API calls
from the next version of Windows - at least not a large number. But the
advocates of the idea that Win32 APis are going to get yanked in mass
numbers are quoting these pages:


     http://msdn.microsoft.com/chats/vstudio/vstudio_121802.asp

     Q: Can you clarify the distiction between the WinForm API and the
future
porting of Win32 to run as a managed API?

     A: The "Windows Forms" API is essentially a set of interfaces that
expose the existing Win32 functionality via managed code. In the future,
you will see the API for developing applications on Windows will evolve
into a fully managed API.


Here is a press release regarding some of Microsoft's plans for Longhorn:

     http://www.develop4.net/news.html

     First, the software giant aims to slash the number of API calls in the
Win32 API set from more than 70,000 to fewer than 10,000 to help developers
better exploit the next-generation Windows shell, user interface
(code-named Aero) and .Net framework components in Longhorn, according to
sources familiar with the Longhorn plans.

     "Win32 has like 76,000 APIs, and they're taking it down to 8,000 with
Longhorn technology," said one source familiar with the plans.

     ...

     Also in Longhorn, Microsoft plans to integrate a replacement for the
Windows graphics device interface (GDI), code-named Avalon...



According to Eric Rudder, Senior Vice President of Developer and Platform
Evangelism at Microsoft (and reiterated by Thomas Scheidegger, Microsoft's
.NET MVP):

     http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/ericr/02-11vslive.asp

     You'll see new UI tools and designers to take advantage of the new
presentation system of "Longhorn." We'll leverage some new
storage features of "Longhorn." And really if you think about
where we're going with "Longhorn" it's really the next evolution
of the Windows platform API. So you can think about Win 16 to Win 32 to
really a managed platform where all the interfaces in Windows are managed.

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