Microsoft’s Windows operating system is built upon years and years of code that is continuously rolled forward to maintain interoperability between platforms. But, after doing this for many years, there comes a time when you must go back and re-work the code to modernize it and make Windows a more streamlined operating system.
Thanks to a new job posting, Microsoft is doing exactly that and it’s not a trivial task. The post says that the application will be working in top-level UI surfaces that “are so ubiquitous that even your Mom will understand what you work on”. Another way of saying this is that this role will be responsible for working on the visual interface of Windows that you are likely looking at right now as your read this post.
The job posting goes on to say:
As a developer on the team you will be responsible for leading the creation of high-quality architecture, design, and implementation of top-level Windows UI surfaces. You will collaboratively make product decisions on how best to deliver on our customer promises and scenarios. You will make engineering decisions to either iterate on legacy UI components or to replace/refactor longstanding pieces of code with new code in new frameworks (such as XAML) to accelerate development. You will figure out how to make UI testable and measurable to allow more agile iteration while maintaining high self-host quality.
We added the emphasis above but it clearly shows that Microsoft"s in the process of either replacing legacy Win32 code or will build-upon it, when necessary, to accelerate development of Windows.
It shouldn’t be a big surprise that Microsoft is working on updating the legacy code but what’s notable here is the replacement of this code with new frameworks. If and when this is implemented successfully, it will help to increase the speed at which Microsoft can update its OS at the core level, which is something that is likely slowing down its rapid release cycle at this time.
Is this work part of Windows 9, it would seem likely, but we won"t know until that platform launches sometime in 2015.