The Microsoft C standard library implementation also takes this approach - C++ implementation with C exports, for the reasons called out by the sibling comments.
But it's for people running 7 and up, for one year. The 70% of Chinese users on XP aren't going to see the benefit of this.
(Why didn't Microsoft make it for XP too? They want to squeeze that last sale out of people. They don't realize the greater threat is people leaving their platform entirely.)
Even Google doesn't support new versions of Chrome on XP anymore. There is just a point where the OS is outdated.
Not many people run XP in China anymore. Maybe some netcafes with pirated versions that they don't want to upgrade. Its really been a while since I've seen anyone run XP in Beijing.
Interestingly enough, it wasn't $future_version, but version 1.0, that didn't even support .NET and was scriptable only through JS. Silverlight is still scriptable through JS to this day. Given that Silverlight already supports a hybrid model I can image we could expect that to continue, with HTML as a possible alternative UI langauge to XAML.
FolderShare was acquired. I don't know if Microsoft has done a terrible lot with the program since the acquisition to be able to claim the success as its own.
