Short history of all Windows UI frameworks and libraries

The official way to create user interfaces for the Windows operating system changed quite a lot of times during the last years. Microsoft created and (partially or fully) abadoned a lot of APIs which where intended to replace the respective previous ones. They changed names and ways how it’s supposed to be done a few times, and left a lof of developers confused. Here is a small historical overview.
↫ Nikolaus Gebhardt

If you’re ever wondering how we ended up at a situation where, on the desktop and in Explorer, context menus have their own context menus, well, this is why.