Every time I see something about windows7 coming up, I feel a little sad. 7 imo was the last good windows ms came up with. I remember upgrading to it was something worth bragging to your friends in school. There was so much excitement around it. After 7, something felt, broken, new features felt unnecessary, things got more user hostile, the magic, it was just gone!
So while it was indeed a great version of Windows, having COM as the new way of shipping Windows APIs wasn't that welcoming, it is kind of incredible how for such a critical technology on Windows development, Microsoft keeps shipping cluncky frameworks to write and consume COM.
There was even the famous Hilo sample that was praising this as the way forward,
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/announcing-hilo/
https://github.com/microsoftarchive/msdn-code-gallery-micros...