C++/CLI is a necessary evil for operating on the CLR where are object lifetimes may be managed by the CLR and others follow standard C++ memory management. Ultimately it’s raison d'etre is to bridge native code to the CLR where P/Invoke or COM isn’t sufficient (lot of reasons that could be the case), so we deal with it.
C++/CX on the other hand only exists because Windows Runtime Components, while based on COM, is still a superset with new features that couldn’t be supported with C++98 and MSVC lacked the necessary C++11/17 features to implement it without needing compiler extensions.
Syntax highlighting and Intellisense being absent for MIDL 3 does indeed cause annoyance, however.
I guess those explanations were for the wider audience, I am perfectly fine with Microsoft's C++ dialects.
Actually my only complaint is the downgrade in tooling experience in name of some ISO purity that I don't care about, and other compiler vendors also do anyway.
For the time being I don't plan to adopt C++/WinRT until the tooling experience catches up with C++/CX.
