will applications written with this thing today ever run unaltered in 10+ years from now
I wonder the same usually, but less when it's a fairly large/established framework from MS, exactly because of having Win32/COM/... in mind; they are known for many things but less for suddenly dropping backwards compatibility. We have 10+ years old WPF code which still does the same as it used to do and builds with the last IDE as it did with the first we used it on, and it doesn't look like it's going to stop functioning soon. But yes, it's not quite 30+, so only time will tell..
I wonder the same usually, but less when it's a fairly large/established framework from MS, exactly because of having Win32/COM/... in mind; they are known for many things but less for suddenly dropping backwards compatibility. We have 10+ years old WPF code which still does the same as it used to do and builds with the last IDE as it did with the first we used it on, and it doesn't look like it's going to stop functioning soon. But yes, it's not quite 30+, so only time will tell..