The misterious case of Microsoft Money

2022Q2 and we are witnessing this crazy Train of frequent .NET releases.  Here are some perhaps relevant observations from the .NET long train older wagons.

What slow and long demise of .NET has to do with “Microsoft Money”? Indirectly there seems to be some connection. Selfishly speaking I am not that bothered. Simply because I was never an .NET lemming’.How?

MS Money 2006
MS Money 2006

I was able, for last 10+ years, to use HTA + Javascript, for almost any kind of WINTEL desktop software requiring UI. Good old mshta.exe makes this possible.

I think that all this “desktop HTML deviation”, that bothers.NET XAML lemming a lot, has started all the way back with “MS Money”. (Yes, yes, we are that old are we not?)

MS Money was almost 100% HTA, with some special ActiveX inside. All cleverly packaged in its own special host, very much like mshta.exe is today. That was before C#, “good” old WinForms and those were the hard times when MFC was considered the ultimate weapon for building WIN32 UI.

MS Money it seems got carried away. Much further than some Microsoft “managed platform” cough, architects, cough, liked. It was, and still is, very popular personal finances software with a large fan base in existence even today. Just to be mysteriously stopped?

If some of you think I had too much coffee (again) please see THIS. Especially this paragraph is very indicative (aka peculiar)

The interface will be familiar to anyone who has used Microsoft online – it looks like a web page and, given the program’s high degree of web integration, it can sometimes be difficult to tell if you are online or not.(!)

Saying that MS Money was ahead of its time will be an understatement. Who designed it? Who was on the team? In a way, Windows 8 and 10, with its HTML5 and JavaScript native support is a vindication of MS Money :)

Imagine Microsoft taking Ms Money out of the vault, re-releasing it as Windows8 App(1), and best of all, publishing the whole experience!

Does this has to do with MS Money legacy, please judge for yourself :)


(1) MS Money Wikipedia page claims this has actually happened, but I could not find it in the App Store. Just the MSN Money App?

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