I hope you updated all that to D2D. I was always deeply offended you forced office to move with Universal but had the gall to link GDI in and keep using it for your own stuff :).
That part comes next ;) Getting all of the rendering calls isolated to one component was a pretty big task in itself, and just isolating and de-duplicating them improved our rendering perf by something like 30%
Your efforts are noticeable and appreciated! It was always a mystery to me why the Windows console was stuck in time from the NT days, and your work sends a signal to all those doing sysadmin and programming work that Microsoft is supporting these use cases in Windows.
Ouch. This sounds terrible. I can see how refactoring a bowl of spaghetti like that took a lot of time. I respect you for sticking with it and not throwing in the towel.
Refactoring spaghetti would have been a breeze compared to the Console.
What stands as a HUGE testament to the Console team's effort, however, is the fact that, while re-engineering what was truly a nightmare code-base, apart from a few newly-introduced bugs (most of which were caught before release), the rapidly improving Console didn't break any any existing command-line apps or users' workflows.
The engineering team deserve a medal for pulling this off, quite frankly!
After a LOT of refactoring it's finally in a state that's really quite managable, and much more modernized.