Yes, his book Programming Windows was what took me from hopeless newbie to half decent self taught dev while I was still in my teens. Taught me loads that I still find use for to this day in my career (which involves a lot of Windows development).

I wonder if he gets nostalgic for that era of programming, and what stack he would choose if he was writing a Windows app today.

Sadly, that's an area that he doesn't want to talk about. Not really sure why, but it makes me wonder what the story behind that stance is, and if I can get him to talk about it.

Ah, that's unfortunate. My (wild, speculative) guess is that he's left that part of his career behind, after he was burned by the Windows team dropping the ball on native development multiple times.

After the winrt shitshow, he had given up windows and started on xamarin IIRC. Don’t know if wrote or is writing any books for that though.