Programming Windows 5th edition

I was reading Programming Windows 5th edition

Is it fair to say that old-fashioned Win32 GUI programming with WndProc et al is really

convoluted and tedious by modern standards?

Isn't e.g. XAML, C# much simpler

Yes, there are better ways (and C is a horrible language for this, object orientation (or even class orientation) is built precisely to address the shortcomings of this. Android does basically the same thing, but it does look much nicer. It isn't that bad though, it's nicer than GTK.