Windows Development, per opposition to DevDiv, Developer Division.
Two quite common names in the Microsoft ecosystem.
As a former MS employee some time ago I don't think I ever heard "windev". It was always referred to as "Windows". Though there were a lot of different groups within that, so sometimes you'd hear an initialism for a specific team. For example during some of my time there was a big organizational split between "core" and more UI oriented teams.
Here is an example in the press, with an email from Somasegar, leader of developer division in the past.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-splits-up-its-xaml-t...
I was an employee in Windows on the date of that email. I left a few months later. Note that the email itself doesn't say "windev". It says "Windows" a bunch of times.
If I'm stretching this "windev" thing, the domain for a lot of employee accounts (including mine) was NTDEV, that had a longer history afaik, nobody called an org that..
The journalist writes it though, as do many other folks.
I didn't come up with this definition myself.
If I am not mistaken, I can probably even dig some Sinosfky references using it.
I think it was sort of externally derived based on "DevDiv", but as another former MS employee - albeit from DevDiv - I can confirm that "WinDev" is not something that was routinely used inside the company the way "DevDiv" is. Usually it's just "Windows", or "Windows org" if the context is ambiguous.
For a moment there I thought you were referring to this trademark: https://pcsoft.fr/windev/index.html Which was known at a time for having young women in light clothing in their marketing material.
aha, that's the windev that comes to mind too. I didn't know they were actually a french company, wild that they're still around... their ads were plastered everywere in the 2000s.
Apparently they have a programming language for which you can "one-click-switch" between english and french for the keywords??? https://pcsoft.fr/windev/ebook/56/