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If you think Microsoft would do this you have no appreciation for their history of backwards compatability. You should read Raymond Chen's blog. He's an old timer at MS and has oodles of entries talking about various things Microsoft has done to ensure backwards compatibility. Good God, man, they've halted service packs because a game wouldn't run on it, 16-bit DOS applications are still fully supported, and - get this - they've mucked with the actual Windows source code to fix a bug in popular programs. Not only that, but Office will open old school file formats from programs that are no longer even sold, Excel 2003 maintains keyboard shortcuts/behaviors of Lotus 1-2-3... and you really think MS would now just do a complete 180 and not have their own software work with their own older software? I think you are dead wrong.

Anywho, I'm not surprised how the first feature they pimped was Lotus 1-2-3 support, as Lotus 1-2-3 was the "killer app" of the day. In fact, there are bugs in Excel that were put their purposely to allow for true Lotus 1-2-3 integration.

Oh-- and let's not forget how you restart a PC (not that you have to do it much)! Click "start." Select "shut down." Now select "restart." Yeah, I would have found that.

Microsoft always makes such a big deal about backwards compatibility, and introducing ugly hacks to accomodate misbehaved programs. And on the other hand, they drop 16-bit support. I wouldn't mind if they used an emulator to run the stuff and the performance on 16-bit programs was 20x lower.

Microsoft always makes such a big deal about backwards compatibility, and introducing ugly hacks to accomodate misbehaved programs. And on the other hand, they drop 16-bit support. I wouldn't mind if they used an emulator to run the stuff and the performance on 16-bit programs was 20x lower.

In my capacity as a web developer, here are the software packages that I feel you should have a firm understanding of:

1. XHTML - not just 'HTML', XHTML has a few changes that you should get used to (such as closing all tags, even <img src="..."/> and <br/> tags, and all tags being lowercase). For the upcoming specifications, such as XHTML 2.0, which will be very different (you can apply an href="..." property to ANY object, instead of having to wrap it in an <a href=..."> tag), it never hurts to be prepared.
2. CSS3 - May as well read up now, it's going to be relevant in not too long.
3. Photoshop - Use The GIMP if you must, but I find Photoshop generally does what I need it to with less hassle.
4. PHP, ASP, Coldfusion, and J2EE - You don't have to learn how to program in each one, but learn about these solutions, if for no other reason than to make compelling arguments against them if the bosses ever ask you about them (or worse, fail to ask you about them)
5. Apache and IIS - for the same reasons as listed above; also, a lot of things in Apache (mod_rewrite, for example) can help you solve problems down the road. Good things to know.
6. A good editor. I use ViM myself, but what you use is up to you. What you'll want is syntax highlighting, auto-indenting, and a powerful (preferably regex) search/replace. Learn to use your editor and you will save hours of work with seconds of typing.

And now for some soft skills. First, you'll need to learn to give effective presentations. You could use Powerpoint for this, or Keynote or Impress or just print them on transparencies and put them on an overhead projector. How you do it is up to you. Will you ever need to give presentations? Not really, but effective presentations require a lot of soft skills - eye contact, graphic design, pacing, speech tones, body language - that to be skilled in presentations in general means to be skilled in a lot of other areas.

You should also familiarize yourself with colour. Learn about Pantone, just so that you know about it. Learn how colours play off each other, which colors look good on which backgrounds. Learn about bordering, whitespace, balance, and form. Consider the Pantone Guide to Communicating with Color - out of 61 reader reviews, it got 4.5/5 stars, and is a good place to start.

Learn about logos. How companies make logos, and why. What goes into making a logo, subconscious suggestions from logos (there's a reason Playboy picked a bunny for their logo, and it's not obvious). This will help in your graphic design and page layout.

Learn about accessibility and colour-blindness.

I'm probably missing a ton of important stuff, but if you do it right and are willing to learn (and posting on slashdot seems to imply that), you'll probably learn what you need to know as you go. If not, just come back and post another Ask Slashdot.

In the default .NET installation, yes - it favors IE. But to make the blanket statement that all of the built in controls won't work properly in other browsers is nothing but FUD.

To complain that Microsoft made a new development framework defaulted for their browser, but at the same time included a vast amount of flexibility to modify it as you see fit is also nonsensical.

There are plenty of tutorials and samples for configuring the .NET engine to render the same in all modern browsers, and it's hardly as difficult as you make it out to be. I agree -- if you can't figure out how to include a BrowserCaps block in machine. or web.config to change the rendering mode, ASP.NET is probably not for you. Personally, I've had very little difficulty writing apps that work identically in all of the major modern browsers.

The only included controls that I have experienced trouble with are the built-in validation controls - though I admitedly avoid most of the built in ones. There are much improved alternatives to the built in validation controls -- a few of which are completely free and/or open source. You can of course, easily write your own as well.

As far as the other controls go, there are equally as many alternatives that are cross-browser compatible with little or no effort. A few minutes in ASP.NET's Control Gallery will get you started. And again, you can always write your own.

I'm no Microsoft Apologist(R) for sure (owning 5 Macs to my two PCs and lots of Apple stock), but to say that ASP.NET is crap because it doesn't work right in non-IE browsers is ridiculous. In my opinion, ASP.NET is one of the few things that Microsoft has got mostly right.

In regards to portability, look towards Mono.

That doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement (it's still officially at version 1.1 after all). I would love to see out of the box browser compatiblity and VisualStudio.NETs HTML handling is atrocious -- constantly mangling my hand-formatted code when switching into design mode. I anxiously await a production release of v2.0 where it is rumored that these items, among others, have been addressed :)

Because, when Microsoft break apps with a new release (be it a service pack, or new version), who do you think is going to be blamed for that by the consumers?

Let's say that Bob uses Stamp Collector Deluxe on his Windows 98 box. Bob decides to upgrade to XP, but unknown to him, Stamp Collector Deluxe relies on some undocumented feature of Windows 98, which does not work on XP. The result: Stamp Collector Deluxe does not work anymore, and Bob blames Microsoft, because it used to run fine on 98.

When you decide on being the most popular OS in the world, compatibility is everything, and Raymond Chen, the person the grandparent poster was referring to knows this better that most of us combined.

Because, when Microsoft break apps with a new release (be it a service pack, or new version), who do you think is going to be blamed for that by the consumers?

Let's say that Bob uses Stamp Collector Deluxe on his Windows 98 box. Bob decides to upgrade to XP, but unknown to him, Stamp Collector Deluxe relies on some undocumented feature of Windows 98, which does not work on XP. The result: Stamp Collector Deluxe does not work anymore, and Bob blames Microsoft, because it used to run fine on 98.

When you decide on being the most popular OS in the world, compatibility is everything, and Raymond Chen, the person the grandparent poster was referring to knows this better that most of us combined.

See a nice explanation here, and see why it probably never gonna be done here (just check out some of the comments there... sad...)

oh well...

I've been reading The Old New Thing for a few months now. It's a blog written by a guy at Microsoft (I don't know what department), and among the things he writes about is why windows sometimes works in unexpected ways.

Yeah, Windows has lots of bugs. But some of those bugs can't be fixed, because certain major programs rely on those bugs . When you fix the bugs, you break the programs. Almost every bug fix windows gets these days is accompanied by a program breaking. MS has to try and decide whether enough users are affected by the bug to make the fix worthwhile.

MS has been pussyfooting it about breaking programs in the past, and I'm glad MS finally bit the bullet with SP2 and broke all those programs in the name of security. It was high time. Of course, it means I have to keep a second PC around for some older games, but hey, that's life.

This was especially evil timing, as less that 24 hours ago Rick Brewster had blogged about needing a mirror

Hehe! atleast one must thank Mr Peter Torr

Check this blog post
http://weblogs.asp.net/ptorr/archive/2004/12/20/32 7511.aspx#327756

LOL!! His article is actually getting everyone convert to FireFox. I think he has done a great service to OSS community with that article!!
LOL!!

ASP.net is free. Not only is there a mono implementation but you can also install it on windows XP, windows 2000, and server 2003. Hell there's even a free and open source web server written by microsoft if you don't want to run IIS. And in 3 years, there's only been 3 security advisories. Can you say the same about php? I see over 1000 security advisories listed on secunia.org security list. Thats some high quality stuff.

Oh please. I didn't say "Windows is backwards compatible with every single app".

I said that Microsoft tries hard to keep backwards-compatibility.

But don't take my word for it, I don't work for them. Read Raymond Chen's various blog articles on the subject. He is one of the poor souls at MS who worked his butt off to try and keep backwards-compatibility.

Oh please. I didn't say "Windows is backwards compatible with every single app".

I said that Microsoft tries hard to keep backwards-compatibility.

But don't take my word for it, I don't work for them. Read Raymond Chen's various blog articles on the subject. He is one of the poor souls at MS who worked his butt off to try and keep backwards-compatibility.

That's reserved for Klingon software.

"What is this talk of 'release'? Klingons do not make software 'releases'. Our software escapes, leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake!"

From: here

You can read why you get a warning on 2000, but don't on XP.. straight from the horse's mouth.

In Windows XP, it still gets upset but it now keeps its mouth shut. You're now on your honor not to rip out your USB drive before waiting two seconds for all I/O to flush, not to unplug your printer while a job is printing, etc. If you do, then your drive gets corrupted / print job is lost / etc. and you're on your own.

C:\Program Files\NTDDK\4074\bin\win64\x86\amd64>cl
Microsoft (R) C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 14.00.31008.15 for AMD64
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

usage: cl [ option... ] filename... [ /link linkoption... ]

http://weblogs.asp.net/duncanma/archive/2004/03/ 02/82953.aspx

Paul Vick on two new operators in VB Whidbey

actually, judging from the numerous "warning to users of [x] - [y] doesnt compile under new kernel" posts everytime news of a new kernel gets posted to /., it seems to me that ms's backwards compatibility record is alot better than linux's

There is an interesting entry in Robert Hensing's Incident Response blog about using passphrases to avoid using the NTLM hash. He is a microsoftie but what he says makes sense. I've since switched to using passphrases over 14 characters and so far have not be able to crack them with rainbow tables.

if your interested in a rainbow table demo one can be found here

Just because Diebold has said they are committed to delivering votes to George Bush and they make e-voting hardware without an auditing system that a monkey can hack is no reason to suspect everything is less then on the up and up.

The useless crap can be removed, UNLESS you're talking about IE which is a problem because it is bolted to the OS which makes the security problems in IE operating system holes.

Useless, too, is a matter of opinion. And seeing as how ~90% of the market still uses IE, I'd say their opinion overwhelms yours. All OS's have dependencies. And, quite frankly, removing IE and keeping the Windows kernel is not difficult. It's keeping everything that's dependent on IE that's a problem - but I suppose that's why they're called dependencies. (What? *nix has those too? I never knew...)

The crashes can usually be mitigated by rebooting the system. Remember, Microsoft has issued a couple of service packs to deal with problems such as that. Until you get the service pack that fixes the crash bug you're experiencing, you don't have much in the way of options, do you?

If you're talking an OS crash...well, then, obviously. It's kind of hard to continue when the kernel has BSOD or a kernel panic. Almost all other crashes can be revived without rebooting. MS releases Service Packs to fix the crash (and add features), not the reboot.

What that actually means is that you've never triggered any of the crash bugs that Microsoft has admitted to. If you don't use a sub-system that has a crash bug in it, is it because you know how to use Windows or because you are avoiding those bugs?

What it usually means is that those crash bugs are so esoteric and out of the mainstream that your chances of hitting one is about 1 in a billion. That's why they escaped MS's testing in the first place. ASP.NET 2.0 currently has 102,000 test cases testing 505,000 scenarios. And it's still in Beta 1 - and isn't a part of the OS. And will be given out for free.

The problem with Windows is that it isn't designed for easy diagnostics. It is easier to just reboot it than to actually find the problem.

Perhaps you don't find it easy to daignose problems. So, if you think it's easier, then go ahead and reboot. Some of us don't like to reboot Windows or *nix, so you can leave it to us to figure out how to do it without rebooting. Welcome to the world of choice...hope you enjoy your stay.

With Linux, the diagnostic process is easy.

Nice of you to back up that claim.

Go ahead. Show that I'm wrong. What would you do if you were getting a blue screen on startup with a message about the software hive?

1. Boot to the aptly named Last Known Good Confinguration.
2. Run Recovery Console chkdsk - since it's usually a corrupt file.
3. Replace from my ERD, or the Repair folder.
4. Copy a software hive from another system.
etc., etc.

And, of course, that's not a problem you reboot to cure. Unless Windows automagically replaces the corrupt file with the LKG copy. Which, come to think of it, I think it does. Yeah - in that case, rebooting is easier than step 1. OMG, MS saved me a keystroke!

If you're point was that the registry is a binary file and can't be fixed with a text editor...well, duh. So are a lot of files in *nix. And it's quite difficult to fix a corrupt text file with a text editor as well.

http://weblogs.asp.net/michael_howard/archive/2004 /10/18/244181.aspx

The same person tells us that Apache sucks when compared with IIS.

No, Larry Osterman did not tell you that.

Larry Osterman didn't even tell you that IE wins compares to the mass suckitude of other browsers such as Mozilla or Opera when fed malformed HTML.

Specifically, Michael Howard wrote the blog article about Apache vs. IIS

The person who wrote the article about IE being much better - in terms of NOT crashing - than other browsers is Michal Zalewski, who doesn't even work at Microsoft.

But hey, if you want to claim that Microsoft are the people making all this stuff up, and jump up and down, then go ahead. But please, don't be surprised if when people point out that it's not Microsoft doing it, you look like a fool.

The same person tells us that Apache sucks when compared with IIS. Does this mean we've all been wrong about Microsoft products? If we take Microsofts word for it we have indeed and should seriously consider switching back to IIS. After all, [THE FOLLOWING IS SARCASM:] this conclusively proves that IIS is far superior to the Linux Apache Mysql Perl/Python/Php system.

The same person tells us that Apache sucks when compared with IIS. Does this mean we've all been wrong about Microsoft products? If we take Microsofts word for it we have indeed and should seriously consider switching back to IIS. After all, [THE FOLLOWING IS SARCASM:] this conclusively proves that IIS is far superior to the Linux Apache Mysql Perl/Python/Php system.

Your first instinct would be wrong, at least when it comes to it being built by a separate team. The fact is, as hard to believe at it is, for the past year Microsoft has put in place for every product systematic development techniques that directly target the security of an application (Threat Modeling, Secure coding techniques). Furthermore, this kind of test is standard within Microsoft (feed random inputs to all possible input locations). And once all the coding is done, the source still has to pass inspection through a security group within Microsoft! You can read about this stuff at the secure windows initiative.

And this shift is working. The trend per-product is a significant reduction in security vulnerabilities. That is not to say there aren't any, that would be impossible, but if you look at the vulnerability graph for, say, Win2k Server since it's release, and win2k3 Server since it's release, there is a significant drop in the amount of vulnerabilities that are coming in since the release of the product. Furthermore, a large part of the vulnerabilities are found from within the company. The same thing can be said for most products, including IE, IIS, Office, etc... We're getting there....

Now, go off and run as LUA, and nip this stupid spyware problem in the bud.

I'm glad modern linux distros automatically prompt for the root password when needed.

As far as I'm concerned (on the windows side), having to open the entire shell (explorer) as admin in order to run a certain program (e.g., control panel) seems like bad design.

I would at least like to see the commandline version of runas work as well as su does in linux.

This is not a big deal and will ultimately not succeed much, although I won't say it will totally fail.

Blogs are "pull". You have to choose to read them, and thanks to the wonders of RSS and newsreaders, the majority of most blog's readerships are recurring, from the smallest ones to the largest ones. That is to say, blog readers rapidly get to know the blog, where it is coming from, etc., and make decisions based on that.

If you try to start an astroturfing blog, you'd better have something more substantial than "rah rah rah, product X is great", or people won't subscribe or visit for long. Blogs as pure astroturfing degenerate into astroturfing web pages, and they just don't work.

If you have something more substantial, then you may acquire an audience, but it'll be mostly for the substantial stuff, not the rah rah rah. In fact I know of many blogs that are largely product advocacy blogs, or can be interpreted as such, but are still fascinating because of the beef they have. An example I've been working through lately: The Old New Thing, written by Raymond Chen, an important Windows developer and guru. On the one hand, you could read it as Windows advocacy (though I truly believe it is not intended as such directly), but there is so, so, so much meat there that it is irrelevant. My blog hasn't got a huge readership, but I know the ones I have are there for the substance, because I don't offer much else.

Like I said, astroturfing may not "fail", but it'll be just preaching to the choir, which isn't terribly effective. (The majority of political blogs already boil down to this, although they aren't necessarily intended to be astroturfing.) Nothing to worry about here, just corporate hipsters who aren't.

Wow, hey, you're right...

Configure was originally written by Raymond Chen...

Interesting....

The assumption that MS hires "idiots" is unfair to be sure. However, those in the know who have seen some of the colossal kludges in MS software, and recently almost all Windows users who have been impacted by the repeated, massive virus/worm attacks base their knowledge on the only thing they know about Microsoft--their products.

It has always appeared to me that MS hires top students from the very best schools.

That is true--unfortunately they have been known to hire them AWAY from the best schools too (ie. before they graduate). It doesn't matter if they are top five percentile students--if they have zero practical experience and are thrown into a situation beyond their capabilities the result can be less than ideal. Nonetheless, I think that by now MS has figured out how to select and place recent grads and students hired before graduation. I think the problem is now deeper than that.

Microsoft triumphed over other tech companies that were prominent in its early days because BillG learned it had to become a marketing company (the same reason Apple still exists today--Jobs knew that from the start and Gates is a very quick study). Other tech companies remained software companies--they toiled away to make their next killer app the best it could be and marketing was an afterthought.

At Microsoft, from 1980 on at least, has been a marketing comapny first, with software development second. The most important technology it markets was invented elsewhere and merely extended by Microsoft. Only in the company's latter life have they been truly serious about research. The long time "thinkers" are brilliant but historically little has come out of Microsoft's research that has been commercially successful given the potential funding power MS has had.

Therein lies the problem. The article is right--software isn't the root cause of the vast majority of failures (even when the failure is the direct result of a software bug). At Microsoft, software design is driven by marketing--time deadlines, customer requests for features, backwards compatibility/legacy support etc. The result is the house of cards we build our systems upon today.

That result is unavoidable without EXTREMELY skilled planning and throttling the pace of change. Unfortunately, The MS Ship sails where the winds take it, and the pace of change has been rapid and relentless until now. I once thought the problems with MS products were because too many drop-outs were running the show. After seeing this blog I can see what the development teams have had to cope with. They have to do the impossible and try to get it done before the deadline slips yet again and MS market cap slips a few million and BillG comes down to yell at them. In some cases you have to be brilliant just to survive at MS.

So anyways, I think software bus are the immediate cause of a lot of disasters, but the ROOT cause definitely is poor planning and project management that leads to unstable system development.

David is the primary author of FlexWiki. See his blog here.

I'm not totoally sold on Microsoft releasing this software as open source. It was written by David Ornstein, who works at Microsoft. While this tool is used internally at Microsoft, and I'm sure MS has the rights to the software too, I just don't think it's fair to David to classify this as a Microsoft Product.

BTW, David's weblog has a bunch of info on FlexWiki being posted to SourceForge.

I'm not totoally sold on Microsoft releasing this software as open source. It was written by David Ornstein, who works at Microsoft. While this tool is used internally at Microsoft, and I'm sure MS has the rights to the software too, I just don't think it's fair to David to classify this as a Microsoft Product.

BTW, David's weblog has a bunch of info on FlexWiki being posted to SourceForge.

Depending on what you chose during installation, Mozilla Suite has a Quick Launch icon in the tray (which some insist isn't called the tray). So does Firefox. What problems have you been having?

Which release of Windows? 98SE? ME? 2000? XP? Pro? Which servicepacks? With what patches?

The difference of course is that Microsoft had people like Raymond Chen who worked really, really hard to ensure that even the most obscure apps from umpteen years ago will still run on the latest version of Windows. I don't think you can point to a similar person, group, or organization that performs the same function for the Linux world. Whether or not the problem is real (and I think it is), the perception still exists that there's too many flavors of kernels/glibc/X server/whatever for vendors to support.

Unfortunately, MSDE has even more limits than Sybase's offering. Database size is limited to 2GB (real easy to reach) and contains a performance "governer" that will throttle the database engine's performance down when the number of concurrent connections exceeds eight. The actual number of concurrent connections is in excess of 32,000 but the engine will delay processing of I/O operations by a few milliseconds once the eight-concurrent connection limit has been reached.

More info here: http://weblogs.asp.net/gad/archive/2004/03/10/8720 0.aspx

You are missing the point. It makes it easy to convert from Microsoft SQL. Imagine thousands of independent software developers with an alternative to MSQL within easy reach. Their entire solution cost is now reduced, and they will sell better. At least the ones that take the chance.

I'm not sure so many independent software developers use MS SQL anyway, but there has for a while been a light version of MS SQL, MSDE, available for a free download, with most of the features of MS SQL but with similar restrictions to this Sybase offering.

But this appears to be targeted mostly at Linux developers so it's competition for PostgreSQL and the Abomination That Shall Not Be Named.

Here and here

(btw filtering is off by default)

I'm not saying MS has changed. I suspect they would wilfully break competing applications again if they judged it to be in their strategic interests. I don't think this is likely to happen at all often though - the raised level of scrutiny of MS means it would probably damage their customer and developer relations too much to be worthwhile. In general it is in their interests to maintain compatibility in order to retain customers, so that's what they do. Raymond Chen's blog The Old New Thing describes some of the stupid things applications do that he and others at MS have worked hard to keep working.

How else would you apply formatting to a document? Use a seperate buffer somewhere which holds character positions and their formatting?

See this site for a description of Word's internal format.

The essence being:

To make something Bold in WP, you (effectively) put Bold tags around the ends of it. In Word, that "run" of text is assigned the property "Bold". Actually, there is some indirection involved. Any run of text in Word with unique properties has a unique "property bag" assigned to it. The property bag is defined elsewhere in the document. If more runs of text are created that use the same format, the property bag is reused by reference - that is, the text is assigned the properties from bag #427, and somewhere else #427 is defined as bold, green, italic, etc. many different runs of text can refer to bag #427. Same for paragraphs, sections, and so on.

Does .Net support anchor tags?

http://www.asp.net/Default.aspx?tabindex=6&tabid=4 1

http://weblogs.asp.net/oldnewthing/archive/2003/08 /22/54679.aspx

The time zone map met a similar fate. The Indian government threatened to ban all Microsoft software from the country because we assigned a disputed region to Pakistan in the time zone map. (Any map that depicts an unfavorable border must bear a government stamp warning the end-user that the borders are incorrect. You can't stamp software.) We had to make a special version of Windows 95 for them.

Geopolitics is a very sensitive subject.

When Windows 3.0 came out, it started selling reasonably well. But what REALLY made it take off... was Word.

MS spent a billion dollars developing this patch. You think they don't do QA? Try looking at some past real-life examples of MS's extraordinary work.

MS spent a billion dollars developing this patch. You think they don't do QA? Try looking at some past real-life examples of MS's extraordinary work.

If you do Windows development or are just interested in some of the less obvious parts of the design of Windows (I'm the latter of these), The Old New Thing by Raymond Chen, who works for Microsoft, can be quite interesting. I mostly read just the "History" category, but others might find the "Code" category a good read as well.

There are quite a few "blogs" like this for different things. I remember reading one from a game developer some time ago, but I just stopped in for one article about general game design so the name and relevant company didn't stick in my head.

What is sad about Windows is how dependent it is on old technology (read: DOS)

Didn't you get the memo? DOS is dead. No, really this time. Windows NT is not DOS. Windows 2000 is Windows NT. Windows XP is Windows NT. Windows 2003 is Windows NT. Longhorn as well will be Windows NT. None of those have anything to do with DOS. Do you perhaps mean that Microsoft is still using DOS's command.com-style batch scripting and console interface? (cmd.exe is not DOS, but it emulates the interface passingly well.) That's set to change. Unless you're still using Windows 98 or ME (both of which have been end-of-lifed), you are no longer using DOS when you use Windows.