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Sure. Let's see.

- Be sure UAC is off or on it's lowest setting. - The VB installation doesn't always work. Generally I google "vb6" and then the error message and I find a work around. You can get it to work...the answers are out there.
- When you select multiple controls on a form designer and try to move them, it goes really really really slow.
- Microsoft broke ADO's COM interface in Win7sp1 last year. http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/windowsgeneraldevelopmentissues/thread/3a4ce946-effa-4f77-98a6-34f11c6b5a13 When you try to run a program that's early bound to ADO and been compiled on a Win 7 machine, and then install it on an older 32bit OS, all your ADO calls will throw automation errors. We worked around it by compiling the VB code on XP machines before moving to our dev servers. There's no problem compiling on an older machine and running it on a new machine though. This is only a problem if you're early bound to ADO though.
- Form designers occasionally get weird visual artifacts on them when selecting controls by clicking and dragging the mouse.
- Be sure to google for the vb6 scroll wheel fix. It's almost intolerable to use without the scroll wheel.
- You might have some issues if your program accesses certain portions of your registry or file system. Win 7 restricts some areas. Might be less of a problem with UAC off. I can't remember the specific areas though. The root of the C drive is off limits now I think.
- Compiling a COM object will automatically register it to the location you compiled it. This might not be possible with UAC on. Haven't tried it with UAC on, but regsvr32.exe won't run properly with UAC on, so I'm assuming VB can't register anything either.

That's about all I can think of off hand.

NEW YORK - Oct. 12, 2010 - The third annual Microsoft Open House kicked off yesterday with Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer’s presentation of Windows Phone 7 as the centerpiece of the company’s holiday lineup of consumer products.

WP7 has fewer enterprise features than iPhone or WinMo. The only advantage WP7 might have over iPhone is it has Mobile Office but those versions are so crippled that most enterprises don't consider them a plus. As for desktops, enterprises don't have to migrate to Win 8 at all. They skipped Vista. Many of those that adopted Win 7 are not going to the hassle of adopting Win 8 for no reason.

Not sure what you are talking about. I've been doing it correctly since 2001...

It's not proper OS support on Windows it's developers who know WTF they are doing. Microsoft told people how to do this in 2001. Few listened.

Microsoft added support to bail out such devs in Vista, but that does fuzz things up a bit...

You don't seem to have any idea what you're talking about.

(1) VB6 is an object-oriented language. Its support is poor--eg. no inheritance, clunky syntax--but programmer-defined classes exist. If you meant just the new OO features you should have said so--your wording is imprecise throughout.

OK, I'll bite hard - a little bit. If you're going to accuse someone of not having any idea it is usually a good idea to get a fracking clue yourself - which you evidently do not.

Classical VB did not, and does not, have inheritance and subclassing (utterly fundamental to a language actually being object oriented) nor the polymorphism you see in proper OO languages as a result. If you don't have that you certainly do not have an object oriented language and you most certainly don't know what one is. My wording is not imprecise. It is very clear and there are no such thing as 'new OO features'. Anyone who actually programs with half a clue understands what a language has to satisfy to be object oriented. Seriously, you can Google this stuff.

Point 2 is utter, utter twaddle and cant be replied because you obviously know nothing about classical VB.

(3) .NET and VB6 are comparable in speed (except loading times, .NET is worse there).

Yay. Let's rewrite our applications that replicates existing functionality and have them startup at least five times slower. Seriously, you can go away and have a cup of coffee before a decent sized .Net application starts up. Sorry, but that's not a rational business case.

(7) You'll be able to create .NET Metro style apps. Converting an existing desktop app may or may not require significant work.

No one cares. Windows.Forms, WPF, XAML, Silverlight and the other smorgasbord of pointless crap cranked out via MSDN have already ensured that few people who need to get work done actually care. For the handful of consultancies peddling this they will probably make some money rewriting everything again for people who are stupid enough to do so. Seriously, I've had MSDN weenies crawling out of my ears over the last ten years peddling a rewrite in *insert latest nonsense from MSDN magazine here*. It's all pointless hand-waving.

(6) Lots of people care about .NET apps. Glance at the Tiobe index, for instance.

Yep. There's people as far as the eye can see crying out for .Net 1.0 and 1.1 support because so much was written with them. The companies who are using VB who have prompted Microsoft to do this don't go anywhere near the Tiobe index, and they are the silent majority..............

(8) You greatly exaggerate the backwards compatibility problems and you know it. Some large projects are suited to automated/assisted migration; just read these zillion testimonials. It's far from perfect, but it's also far from nothing.

No, I don't - and being somebody who possibly sells this shit to people you know it. If it wasn't a problem we wouldn't be commenting on this article because it wouldn't exist, would we bright spark? 'Zillion testimonials.........' What are you? 11?

You do have at least a few good points--lots of businesses absolutely rely on very old technology and wouldn't upgrade without support

If Microsoft actually had a clue about supporting existing code in their new development products this wouldn't be up for discussion. Oh, and trust me, if you think VB applications are 'old technology' then think COBOL. Many VB desktop applications perform fairly critical business functions and they are going to have to be supported for decades. Just like the lines of COBOL out there runni

...fully object oriented thingy called VB.Net ... the overhead of that object oriented nonsense didn't make any sense at all ... The fatal mistake that Microsoft made with VB.Net is that it was completely backwards incompatible ... No one cares about .Net applications

You don't seem to have any idea what you're talking about.

      (1) VB6 is an object-oriented language. Its support is poor--eg. no inheritance, clunky syntax--but programmer-defined classes exist. If you meant just the new OO features you should have said so--your wording is imprecise throughout.
      (2) VB6 has no class library to speak of--you had to write your own routine or hack together a ListBox to sort a string array. That should be a couple lines of code. Forget hash tables, queues, etc.--you have to implement it all yourself or find somebody else's random crap, which is wildly inefficient. The .NET class library is very good and is a huge potential "appreciable benefit" to upgrading.
      (3) .NET and VB6 are comparable in speed (except loading times, .NET is worse there). Which wins depends on precisely what you're doing. For math-heavy problems, .NET is often much faster. But honestly, why the hell do you care about the speed (/memory use/whatever you meant by "overhead") of VB6 apps? It's almost always irrelevant in light of user input delays.

      (5) .NET is not even remotely dead, so no "fatal mistake" was made.
      (6) Lots of people care about .NET apps. Glance at the Tiobe index, for instance.
      (7) You'll be able to create .NET Metro style apps. Converting an existing desktop app may or may not require significant work. Your backend will be mostly to entirely reusable, so you won't have to "rewrite everything".

      (8) You greatly exaggerate the backwards compatibility problems and you know it. Some large projects are suited to automated/assisted migration; just read these zillion testimonials. It's far from perfect, but it's also far from nothing.

You do have at least a few good points--lots of businesses absolutely rely on very old technology and wouldn't upgrade without support; Microsoft's chances of getting a significant mobile presence are slim. You came close to the truth behind the continued success of VB6: people don't want to learn new systems and some people are stuck maintaining old ones that are too difficult to convert. Most of your points are garbage though.

It's even worse than that: the horrible legacy of hacks that windows uses pretty much guarantees that apps will always render horribly in anything by the default PPI. Their rounding "tricks" cause the text to scale inconsistently, as it's snapping individual letters to horizontal pixel boundaries. (err, it's more complicated than that; see the above link for a very well written discussion of the problem, and a very nice discussion of font rendering issues in general)

Pixel snapping is what gives clear, crisp text on current (low-DPI) monitors. Call it a "hack" if you want, but the only alternative is to have blurry text, and use larger and bolder fonts to compensate for that (see also: OS X).

For high-DPI, yeah, it doesn't work so well. Which is why various Windows frameworks were trying to switch to ideal rendering for a long time now - WPF did just that in 2007, for example, and people hated it.

These days, WPF (for .NET apps) and DirectWrite (for everything else) both give an option of using either ideal or pixel-snapped rendering, with ideal being the default. So you can have it if you want it. IE9+ actually uses it for rendered pages. But a lot of people still don't like the way it looks, and that will go on for as long as we don't actually have those promised high-DPI screens which will render it right.

ASLR works just fine for me as far as I can tell, and more importantly its enabled for the browser which is the main (and at least from what I've seen pretty much only) attack vector you need to worry about. And if you want to be extra secure you should probably flip the switch for structured error handling overwrite protection which I've had for over a year now and doesn't seem to affect performance any. Maybe its because I don't buy crappy boards, maybe its i get lucky, hell if i know, but as many boxes get built that go through my shop you'd think I'd be seeing some of these ATI horror stories but I'm just not.

As far as the monthly drivers, Nvidia doesn't do monthly drivers either, they do the same thing AMD is switching to which is only putting out drivers when needed as it just makes more sense. if you haven't added support for new cards or fixed any bugs simply repacking last month's driver simply makes no sense and causes needless updates. The only move AMD has done that's bothered me on the GPU front is putting the 4xxx into legacy but even that I can understand, as there simply isn't more speed to be gained there. since Win 8 is gonna require DX11 for all the bling and i have no intention of buying Win 8 it really doesn't affect me and the drivers that are already out work just fine in Win 7.

But I honestly don't see how a browser that is running at low permissions and is already sandboxed is gonna magically be able to get through all that but NOT get through ASLR. And honestly? I can't remember the last bug I saw that wasn't PEBKAC on Vista or 7, every bug I've seen has been classic social engineering like Security tool and AV201x which lets face it, if the user runs it and gives it permissions then nothing is gonna stop them, not ASLR or DEP or anything else.

In the end i just have to do what i think is right for my customers and the higher cooling and power requirements along with the higher prices for equal performance just don't make Nvidia a good buy IMHO. They are fine if you are building a gaming rig with tons of cooling and a $300+ GPU, but the majority of my customers are in the sub $150 market with most of those falling in the $50-$100 range and in those categories frankly the Nvidia offerings are just sub par. Too much heat, too much power, not enough performance, that is what I've seen of late from Nvidia and since ASLR is enabled on the only attack vector i ever encounter i really don't see a problem. Feel free to bitch at them though, I have no problem with security getting even better, I just don't think this is as really a big a deal as they are making out. Did they even run any tests on malware with browser enabled ASLR? Because if they did i can't find the figures.

Humans do not recognize words by shape. They do, however, recognize letter combinations by shape, and they do recognize lowercase letters better. So you've got the right conclusion, but wrong premise.

Ironically, Microsoft itself did a study on word recognition back in the day. Turns out that
lower case is much easier to read, the main reason being that we see far more lower-cased letters, and hence our pattern recognition is better trained against them.

On the other hand, the notion that this is because the word shape is what's being recognized (and lowercase letters have more varying shapes) is not true. We recognize letter combos, not words as a whole.

And besides, I've since realized that it's better to target HTML5 (with Canvas -- pixels finally come to HTML) than Metro anyway.

I don't get it. As you say yourself, Metro is a design philosophy, not a technology. You can absolutely target Metro with HTML5 (including canvas and whatnot). Indeed, that's kinda the big selling point in Win8 app development story.

TFS is not entirely correct, either. The real story explains people outrage better. Let me explain.

"The recent release of Visual Studio 2012 contained a UI element that few believed could make it into the final version — ALL-CAPS menus. After lots of user criticism and disbelief, Microsoft has moved swiftly to do something about it — by tweaking the typography.

In fact, the first release of VS 2012 that contained ALL CAPS in some form was the beta, but there it was used for tool windows (panes), not for top-level menu.Here is what that looked like - note "SOLUTION EXPLORER" etc, but regular menu. Users complained loudly about it back then. It wasn't the only sore point, but it was one that was by far the most "popular".

Then RC comes, and removes ALL CAPS from tool windows... only to put them into the main menu instead. Needless to say, the users were not amused when that happened after the clear feedback that caps are pointless and annoying. Now there's a new UserVoice submission for that, which quickly gets into top 10.

And after all that, the linked blog post comes out that explains that caps are actually just fine and will stay, despite "some people" not liking them!

At this point, it's not really about caps themselves. As you say, there is a reg key to change it, after all. It's more about how user feedback was handled (or ignored) along the road.

But does it have hooks that allow it to communicate better with Windows? Or with MS's office suite? Private protocols?

Not that I know of. The EU anti-trust decision back in the day (to a large extent courtesy of Samba team) forced Microsoft to document all protocols it uses between products. To the best of my knowledge, that requirement is still in force today.

Aren't they already trying to prevent other phones from talking to Exchange?

Again, not that I know of. Most phones use ActiveSync (for the sake of push), which is publicly documented but patented, but it is licensed out for a reasonable (presumably; no-one complained so far, at least) fee to anyone who asks - at least I've yet to see a smartphone that didn't support it, regardless of the manufacturer and the OS. Certainly, both iOS and Android do.

Also, curiously enough, of late MS has been releasing a bunch of products on competing mobile platforms that interact with its enterprise intranet services. For example, a Lync client for iOS and Android.

But does it have hooks that allow it to communicate better with Windows? Or with MS's office suite? Private protocols?

Not that I know of. The EU anti-trust decision back in the day (to a large extent courtesy of Samba team) forced Microsoft to document all protocols it uses between products. To the best of my knowledge, that requirement is still in force today.

Aren't they already trying to prevent other phones from talking to Exchange?

Again, not that I know of. Most phones use ActiveSync (for the sake of push), which is publicly documented but patented, but it is licensed out for a reasonable (presumably; no-one complained so far, at least) fee to anyone who asks - at least I've yet to see a smartphone that didn't support it, regardless of the manufacturer and the OS. Certainly, both iOS and Android do.

Also, curiously enough, of late MS has been releasing a bunch of products on competing mobile platforms that interact with its enterprise intranet services. For example, a Lync client for iOS and Android.

All you guys posting here are more evil than Microsoft.

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/profsup/en-au

Mainstream Phase: This phase commences at general product availability and normally extends for at least five years. During this phase a product is fully supported and free assisted support per the definitions below is available.

Bug
A bug is defined as "behaviour manifested by program outside of original design specification and is due to an inherent defect in the product code"; in other words a technical feature of a product that does not perform the task for which it was designed.

When Microsoft stops providing free security fixes for Windows 95 in 2010, you all call them evil, but looks like in your own businesses, free support ends when the customer signs the cheque for the original software.

Not exactly a Palm fan here, but I do like the idea and the (albeit half-assed due to time constraint) implementation they had with making the UI HTML-based. I wonder what could be done with that now, considering HTML 5 is complete enough to be useful...

They were the first to bet on HTML5 as the UI layer for touch devices, but they're not the last.

I agree that this is a positive step.

I have nearly a religious hatred towards MS, and it has nothing to do with "Microsoft's desire for profit." I work for a company that sells software for profit, so obviously that would would be hypocritical if I felt that way.

What I've always hated about Microsoft was their willingness to buck standards just to prevent their users from using other products along with MS products.

This started with early versions of Windows that required you to also buy DOS. A competitor to DOS came out (Dr. DOS), and Microsoft responded by putting a check into the Windows bootstrap that would cause it to exit out with an error if Dr. DOS was detected. Any time a company goes out of their way to make their own product not operate with 3rd party software, it generates serious rage from customers like me.

As I look back over the last few years, the last move by MS that really angered me was the whole OOXML vs Open Document war, where Microsoft refused to use the new standard, and instead made their own new standard with built in obfuscation.

There's still a lot terrible decisions that MS makes for their customers (hiding file extensions by default in Windows, modifying extensions on files downloaded with IE without informing the user, automatically removing line breaks on messages read in Outlook without telling the user), but I've seen far less pure evil come from the giant, compared to ages past.

You assume the off switch will be available. If you've ever had to deal with PC mobo manufacturers, you'll know they do what MS tell them to do.

And MS explicitly tells them to make the switch available:

"MANDATORY. On non-ARM systems, the platform MUST implement the ability for a physically present user to select between two Secure Boot modes in firmware setup: "Custom" and "Standard". Custom Mode allows for more flexibility as specified in the following:

a) It shall be possible for a physically present user to use the Custom Mode firmware setup option to modify the contents of the Secure Boot signature databases and the PK. This may be implemented by simply providing the option to clear all Secure Boot databases (PK, KEK, db, dbx) which will put the system into setup mode.

b) If the user ends up deleting the PK then, upon exiting the Custom Mode firmware setup, the system will be operating in Setup Mode with SecureBoot turned off.

c) The firmware setup shall indicate if Secure Boot is turned on, and if it is operated in Standard or Custom Mode. The firmware setup must provide an option to return from Custom to Standard Mode which restores the factory defaults. "

That's nothing: this is the real ubersecure requirement.

I'm assuming no one has yet noticed that the $99 fee is not going to last forever. From Microsoft's sysdev portal:

Microsoft is pleased to announce that, for a limited time, VeriSign is offering the ‘Microsoft Authenticode’ Digital Certificate at a substantially reduced price by following the link below.

Moreover as others have mentioned here, it's not guaranteed that any hardware manufacturers will include the capability to register one's own keys. I certainly haven't heard of any yet.

Indeed certificate revocations went out on the 3rd.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2718704

And as you've said, system restore 2.0 won't stop them. And malware survive? It gets worse than that, some of the more vicious ones inject themselves right into the SR backup, and edit the backed up hive. Unless you can remove it fully, you're kinda shot. Which can also mean disabling SR.

Are those the same lectures as these?

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html#data=3

"Flame" isn't on the list of malware detected by the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool. Why not?

Except that my wife's camera doesn't have the Eye-Fi cards, so we're manually downloading the pictures from the camera to the laptop.

I have an Ubuntu server running rsync. I've installed cwrsync and am using a very simple script (below) to sync my laptop to the rsync server. I'm using a windows at command to schedule the script to run hourly when the laptop is on. That last part is pure laziness, I haven't bothered figuring out how to test for network connectivity and then to run when connected.

One very nice advantage to running my own rsync server is that I can sync my photos from my Android phones as well. Micha Kowalczuk has written a terrific rsync backup program for Android that's easy to use and can easily be set up to use ssh public/private keypairs for authentication using the instructions on his website. That, in addition to Crafty Apps' Tasker, enables me to backup all of the pictures (and whatever else I want) from my phone every time I have an established WiFi link. (Note that that is my own restriction. I don't want to pay the extra data fees for uploading my pictures over the cell data link.)

Hope that helps.

Note that and are replacing the actual values to protect my server. ;-) Also, I have created ~/rsync folders for each user for the backups. Finally, the switches in use will NOT delete pictures from the server if they're deleted from the laptop.

@echo off
cd c:\Program Files (x86)\cwRsync\bin
rsync -av --chmod u+rwx -e "ssh -i c:\Users\\Documents\certificates\cwrsync" "/cygdrive/c/Users//Documents/rsync/" @:/home/user/rsync/

MS has issued a security update KB2701704 that revokes some certificates, presumably the ones used in these attacks.

Sure, the OS companies. Yes.

But not the anti-virus companies, which is what we're talking about here. The anti-virus companies are just script kiddies. Their core competencies are public relations and cookie scaremongering, but that's all. They do not pay people to do original research, that would cut into their profit margins.

If they can detect something, it's only because someone else did the research and posted it on their blog. Once someone has written some manual instructions for detecting the malware and removing it, the anti-virus companies are capable of writing a script that tries to do the same automatically, but even that sometimes stretches the limit of their capabilities since they can't even do that part correctly many of the times.

The real research is done by people like Mark Russinovich (and yes, you don't have to trust anything he has written after his company was acquired by Microsoft, you can just take a look at his oldest blog posts first -- which pre-date the acquisition).

I prefer mirroring certain files this way as you do not have to resort to a particular backup software to 'unpack' them. If you need to access the files, just open them up. This is especially handy for photos and other media files.

If you're using OcclusionQuery.PixelCount, you should automatically get pixel count.

Dig around in the docs on MSDN.

One caveat, PixelCount behaves slightly different on Xbox360 compared to on Windows.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.xna.framework.graphics.occlusionquery.aspx

And that's another reason why many developers switch to consoles. Because you cannot predict what configuration the user has. It's not only videocards, it's motherboards, processors, RAM... All kinds of bugs. My own PC reboots from time to time, I have no way of knowing why that happens. And notebooks are even worse.

Passing the handling of hardware related bugs to developers is stupid. In that case videogames would support only specific system configurations and refuse to run on a different hardware. Do you want that?

Since the developers can't even make their games run correctly on consoles, I think it's fair to blame the problem on them.

And is your problem with mystery reboots from Windows automatically updating? Fix that here.

As someone who very recently switched back to AMD because recent Nvidia cards (including my own) have been giving me and others some annoying and only occasionally recoverable Purple Screens of Death*, I can't wait for a decent Company #3** to kick both their asses on driver size and reliability.

*In my case, a GTX 460, after a year of use. After it started interrupting my Terraria games (even with motherboard settings changes) I thought it was time to recheck what others experienced; and after that, time for it to go.

**Intel does not currently count. They need more mana and must drink more booze.

those options are not worst than the way other platforms offer to interact with native calls. e.g. Python ctypes or as mentioned jni. Most of the times you dont even need to go that far, and if you find repeatedly far from the runtime, then you are using the wrong tool.

I didn't say there were. What I did say was that MS claimed C# was the way of windows programming for the future. And then they failed to deliver by delivering a half-ass language.

.NET's primary feature is multi-language support. C# was supposed to bring the wonders of Java managed memory to Windows developers, and of course better it. MS itself originally stated that C# (.NET, C# with C++/CLI were the only two languages really supported at that time) was to be the one and future language for programming in windows, including the system. Recall Longhorn?

Since VS2002 vb .net was also included but I give you that the focus was really on C#. The OS team never delivered on the bindings and structure to do real system programming with .Net that has been quite obvious for years now and .Net found its place being very popular on other kinds of applications.

Yes, it serves fine as a Java competitor, if it could only get to be a little faster. At least it's faster than Ruby, Grails, et al.

Maybe not everyone wants to use C# to do system programming and the language fits their needs? It seems a bit far fetched to call the whole thing misguided because it does not fulfill your expectations on a specific area that pretty much everyone knows by now is not its main target.

Ah - there's the rub. Systems programming was one of C#'s original purposes. I never said when the systems coding took place. It was years ago. I would not try it today, it'd be pointless,and quite possibly easier and faster to do in Java, Ruby, Scala, or Lisp, which should say everything you need to know or hear about the state of systems programming in C#, at least on Windows. It's also an indictment of the language itself.

MS's .NET languages are all hamstrung by the CLR they're running on. Yes, it's relatively easy to drop into the "unsafe" native calls, but that's not a feature that makes it better - it's a feature required by short comings of the CLR, otherwise known by various terms such as "compromise", "band-aid", or "failure".

those options are not worst than the way other platforms offer to interact with native calls. e.g. Python ctypes or as mentioned jni. Most of the times you dont even need to go that far, and if you find repeatedly far from the runtime, then you are using the wrong tool.

.NET's primary feature is multi-language support. C# was supposed to bring the wonders of Java managed memory to Windows developers, and of course better it. MS itself originally stated that C# (.NET, C# with C++/CLI were the only two languages really supported at that time) was to be the one and future language for programming in windows, including the system. Recall Longhorn?

Since VS2002 vb .net was also included but I give you that the focus was really on C#. The OS team never delivered on the bindings and structure to do real system programming with .Net that has been quite obvious for years now and .Net found its place being very popular on other kinds of applications.

While Mono's original creation was to bring C# and families to Linux, it's grown beyond that since then and may actually be a better platform than .NET. I don't know enough about it to really say. My opinion about it broadening the base of MS's misguided language still holds. While you can code apps in C#, there are some serious shortcomings if you want to do any specific system calls or anything relating to security contexts, at least under MS's latest offering. I don't know how Mono handles either of those categories, but I'm guessing it's better than MS's approach, it'd be hard to be worse.

Maybe not everyone wants to use C# to do system programming and the language fits their needs? It seems a bit far fetched to call the whole thing misguided because it does not fulfill your expectations on a specific area that pretty much everyone knows by now is not its main target.

These must be figments of my imagination.

All you need is ability to say something to like "val myiospace = new MMIORange(baseaddr, length)" and "myiospace[42] = x". You might get a drop in speed for bounds checking, but as the compiler/JIT compiler is aware of this MMIORange type it can safely eliminate those in most cases.

Hope your "Period." passes without further frustration.

Forget about protecting me from my bugs ... how about protecting me from the OS's bugs? Windows has so many bugs in very basic functions that I'm amazed anyone manages to write robust software.

For example, the atof() function, which has been around since at least the 80's (probably the 70's) still has bugs on Windows. Microsoft's documentation says: "The function stops reading the input string at the first character that it cannot recognize as part of a number." No, it doesn't. It will keep reading until it hits a '\0' even though the extra bytes it is reading won't impact the returned value. This can make reading a number from a large buffer excruciatingly slow. And, if you aren't lucky enough to have a null byte hanging around at the end of the buffer, atof() might just keep going until it tries to read outside of your program's memory space, causing the OS to kill it.

Building robust software on Windows is like building a house on quicksand.

MS's .NET languages are all hamstrung by the CLR they're running on. Yes, it's relatively easy to drop into the "unsafe" native calls, but that's not a feature that makes it better - it's a feature required by short comings of the CLR, otherwise known by various terms such as "compromise", "band-aid", or "failure".

"crap MS language that MS can't even internally agree on what it should be and do."... couldn't make sense of this? are you talking about the Net platform, or a specific language, ... or what.

.NET's primary feature is multi-language support. C# was supposed to bring the wonders of Java managed memory to Windows developers, and of course better it. MS itself originally stated that C# (.NET, C# with C++/CLI were the only two languages really supported at that time) was to be the one and future language for programming in windows, including the system. Recall Longhorn? While Mono's original creation was to bring C# and families to Linux, it's grown beyond that since then and may actually be a better platform than .NET. I don't know enough about it to really say. My opinion about it broadening the base of MS's misguided language still holds. While you can code apps in C#, there are some serious shortcomings if you want to do any specific system calls or anything relating to security contexts, at least under MS's latest offering. I don't know how Mono handles either of those categories, but I'm guessing it's better than MS's approach, it'd be hard to be worse.

I seems more like you know nothing of it and should stick to the regular set of complains about Mono being a trap or a way to expand MS ground.

Yep, pretty easy to throw those ad hominems around. Catch.... Oh crap, I actually proved my case while disproving yours.

Express 12 is limited to Metro apps.

Not VS 2012 Pro and higher.Compare Visual Studio 2012 editions

The only thing this change will do is push piracy of VS2012 pro to levels not seen since the express versions came out.
Well played MS..

i looked up office 2010 and it does work on XP SP3, so I take it back. but office 2010 is way cooler than office 2003.

vis a vis firefox I have both ie9 and ffx installed side by side and usually use ie9. I've never used open office.

I mean, seriously? Starting stuff from the stupid Start screen? Cripple the regular version of Visual Studio to only write apps for this screen?

Visual Studio Express 12 is limited to Metro apps.

Not VS 2012 Pro and higher.Compare Visual Studio 2012 editions

Microsoft encourages the idea that the Start screen is the Windows 8 "home page." From there, a few mouse gestures or a keyboard shortcut will take you almost anywhere you want to go. If you need access to common functions previously available on the old Start menu, you can right-click on the lower left to bring up the Power User list. You can even modify this list, though Microsoft won't officially support or document the method for doing so.

Windows 8 Release Preview Impressions, Windows 8 Tip: Edit the Power User Tasks Menu

The link was there, it's just not up in your face the way web installer is.

Windows 8 RP: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/iso
Windows Server 2012 RC: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/hh670538.aspx
Visual Studio 2012 RC: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=247147

The link was there, it's just not up in your face the way web installer is.

Windows 8 RP: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/iso
Windows Server 2012 RC: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/hh670538.aspx
Visual Studio 2012 RC: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=247147

The link was there, it's just not up in your face the way web installer is.

Windows 8 RP: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/iso
Windows Server 2012 RC: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/hh670538.aspx
Visual Studio 2012 RC: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=247147

OMFSM! HOW DID YOU GET THAT KEY!?!?

oh, right http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/iso

It's a small link but it's there: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/iso

I went to http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/release-preview and all I got was a 5MB .EXE file.

Kind of pointless for those of us who want to try it via VMWare or similar.

If Dell wants Windows Certification it better not do this. Per the Windows Certification Requirements, page 122:

Of course for Windows 9, blocking non-Windows operating systems will become mandatory on all devices.

You don't get the 'slippery slope' thing, do you? Or are you one of those 'slippery slopes don't exist' bozos?

I am pretty sure that if a hardware manufacturer like Dell locks out Linux operating systems

If Dell wants Windows Certification it better not do this. Per the Windows Certification Requirements, page 122:

MANDATORY. On non-ARM systems, the platform MUST implement the ability for a physically present user to select between two Secure Boot modes in firmware setup: "Custom" and "Standard". Custom Mode allows for more flexibility as specified in the following:

a) It shall be possible for a physically present user to use the Custom Mode firmware setup option to modify the contents of the Secure Boot signature databases and the PK. This may be implemented by simply providing the option to clear all Secure Boot databases (PK, KEK, db, dbx) which will put the system into setup mode.

b) If the user ends up deleting the PK then, upon exiting the Custom Mode firmware setup, the system will be operating in Setup Mode with SecureBoot turned off.

c) The firmware setup shall indicate if Secure Boot is turned on, and if it is operated in Standard or Custom Mode. The firmware setup must provide an option to return from Custom to Standard Mode which restores the factory defaults.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/microsoft-office-compatibility-pack-for-word-excel-and-powerpoint-HA010168676.aspx

Formats supported. I'd still use 2003 over any other version. I'd also still use classic gmail over any other web-based email app, but that's a literal impossibility now, because Google doesn't understand the value of old versions.

I've been trying to get the EULA for Expression Web Studio 4, but the site: http://www.microsoft.com/About/Legal/EN/US/IntellectualProperty/UseTerms/Default.aspx fails constantly, even if I use IE. MS "support" has sent me the same form letter three times, saying that if I haven't heard from them in three days, to email them back.

Trend Micro Hosted Email Security and Microsoft Forefront Online Protection for Exchange

HTML5 is the path for Metro tile apps

HTML5/JS is a path for Metro apps. You can also write them in .NET and C++. In fact, writing them in C# is the easiest of three, because Metro APIs are heavily asynchronous (continuation-passing style), and C# 5 has convenient syntactic sugar for CPS; whereas in both C++ and JS you have to write out callbacks explicitly as lambdas.