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The reason for [massive memory use when opening windows] was a limitation of GDI at the time, it was really the only workaround, it used more RAM but it meant less CPU usage if you had aero turned on. I wouldn't really call it 'bloat', it was a necessary use of system resources, which - if you had low system specs - you avoided by just turning it off.

If by "limitation of GDI at the time" you mean, "performance regression with Windows Vista and no other version of Windows", then I'd agree. Bear in mind, this problem is fixed in Windows 7. It's true that Windows 7 requires more CPU in some circumstances but you're not seriously considering that that's a trade that the Vista team made deliberately and thought was good, are you? Windows systems running GDI are commonly memory/IO bound (if you're running directx you're likely running games and GPU/CPU are more important). Making basic operations such as opening a window consume massively more memory than previously is a serious performance regression and exactly the kind of thing people refer to as 'bloat'. See point 2 here for a summary of how it's fixed in Windows 7: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/04/25/engineering-windows-7-for-graphics-performance.aspx

This is true, it's using your system memory as a cache, they did get a little overzealous on their use of system memory for this purpose, not poor programming just a questionable design choice since if you had a decent amount of ram this was beneficial, if you had too little ram then obviously it's going to impact performance hence the reason they pushed ReadyBoost.

No, you're confusing SuperFetch (a good thing) with running a bunch of services that are rarely needed (a bad thing, especially during startup). Windows 7 still has SuperFetch (which is well behaved and does low priority IO) but it just doesn't run all those services on startup. Running a bunch of stuff you don't need is the very definition of bloat. To read up on Windows 7's fix, "service trigger events", see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd405513(v=vs.85).aspx .

This is not about 'time to usable desktop'. It's about shortening the existing boot process (I agree that Windows is far from usable the first half-minute or so after it gets you to the desktop).

This image sums it all up nicely, without the waffle, video or text.

According to MS, neither XBox is based on the Windows kernel at all contrary to popular belief.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xboxteam/archive/2006/02/17/534421.aspx

Re IronPython & F#:

I just checked ironpython.codeplex.com - it looks like it's been downloaded about 650K times. The usage we've seen has been primarily by folks who require a good impedance match with .Net & a lot of embedded scripting eg Rhino3D drawing package. But of course compared to CPython the usage is extremely small.

re F# - it's actually used by a lot of Quants... and it just made it into the top 20 "TIOBE" language popularity index (not exactly scientific...). Either way, F# really is an awesome language. Many of the cooler features of C# started out in F#. One of my favorites, Units of Measure: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/andrewkennedy/archive/2008/08/29/units-of-measure-in-f-part-one-introducing-units.aspx

Collapsing the ribbon would defeat the purpose of having the ribbon, which would defeat the purpose of showing why the ribbon is TEH AWESOMES! Therefore you cannot collapse the ribbon. As a result, from a marketing perspective, you *must* make W7 take up more space. Which means turning on that utterly useless status bar.

(Wouldn't it be hilarious if, by default, W8 comes with the same huge, shitty status bar turned on? So much for that whopping two additional lines of space!)

(Also, doesn't it seem funny that per MS's own research, the ribbon seems...pointless? >80% of commands come from context windows or hotkeys. See: https://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-01-29-43-metablogapi/3125.Figure-6-_2D00_-Command-entrypoint_5F00_2.png . Seems people have adapted just fine to NOT using the menu bar which is what this monstrosity replaces.)

One of Microsoft's big problems in Office 97-2003 was that people were not noticing features that Microsoft wanted them to use

One of the other motivations about the ribbon: When Microsoft asked users about what features they would like to see in Office, it turns out they asked for features that were already there. But the menu system was so complicated that nobody figured that out.

Jensen Harris (architect of the Ribbon) has an awesome talk about the history of the Office UI that led to the creation of the ribbon on his blog. Search for "why the ui". He also did a video of the story

One of Microsoft's big problems in Office 97-2003 was that people were not noticing features that Microsoft wanted them to use

One of the other motivations about the ribbon: When Microsoft asked users about what features they would like to see in Office, it turns out they asked for features that were already there. But the menu system was so complicated that nobody figured that out.

Jensen Harris (architect of the Ribbon) has an awesome talk about the history of the Office UI that led to the creation of the ribbon on his blog. Search for "why the ui". He also did a video of the story

See the video. Basically they have tried to create functionality currently created with a few nice tools like 7-zip. It's just "all over the place", without a coherent mental model and consequently with redundant functionality. The collapsed view behind the link might be near the 'classic' look. Unsurprisingly, they think the XP explorer as having great customizability.

Hmm...well, now I have a reason to never update to Win 8..

It would indeed be nicer to have some insights from the belly of the beast instead of its granny outfit.

You can hide the ribbon and add a custom toolbar that behaves somewhat similarly to Explorer from XP.

http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-01-29-43-metablogapi/8422.Figure-21-_2D00_-Real-Estate-comparison_5F00_2.png

2 files more visible; that will help with large directories.
Less info about the file. hmm. I think I can do without.
a LOT more ***, oh wait that IS the ribbon.

I know it's a radical concept, but maybe you should read TFA, specifically the subsection labeled "Designing for a wider screen."

I'm looking at the screenshot right now. http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-01-29-43-metablogapi/7245.Figure_2D00_8_2D002D002D00_Win8_2D00_Hero_5F00_449B7A36.png

The top left of the Explorer window is a morass of buttons and text things. I actually don't understand it.

The window title bar has several icons on it. First looks like the application icon - but it looks like a text document icon. Then there is a yellow icon - an open folder? After that there is a ticked document. What is that for? Then there is a downward arrow thing - does that bring up more menus?

THEN we get the application title - but oh no, it's not centred. There's a weird "Library Tools" thing encroaching from the ribbon into the window's title bar. Now I know that this happens in Office, e.g., "Table Tools", but it's just additional confusion here.

So under that we get the Ribbon. Great! The Ribbon is essentially an icongraphic tabbed representation of a menu. We can see the different Ribbons here - File, Home, Share, View, and that Library Tools - Manage one.

But ... wait ... File is dark blue. Home is white. The others are grey-blue. Which one is the active tab? Why is the other one a different appearance? Confusing!

Then there's a carat on the right hand side. Does that hide the ribbon? No idea.

The ribbon itself is a typical ribbon - common actions are bigger. I can see that it would be useful for a touch interface... but...

Oh look how small the Cut icon is - vindicating Apple's decision to not offer Cut as an option in Finder, perhaps?

What is a New Easy Access?

View is a separate Ribbon (I think) - no more quick view changes eh!

Oh, I can't continue. I have been presented with what appears to be a contender for worst UI of the decade, and it's only 2011.

However, interesting little suggestion in TFA is that there is a "quick access toolbar" which basically looks... like an Explorer toolbar

Note that the screenshot where it shows a lot of icons there it is in "show below ribbon" mode. To save even more space, one can instead put into the title bar of the window to further minimize space - e.g. on this screenshot, you can see it with two icons, to the left of "Documents" - which is in fact its default mode (same as in Office).

However, interesting little suggestion in TFA is that there is a "quick access toolbar" which basically looks... like an Explorer toolbar

Note that the screenshot where it shows a lot of icons there it is in "show below ribbon" mode. To save even more space, one can instead put into the title bar of the window to further minimize space - e.g. on this screenshot, you can see it with two icons, to the left of "Documents" - which is in fact its default mode (same as in Office).

I particularly like this graphic:
http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-01-29-43-metablogapi/8422.Figure-21-_2D00_-Real-Estate-comparison_5F00_2.png

You get to see TWO MORE FILES!!!! with the ribbon...
Except if you streamline your W7 explorer you'll get about 6 back.
Let's compare the most streamlined W8 layout to the least streamlined W7 one! MARKETING!!

You call that mess minimal ? Compare this screenshot of the Windows 8 explorer to the OSX Lion Finder, now that's no nonsense minimalism.

In the age of widescreen displays, why in the world do they want to waste more of my precious vertical viewing plane with pictures?

It sounds counter-intuitive, but redesigned Explorer with Ribbon fits as many files as Explorer in Win7, and in some cases even more, because some other UI elements were either ditched altogether, or (like the file info pane below) moved so that they consume horizontal space rather than vertical.

I guess I should read more about their "clear benefits", because we are obviously missing them!

You probably should read the blog post linked from TFS, and see what points you disagree with. It gives a fairly detailed rationale for UI design.

this screen shot won me : http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-01-29-43-metablogapi/4380.Figure-24-_2D00_-Alex_2700_s-customizations_5F00_2.png

It is well known in time synchronization circles that by default Windows stores the time in the BIOS/RTC in the local time zone but there is a registry hack for Vista and above to make Windows use UTC in BIOS/RTC. However Windows uses UTC internally.

I'm surprised no one else has picked up on the fact that it bears starting similarities to the KDE file copy dialog.

Here are the images, for those who didn't RTFA:
Link 1
Link 2

I'm surprised no one else has picked up on the fact that it bears starting similarities to the KDE file copy dialog.

Here are the images, for those who didn't RTFA:
Link 1
Link 2

* \ instead of the standard / - leave it to Microsoft when faced with picking a sane choice and and a mind boggling idiotic one...

Microsoft developers originally wanted to use "/". However, IBM has already reserved "/" as a start-of-switch character in their utilities for MS-DOS 1.0 (where there were no directories) - and this is because it was already used for this purpose in CP/M. IBM insisted that this was kept supported into DOS 2.0. And you can't reasonably support it with /-separated paths, because the old semantics required "foo /bar/baz" to be parsed as "foo /bar /baz" by the shell, and "/bar" and "/baz" treated as switches. For a while you could work around this by setting SWITCHAR in config.sys, but this was eventually dropped. Here is the full story.

The time remaining is not gone. See it in the actual screenshots for the detailed view.

Could we link to the actual source please? Building Windows 8 blog

If MS went the way that made Windows successful - totally open ecosystem, cheap/free tools, apps written for one machine run anywhere, loads of customization is allowed - then maby. But not with WP7 being a locked down imitation of iOS, which can keep that market better than MS ever can.

Microsoft went with exactly that list with Windows Mobile and it turned into a nightmare. Hundreds of devices which were never to be updated by their OEM all with different skins, screen resolutions and hardware configurations. It was a mess.

They learned from this so are keeping some tighter control over their system. They still manage to hit some of your points:

• Cheap / Free Tools - download all you need to build a Windows Phone 7 app for free here: http://create.msdn.com/en-us/home/getting_started
• Apps written for one machine run anywhere - by enforcing standard minimum hardware your application will run on any Windows Phone.

I'd argue that they have a diverse ecosystem for hardware too. Once the OEM meets the minimum specs things like hardware keyboards, strange form-factors or anything else they wish to use to differentiate themselves are all on the table.

some of it software research (Operating system design, Objective-C, OpenCL, Grand Central Dispatch, etc)

Products != research. Can you point to some new research that Apple did? i.e. published papers and such?

Speaking of products, e.g. GCD is a fairly typical fork/join task-based parallel programming framework, there's nothing innovative there. All others you've mention are too generic to make any comments - e.g. OS design - what was Apple's contribution to that? From everything I know, from design standpoint, OS X is a fairly conventional operating system, and so is iOS.

some of it materials research (as they have used in forming cases for various devices they produce)

I can buy that, though, again, I'm not aware of any specific examples. My iPad case is aluminum and glass - it sure looks nice, and I commend their designers, but I don't see what research was needed to come to that arrangement.

Microsoft may be doing more research but nothing seems to come of it, either in products or even influencing other research the way IBM does.

It's a popular myth, but wrong. Bits and pieces do make it out of MSR into products, it's just that they're not (usually) transferred verbatim, and not publicized as such. But e.g. efficient JIT-compilation of reified generics in .NET was originally an MSR project. LINQ had a fair bit of MSR backing as well (hence why it's really just syntactic sugar for monads). For a rare example of a shipping product that was lifted wholesale from MSR, look at F#.

But, yes, the real output of MSR - in terms of shipping products, or - perhaps even more importantly, in terms of money earned by those products - is relatively small in comparison to e.g. IBM.

to be fair to Garbage collection, even they need smart pointers(warning long, but fabulous post. The safehandle 'fix' starts about 1/3rd of the way down). So assuming that GC is a magic bullet that somehow solves all your resource management and object lifetime issues is simply not the case.

(remember GC is a system for collecting memory only, its poop at any other resource, RAII wins hands-down at that)(but I guess you could implement a GC-memory model underneath a RAII object-lifetime model, so an object gets destroyed in a deterministic manner, but the memory that was allocated to it gets frees lazily - that'd work, but it wouldn't give the magic bullet feeling to our less able developer colleagues :) )

As does Visual Studio 2010: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2010/04/06/c-0x-core-language-features-in-vc10-the-table.aspx

Yea, the thing about it is that when the 80286 and the 80386 came out, Unix was on the ball soon afterwards (I think a protected mode version of Xenix was available by the time the IBM PC/AT was released). By comparison, MS wasted years creating a real mode multitasking DOS version before finally realizing that it was a mistake. It ended up turning into an entire mess that made DOS and 64K segments lasted longer than it should have.

See the following:
http://mariusbancila.ro/blog/2011/06/20/cpp-renaissance-at-microsoft/
http://herbsutter.com/2011/07/28/c-renaissance-the-going-native-channel/
http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Craig-Symonds-and-Mohsen-Agsen-C-Renaissance
It's true that MS it starting to push JavaScript/HTML5, but there's also a "return to roots" movement for C++.

So, to install the rootkit, you also need to exploit a bug in the user. Where do I file the bug report?

The user is the biggest vulnerability. It's called the Dancing Pigs problem and it's extremely difficult to protect. In fact, popping up additional dialogs hurt security because of it (that Android permissions screen? Utterly useless - even if you make it so they have to check off every item then hit install).

Hell, the age of the Honor System Virus is actually around. Facebook viruses and spam and such often rely on such odd techniques as well (click here and here and here, paste this URL, etc...).

A simple popup like "Low battery" might be easily dismissed by anyone and no one is the wiser.

To satisfy the lameness filter while my coloured correction card chases my original post.

Celebrating Richard Feynman at TEDxCaltech

The result was a total transformation. Instead of completing only three problems in nine months, the team was able to complete nine problems in three months! Of course, this led to a different problem when management reasoned that it should be possible to complete the last calculation needed for the Trinity test in less than a month. To meet this deadline, Feynman and his team had to address the more difficult problem of breaking up a single calculation into pieces that could be performed in parallel.

Emacs ruined me worse, I can't count the times I hit C-x C-s to save only to have VS cut the current line and then save.

Visual Studio, up to and including VS2008, had Emacs keybinding scheme selectable out of the box, which should help there (in particular, it rebinds C-x C-s to save, among other things). For VS2010, this is available as an separate extension, which tries to be even closer to how Emacs behaves.

Friggin idiot who invented that stupid windows cli.
"Hmmm, yes, let's not use POSIX! How about we invent our own standard and make it really crappy, and let's only follow it half of the time!"

Backslash was taken up as directory separator long before Windows - it dates back all the way to DOS 2.0, when that thing has first got directories. And you can largely thank IBM for that.

since IE6 is the one major browser left that doesn't support the new protocol.

MS claims otherwise
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2007/02/20/ipv6-uris-in-ie7.aspx
"Additionally, I should mention that although support for IPv6 URIs is new to IE7 and not available in IE6, IE6 does support DNS names backed by IPv6 addresses."

APNIC doesn't have any more IPv4 addresses to give them.

Web browsing isn't really a concern since it gets along fine with NAT. The applications that need to be concerned about IPv4 exhaustion are those that rely on accepting incoming connections from the internet on domestic connections (primerally P2P networks).

Hyper-V likes having its guest operating systems aware of the fact they're running under Hyper-V. A good example is the virtual ethernet - Hyper-V has two kinds, 'legacy' and 'enlightened'. The former is an emulation of an Intel network card, emulating the real hardware. (It has registers, it has PCI address space, etc etc, all emulated as normal.)

The enlightened network cards, though, are not emulations of any physical network card. They're designed with a much simpler API, designed explicitly for use inside Hyper-V. When sending information between the guest and the parent, the legacy network card has to emulate the PCI bus etc. I believe the Hyper-V network adapter merely sends a high-speed VMBus (the hypervisor's communication channel) message remapping the page between virtual machines; instantly transferring the data. Since there is less layers, they're faster - but the catch is that no operating system can use one of these unless they're aware of the VMBus, the Hyper-V network adapter, and of course, Hyper-V generally.

Being Hyper-V aware allows a guest os to have its memory consumption monitored - and for Hyper-V to hot-add additional memory to the VM when it is getting low. It allows the real-time-clock inside the VM to be kept in synch with the parent.

Etc etc.

Windows XP was released in 2001. No consumer OS has been supported that long

Windows 3.x was release in 1990, and Microsoft only stopped selling it November 1, 2008.

According to www.html5test.com, the other preview is no better than IE 9.

Possibly the test is incomplete; this page says theyve improved a number of HTML5 aspects. And this isnt exactly a beta, so one would surmise that theres work yet to be done.

With the latest fallout from Firefox 5,

What fallout would that be? The 5 people on slashdot who think Firefox devs are pegging version numbers for numbers sake (rather than to signify a new development model)? Yea, the average user REALLY cares about that.

Either way I would like to see HTML 5 forms,

According to the page I linked, they are adding that to IE10, as well as other CSS3 tags and a number of other features. I recommend you check that link; not being a web dev, I can only sort of understand what each of those things are, but the page is nicely laid out and quite concise (they have a bulleted list...).

Instead of the blogspam link you could have linked the official page that has far more useful information than useless article on the submitter's blog.

The problem isn't that the OS trusts random USB sticks. The problem is that most people are idiots. Or some of them might just be ignorant, but that distinction is pretty easy to draw: show them the correct procedure. If they remember and use it, they're not an idiot.

So, without further ado, the incorrect way and the correct way of plugging in a USB stick if you aren't 100% certain that it's safe.

Incorrect way:
Plug it in, wait for it to AutoPlay, and hope for the best.

Correct way:
Hold down the Left Shift key to disable AutoPlay while inserting the device (holding the Right Shift key will start FilterKeys). Continue holding the Shift key until the drive is fully installed and ready to use. (Have Windows Explorer open to My Computer so you can see when the drive shows up and you can release the Shift key.)
If you're using XP, right-click the drive and click Explore. In Vista/Win7 a popup will appear asking what you want to do; select "Open folder to view files" under "General Options" (the "AutoPlay" option can be altered to look identical, but it's found under "Install or run program"), or close the dialog (Esc) and Explore the drive from Windows Explorer.

Needless to say, you should already have file extensions always displayed and take the same precautions you'd normally take with files from untrusted sources (don't open executable files, and if you want to open a media file from the device, drag-and-drop it into VLC or SMPlayer instead of opening it in Windows Media Player).

no, the article is very poor.

if you want a good explanation of rvalue references, watch this video: rvalue references, perfect forwarding and associative containers. actually, just watch the whole series...

See Herb Sutter's entire ADFS presentation: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/AFDS-Keynote-Herb-Sutter-Heterogeneous-Computing-and-C-AMP See Daniel Moth's ADFS deep dive session: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Daniel-Moth-Blazing-fast-code-using-GPUs-and-more-with-C-AMP

See Herb Sutter's entire ADFS presentation: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/AFDS-Keynote-Herb-Sutter-Heterogeneous-Computing-and-C-AMP See Daniel Moth's ADFS deep dive session: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Daniel-Moth-Blazing-fast-code-using-GPUs-and-more-with-C-AMP

Can't speak for others, but in my case it's

Don't know what AMP is and can't understand TFS/TFA

Neither the summary nor the article seem to explain what AMP is.

For the benefit of everyone else who is trying to figure out, here is a link: Introducing C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (C++ AMP) To quote from that page:

Iâ(TM)m excited to announce that we are introducing a new technology that helps C++ developers use the GPU for parallel programming. Today at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit, we announced C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (C++ AMP). (â¦) By building on the Windows DirectX platform, our implementation of C++ AMP allows you to target hardware from all the major hardware vendors. (â¦)

So, from a cursory look, this seems to be similar in purpose to OpenCL.

yes actually.

As you will learn, Microsoft and Visual Studio, specifically, are re-doubling efforts to take part in the native code renaissance. Accordingly, you may see advances in our native tooling that the team thinks of as "C++ first" -> VC++ will extend its capabilities on a faster pace than it has ever done so in the past, at times surpassing the other VS languages/runtimes, in specific scenarios

C++ is undergoing a renaissance at Microsoft. Someone said that it makes sense as the platform team at MS doesn't like .NET and so doesn;t really give a fig what the dev team is trying to push. I guess the Mobile team is pushing Silverlight but no-one cares about them either. It sounds about right knowing Microsoft's huge staff and the infighting between teams.

I welcome a return to C++ on Microsoft platform, .NET is nice enough but it always felt a bit 'VB' to me, and besides, I have a huge amount of code to keep going (can't afford to rewrite it all). In any case, it does appear MS is moving away from its ".NET only, everywhere" approach to a more heterogenous development platform. I'm sure C# will be in there somewhere, even if WPF and Silverlight are relegated to the attic to keep VB and Foxpro company.

So yeah, everything just keeps going round and round.

Firefox is using:

Image (executables): 95,084K

Mapped File: 56,892K

Sharable Pages: 133,100k

Heap: 25,100K

Stack: 46,080K

Private Data (explicit mallocs): 205,280K

Page Table: 1,372K

Unusable (leftover area of explicitly allocated pages that were LESS than 64K): 9,440K

Only 10M unusable isn't bad on windows... (start inevitable trolling here) as the memory manager only allocates pages in increments on 64k

When Microsoft told everyone for years that they shouldn't keep user settings in C:\Program Files back in the Win9x days, because of roaming user profiles and due to expected security enhancements down the road, and developers ignored them (despite how ridiculously easy it is to simply put that data in a different folder), it was Microsoft's fault that apps broke on XP's non-admin accounts, right? And when Microsoft published tons of advice on how to make software work in limited accounts during the XP days, it was still their fault that apps which should have nothing to do with UAC would trigger UAC prompts under Vista, even though all they had to do to avoid that is follow the rules as laid down since the days of Windows 95? To keep things on topic: the only time I've heard of a VB to VB.NET port being anything but trivial is when the automated upgrade tool chokes on exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about here.

If the reason you got screwed over is that you avoided best-practices or used undocumented "features" against explicit advice to the contrary for no good reason, then yeah, you're a fool. Microsoft didn't force you to write the code that they told you not to write. And you should be glad that MS goes as far out of its way as it does to support your shit when you do it anyway, despite the fact that they warned you and offered free examples on how to do whatever you want done without being an idiot.

When Microsoft told everyone for years that they shouldn't keep user settings in C:\Program Files back in the Win9x days, because of roaming user profiles and due to expected security enhancements down the road, and developers ignored them (despite how ridiculously easy it is to simply put that data in a different folder), it was Microsoft's fault that apps broke on XP's non-admin accounts, right? And when Microsoft published tons of advice on how to make software work in limited accounts during the XP days, it was still their fault that apps which should have nothing to do with UAC would trigger UAC prompts under Vista, even though all they had to do to avoid that is follow the rules as laid down since the days of Windows 95? To keep things on topic: the only time I've heard of a VB to VB.NET port being anything but trivial is when the automated upgrade tool chokes on exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about here.

If the reason you got screwed over is that you avoided best-practices or used undocumented "features" against explicit advice to the contrary for no good reason, then yeah, you're a fool. Microsoft didn't force you to write the code that they told you not to write. And you should be glad that MS goes as far out of its way as it does to support your shit when you do it anyway, despite the fact that they warned you and offered free examples on how to do whatever you want done without being an idiot.

When Microsoft told everyone for years that they shouldn't keep user settings in C:\Program Files back in the Win9x days, because of roaming user profiles and due to expected security enhancements down the road, and developers ignored them (despite how ridiculously easy it is to simply put that data in a different folder), it was Microsoft's fault that apps broke on XP's non-admin accounts, right? And when Microsoft published tons of advice on how to make software work in limited accounts during the XP days, it was still their fault that apps which should have nothing to do with UAC would trigger UAC prompts under Vista, even though all they had to do to avoid that is follow the rules as laid down since the days of Windows 95? To keep things on topic: the only time I've heard of a VB to VB.NET port being anything but trivial is when the automated upgrade tool chokes on exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about here.

If the reason you got screwed over is that you avoided best-practices or used undocumented "features" against explicit advice to the contrary for no good reason, then yeah, you're a fool. Microsoft didn't force you to write the code that they told you not to write. And you should be glad that MS goes as far out of its way as it does to support your shit when you do it anyway, despite the fact that they warned you and offered free examples on how to do whatever you want done without being an idiot.

When Microsoft told everyone for years that they shouldn't keep user settings in C:\Program Files back in the Win9x days, because of roaming user profiles and due to expected security enhancements down the road, and developers ignored them (despite how ridiculously easy it is to simply put that data in a different folder), it was Microsoft's fault that apps broke on XP's non-admin accounts, right? And when Microsoft published tons of advice on how to make software work in limited accounts during the XP days, it was still their fault that apps which should have nothing to do with UAC would trigger UAC prompts under Vista, even though all they had to do to avoid that is follow the rules as laid down since the days of Windows 95? To keep things on topic: the only time I've heard of a VB to VB.NET port being anything but trivial is when the automated upgrade tool chokes on exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about here.

If the reason you got screwed over is that you avoided best-practices or used undocumented "features" against explicit advice to the contrary for no good reason, then yeah, you're a fool. Microsoft didn't force you to write the code that they told you not to write. And you should be glad that MS goes as far out of its way as it does to support your shit when you do it anyway, despite the fact that they warned you and offered free examples on how to do whatever you want done without being an idiot.