Microsoft to End DLL Confusion

MankyD writes "ZDNet is reporting that Microsoft is attempting to do away with DLL version conflicts in its next version of Windows with a technology it calls 'Strong Binding'. When new programs attempt to overwrite old versions of DLL's, the Strong Binding will index the DLL's and allow the programs to reference them by a unique ID, rather than by file name. Hopefully it will prevent a new program from breaking an old one. I would think this might add to DLL clutter however."

Comments

Where do we get these people from?

[corebreech]

Just statically link the library and be done with it!

Like Unix but with more Cruft (TM)

[binary_life]

Unix has had library versioning from the very beginning. Shared library filenames specify what version of the shared library the file contains, and when programs load they can request a specific version thru the file name.

And here comes M$ taking the same idea, and adding a point of failure in the form of some binary index of dlls. Jeezz this is just another thing I'm gonna have to fix when my windows friends start having trouble with thier computer. Really unnecessary. Couldn't they have just outright copied the Unix method? At least then they would have done it right.

A simpler solution

[mwood]

Wouldn't it be a lot easier for Microsoft to teach their people to design things before coding them, so that they don't wind up releasing incompatible updates all the time? IBM came up with this kewl new thing called backward-compatibility -- maybe Microsoft should ask them about it?