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Why Vista Had To Be Rebuilt From Scratch
iliketrash writes "The Wall Street Journal has a long front-page article describing how Jim Allchin approached Bill Gates in July, 2004, with the news that then-Longhorn, now-Vista, was 'so complex that its writers would never be able to make it run properly.' Also, the article says, 'Throughout its history, Microsoft had let thousands of programmers each produce their own piece of computer code, then stitched it together into one sprawling program. Now, Mr. Allchin argued, the jig was up. Microsoft needed to start over.' And start over they did. The article is astonishing for its frank comments from the principles, including Allchin and Gates, as well as for its description of Microsoft's cowboy spaghetti code culture."
One of the best books I ever read on the Microsoft code culture was "Breaking Windows: How Bill Gates Fumbled The Future Of Microsoft" by David Bank. From the book, Jim Allchin is the Windows guy who quashed Brad Silverberg and the (relatively) innovative Internet team - although ironically he was an early advocate for getting TCP/IP support in Windows. He believed that all innovation in Microsoft should take place under the Win 2k banner and that the company should just keep making Windows bigger and bigger and bigger. Hmm, maybe it got too big.3 203151/qid=1127565487/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-0616 241-1101748
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/074
Tristan Yates
I have a friend at university who was recently hired by Microsoft, partially for a quality control role. While this's a single case, and in no way can be extrapolated to the whole company, from what he's said, it's apparent that they're reusing a large amount of their codebase, with the dodgy bits either rewritten or modified and thoroughly tested.
As you said, there's no way in hell you can have a 12 month rewrite. But, with any luck (for the end-users), this will hopefully turn out to be more than PR fluff.
Not sure if this is what you were interested in, but I think Paul Thurott has some great lengthy and detailed articles, along with some interviews with Microsoft engineers for some insight in the stress, problems, and achievements with various large Windows projects, and also with pictures of their build labs and test machines.
For example:
Windows 2000
Windows XP SP2
Windows Server 2003
A disclaimer bias-wise is that Paul Thurott is a guy who wants Microsoft to do well, but he's not afraid of criticizing them harshly when he doesn't agree with their decisions, so I think it's still not a case with "inside stories" being too biased to be useful. He was for example the guy behind the quote that Windows Vista had the markings of a shipwreck after seeing Beta 1. Although he has had some missteps IMO such as saying Windows Me should be far more reliable than Windows 98.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
From what I read on the net, the code base used was that of windows 2003 server.
Not quite true... In the mid 90's they did release a version of their own internal tool known as ChangeControl under the name Microsoft Delta... it flopped, big time. Needing something better, they purchased One Tree Software in 1994 and rebranded their One Tree SourceSafe to the more Microsoft style name of Visual SourceSafe.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Mac OS X is not that modular. GNU Hurd is far more, and even GNU/Linux.
Mac OS X’s kernel’ not modular at all. It has conflated the Mach microkernel, which has already been abandoned by the Hurd for its bad performance, with the monolithic BSD kernel. The result is something just as monolithic as BSD, but much larger, more complex and slow. Linux is not as fast or simple as BSD, but still much faster than Mac OS X — and both are just as modular.
In contrast, the Hurd on the Mach is a little bit slower but much more modular, and the new L4 version has the potential to be much faster and still much more modular, because it is a true microkernel with multiple servers.
The Mac OS X GUI’s not modular at all X is.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
There are some more technical details on the big map of windows and the quality gates in this blog post:
0 8/23/455193.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2005/
There's a carrot and stick approach. The carrot is that Microsoft touts all the cool new features that will make life so much easier. Features you won't be able to live without.
Then there's the stick. Part of it is to have Office use features of the new OS, so you won't be able to perform some spiffy operation without it.
Another part of the stick is to badmouth the prior version, but explain that all the issues being badmouthed are fixed and gone in the new OS.
So you get stories where Microsoft "finally admits" to various things, (like that DOS really does underly Win9x, despite assurances that it was gone)... You've read them.
There's certainly truth to what Microsoft claims, and it's nice to see real issues being addressed. For example, WinXP's move away from the Win9x base to the more solid WinNT base was a huge win for most users (although gamers complained about a lack of drivers).
But don't be fooled - fundamentally, you're just looking at PR spin designed to created demand for an new OS.
For the record, even though I only develop in a particular branch of Longhorn, I do have access to the whole source tree.
Apple's own systems programming staff
;) ). A lot of the Carbon toolbox implementation comes from Copland (most of it via Mac OS 8.5). Much of the Darwin IOKit design (but _not_ the implementation) is derived from Copland's NuKernel driver architecture, and some small parts of IOKit are derived from Pink/Taligent designs (but not the implementation).
You misspelled executive management. Apple had plenty of fine programming talent who would have been happy to execute on a strategy. Any strategy.
It may surprise you to learn that many programmers at Apple -- including key members of the Cocoa team, the Carbon team, and the IOKit team -- worked on Copland. Difference between Copland and Mac OS X? Executive management. Define a goal and stick to it. Q.E.D.
In fact, a non-trivial amount of code and concepts from Copland is recycled in Mac OS X (excluding Classic for the purpose of this discussion