The Story Behind a Windows Security Patch Recall

bheer writes "Raymond Chen's blog has always been popular with Win32 developers and those interested in the odd bits of history that contribute to Windows' quirks. In a recent post, he talks about how an error he committed led to the recall of a Windows security patch."

Comments

The Money Quote

[SixFactor]

You're about to be Slashdotted.
Seriously, it's good to get a glimpse of the interactions in the dev side of MS. It's astonishing that MS even allows this to happen at all. The March 07 Wired had a feature on Channel 9 that humanized the MS organization quite a bit, IMO. It's not just about chair-throwing, marketing hyperbole, and world domination after all... oh wait.

Re:Fascinating

[Timesprout]

Raymond has touched on the complexity of their software before and noted that oftentimes the complexity was not acually a product of the fuctionality but due to fixes, patches and additions to the code over time. To his credit he has in the past admitted that issues similar to this one were introduced because the core problem ie loading faulty shell extensions was not addressed directly for reasons of time/money/too scared to touch it/whatever and the hacks and workarounds only served to pointlessly bloat the complexity of the whole system. It's also worth noting that this complexity creep was not entirely due to MS. They had 10s of millions users with god knows how many applications which the MS dev teams struggled to support with backwards compatability etc. Raymond has admitted in the past that specific checks were put in the OS for certain applications to keep them functioning. Nice if you are a third party developer but just asking for trouble for your OS.