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How Microsoft Dropped the Ball With Developers

cremou writes "As part of an Ars Technica series on how one developer migrated from Windows to OS X (and why), this second article concentrates on how Microsoft bungled the transition from XP to Vista. The author looks at some unfortunate decisions Microsoft made that have made Windows an unpleasant development platform. 'So Windows is just a disaster to write programs for. It's miserable. It's quite nice if you want to use the same techniques you learned 15 years ago and not bother to change how you do, well, anything, but for anyone else it's all pain... And it's not just third parties who suffer. It causes trouble for Microsoft, too. The code isn't just inconsistent and ugly on the outside; it's that way on the inside, too. There's a lot of software for Windows, a lot of business-critical software, that's not maintained any more. And that software is usually buggy. It passes bad parameters to API calls, uses memory that it has released, assumes that files live in particular hard-coded locations, all sorts of things that it shouldn't do.'"

3 of 814 comments (clear)

  1. Re:"one developer" by Whitemice · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    And fanboys booster "Open Source" in any and all arguments for free in order to stoke their desperate need for an indentity.

    --
    Using "Common Sense" is being either to arrogant or to ignorant to ask people who know more about something than you.
  2. Re:As a dev who makes his living writing for .Net. by aaron.axvig · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Even on a brand new Dell dual core laptop with 2 gigs of ram, it was sluggish and still could not use the full aero interface.

    There is no way I believe this. I have set up a 1.5GB Gateway dual-core AMD-Mobile that was on sale for $700 on Thanksgiving 2006 and it runs Aero with no problems AT ALL.

    I don't need aero to develop code. The features I was most interested in all got cut from Vista... most notably the filesystem upgrades.

    So you don't need Aero but whine about how slow your laptop was with it? Weird. And I wonder if you can tell me off the top of your head more than three things that you were looking forward to with WinFS that can't be done with NTFS. Fact is NTFS is a damn good file system that has never given me problems or lacked any features that I need, and I demand a lot more than your average user out there. You may be able to list off a bunch of features that some filesystem on Linux has that NTFS doesn't, but when is the last time you were working with NTFS and REALLY needed to do something that it couldn't?

    Regarding the insane cost of SQL Server...what is the problem with paying for great software that you are going to use to make money?

  3. Re:Author is misleading at best.... by TheNetAvenger · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Wow, you are the first post that is so full of crap.

    Your assumption that dropping legacy support is always good should tell everyone you are insane or stupid. If this is true, they OS X should drop that 1970/1980 BSD UNIX API interface, and move forward to an Object based kernel technology like NT. Oh, that would break a lot of *nix and NEXT applications.

    Apple is more guilty of legacy backbending in terms of reusing old technolgy. Microsoft at least uses new technology and makes it appear to work like the old technology for the legacy applications. (Vista works so much like XP, people don't even realize that even how the screen is draw and fonts are rendered is new code, but it works flawlessly with old applications.) This is a win for the developers and users on Microsoft's part, and a lose for them on Apple's part.

    Truly, at least be consistent if you are going to take a side..