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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.'"
"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."
Those are basically programming errors, not problems with the API. Don't get me wrong, I find Win32 to be a pain in the ass sometimes, but this article just reeks of flamebait.
Back before my current gig, I was a software developer for companies that hired me to do their work and for several packages I wrote for my own profit. This story comes from the programs I developed for my own profit.
Because the software I wrote was also licensed for source code if the user wanted it, I picked Visual Basic as the platform to use. I wanted to use Visual C, but you could more easly find programmers that could get by in Visual Basic than VC. I should have picked VC rather than VB for a lot of reasons, the main one being that if you had experience in VC, you were at least likely not to be a total idiot. Not so with VB. I found that VB programmers were idiots at the approximate rate of 7:10, while VC programmers were likely to be idiots at an estimated 1:10 ratio... which isn't to say that all VB programmers were idiots, only that they were cheaper labor, and therefore less likely to have a solid background in programming logic.
That said, we'll focus only on my own development problems, just so we are dealing with only one (possible) idiot... me. I started out with VB 2.x. The upgrade to 3.x went fine, with very few problems. When 4.0 came out, I found I had to rewrite about 20% of my code. Sure, there were conversion programs, but they didn't quite fit in with exactly what I wanted the program to do. It'd get it about 90% right, but then I'd have to slog through the rest of the automated code to correct that last 10%. It was faster to discard that code and re-write it.
Then 5.x came out. Only about 50% of my code still worked. And again, the automated process to "ease" transisition left something to be desired. When Visual Studio 6.0 came out, it was a nightmare. only 20% of the code ported. At that point, I sent the 5.x code out to all the people that bought the program (with source or not), and told them that the code was now moribund, I would not be maintaining it, and that I was releaseing the source code to the public domain (5 floppies included). As I recall, that was about 1998-1999 or so.
As late as March 2008, I've been contacted about the code. Of course, it's morphed far past anything I'd written, and I could only help with the general business case logic involved, not the actual code. But having to deal once again with Microsoft development tools, one would have to offer me far, far more money than it would be worth. No, I'm done with Microsoft "development" games. I'm done with school yard bullies trying to take my lunch money. I'm done, PERIOD, with closed source, whenever I have a choice.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
He has an axe to grind, but I'm not sure he has a point. For example, he talks about how .Net was supposed to insulate you from the vagaries of the Win32 interface,but failed. Then he talks about how the Win32 API returns the length of a file as two 32 values that have to be combined, instead of a 64 bit value. The part he leaves out is that .Net's system.IO.FileInfo does exactly what he wants... it returns the file length as a long 64 bit value. So why bring up the old 32 bit interface when you don't have to deal with it anymore? If that's the best he can do, his argument is in trouble.
To make it more amusing those third party APIs slog through the win32 API hell so you don't have to.
I think that's why Microsoft is afraid of breaking the old APIs. Once you have to go through the pain of porting to a new API why not just go cross platform?
The problem is they know a lot of people aren't happy with Windows but it runs all their programs. Once the scrap that backwards compatibility and build something solid, despite the fact it may be their best OS ever, it's on a level playing field with the rest which means people have to find an alternative to their old programs and they might just pick something that isn't Windows and MS isn't having that.
Having to drop into Win32 to call some legacy thing that no-one should really be doing but which you have to do for backwards compatibility, that I could sort of understand. But having to drop into Win32 to call new features that have only just been added? Anyone saying "stop using Win32, just use