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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.'"
WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS GRAPHIC DEPICTIONS OF MICROSOFT RAPING POOCHES FOR THEIR OWN PERCIEVED GAIN. DO NOT READ IF YOU ARE AVERSE TO GRAPHIC CONTENT OR EASILY ANGERED BY MICROSOFTS WANTON COCKMONGERING STUPIDITY.
/nearly/ just a straight usb joystick device. Likely using the old DDK and making by his own confession very few changes he turned this sweet piece of hardware from something that can only be used with the handful of apps the jerk offs built the controller to support, to a universally accessible wonder controler you can use to stomp the crap out of people in gears of war and freespace 2 with.
The biggest issue is Vista drivers. And its not simply hardware people that need drivers, theres a huge base of software that relies on installing system level devices that perform various things Windows is simply unable to do itself.
MS really fucked the pooch particularly gruesomely in this department
1. Device driver development kits got shipped only at the 25th hour
2. DDK availability was low then and is low now. You have to like red tape and receiving anal sex to play this game anymore.
3. Oh yeah, DDK is now useless.
#3 is really where things get EXTRA DOUBLE Microsoft pooch screwing special. See, because Microsoft wanted a DRM safe platform the only way to secure the OS was to make only certified secure drivers able to run on the OS. Whereas before MS certification just a big roadblock most people just went around (see: not fans of pooch screwing), now its totally mandatory with no exceptions.
My favorite example of how badly customers get fucked by MS's great love of pooch rear ends is the RBC9 SpaceNavigator driver. Some enthusiast saw that the badass 6 degree of freedom controller from 3dconnexion was a) basically useless for anything these jerk offs didnt write a driver for yet b) is
Theres just one problem. Theres not a snowballs chance in hell there will ever be a not-totally-fucking trash 64 bit driver for this awesome controller. 3dconnexion thinks their business is selling shitty proprietary software when in fact all we want is a hardware company, they're to freaking drunk on software sales to write something actually useful for their hardware and have no interest in doing so. On the other hand, RBC9, who wrote this sweet driver, has no way of a) getting a new DDK for Vista 64, and b) distributing the driver in usable form if he DID get a DDK.
I largely suspect Adobe's similar pooch abuse related activities regarding availability of 64 bit flash relates to the above circle jerks. Its been nearly 3 years and they still dont have a Flash that runs on 10% of the world's Windows IE.
MS bent hte customer and developer and the pooch over backwards to produce Vista. I really hope it takes them a while to clean all the gore off their dicks when they're done.
link drop / references:
vista drm:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
rbc9 3dconnexion pooching clusterfsck:
http://www.3dconnexion.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=336&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=390&sid=8207b7e5a2e2949040a86ba9c6c31e1d
what a stupid article. i like arstechica most of the time. but this is just asinine.
Oh dear.. so much blind buyin to the Microsoft marketing.
>> No mention or acknowledgement of WPF/WCF or the new APIs that are and 'set' to replace Win32/Win64
Those API's haven't been proven. Yes they look promising, but until there are a significant set of apps out there using them fully, we won't know if they're any good. And there are signs of that not everything is peachy there: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20071206/yahoo-messenger-vista-launches/
>> Go to Channel 10 and watch videos on why XAML/XPS was created and how it trumps every aspect of other display/print technologies
Shocking that microsoft would say their technologies are better than the competition.
>> Let alone how it is an integrated aspect of the video API system in Vista, making programming freaky simple for advanced features and new UI platforms like 3D.
Blah blah blah. We heard plenty of hype about how the compositing in Vista was so wickedly advanced and it allowed effects that couldn't be done on other platforms. That may or may not be true, I haven't studied it in detail so I'm not going to say. And yet in reality it doesn't make a damn bit of difference. Vista doesn't have anything that doesn't exist on other platforms as well, requiring less resources. So even if it is more advanced, the actual benefits are not there.
>> doesn't mention OS Xs lack of keyboard support
Bullshit and you know it.
>> Office 2007 is a new direction in GUI paradigms, and is WELL accepted in the business world
And you know this via your crystal ball? Stop making statements you can't back up.
>> Menus were a hack to make features available in a GUI context, but are a draw back to non-graphical UIs.
Armchair usability experts are funny...
>> Let alone OS X is still a hybrid 64bit OS, using 32bit code throughout the OS, unlike Vista x64
Of course every windows app is still 32 bit, so your 64bit OS doesn't really make much difference in performance. The only way to really take advantage of 64 bit these days is to run Linux, where ~95% of your apps will be native 64bit (aside from some proprietary apps).
Maybe you were being sarcastic, but I think you hit the nail right on the head. Apple's primary concern for OS X seems to be getting their own software to work. If an OS upgrade breaks some third-party program, tough luck. For Microsoft, things are quite different. There are thousands of crappy one-shot Windows applications out there, and Microsoft just can't afford not to keep them working.
There were more details of poor programming practices in the summary than there are in most other articles. Inconsistent interfaces are not such a big deal but memory management that does not work, bugs and broken APIs are a big deal. Ars provides good stuff like that.
No calls now, I'm