Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Microsoft Starts Working On an LLVM-Based Compiler For .NET

Posted by timothy on from the spreading-like-bamboo dept.

An anonymous reader writes Are the days of Microsoft's proprietary compiler over? Microsoft has announced they've started work on a new .NET compiler using LLVM and targets their CoreCLR — any C# program written for the .NET core class libraries can now run on any OS where CoreCLR and LLVM are supported. Right now the compiler only supports JIT compilation but AOT is being worked on along with other features. The new Microsoft LLVM compiler is called LLILC and is MIT-licensed.

125 comments

  1. Developers, Developer, Developers by CSHARP123 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The old CEO was shouting developers, developers and pushing them aside. This CEO doesn't make a peep but quietly bringing in the developers

    1. Re:Developers, Developer, Developers by Richard_at_work · · Score: 3, Interesting

      How did Ballmer push developers aside? Under the latter part of his reign, Microsoft started open sourcing a lot of their developer frameworks etc (ASP.Net MVC in 2012, Entity Framework in 2013 etc) and we saw fairly large shifts in developer conferences and support.

    2. Re:Developers, Developer, Developers by ranton · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Well I can say these announcements have brought me back to developing in .Net. C# has been my favorite language by far ever since v3.5 (and was my favorite by a little since v2.0) but its vendor lock was becoming too much of a liability.

      The moment I can go back to C# and easily have my code run on *nix servers I will drop Java in a heartbeat. Just being able to use LINQ again in my professional life will be a blessing. And going back to Visual Studio over Eclipse / Netbeans / and even IntelliJ is also something I have been longing for.

      --
      -- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
    3. Re:Developers, Developer, Developers by OzPeter · · Score: 1

      Just being able to use LINQ again in my professional life will be a blessing.

      Is there any other language that has something comparable to LINQ?

      --
      I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
    4. Re:Developers, Developer, Developers by neilo_1701D · · Score: 5, Interesting

      How did Ballmer push developers aside?

      He pushed them aside by killing development systems (VB6,FoxPro), introducing new technologies with the promise of how critical they were to the future (Silverlight), and allowing the crown jewels of Windows development, the Win32 API, to slowly become more irrelevant with endless layers of cruft built on top (eg. .net, although a wonderful system, becomes more and more incompatible with the underlying OS; eg. GDI+).

      Microsoft started open sourcing a lot of their developer frameworks etc (ASP.Net MVC in 2012, Entity Framework in 2013 etc) and we saw fairly large shifts in developer conferences and support

      By your own words, we can infer that Ballmer's middle-empire period required large shifting from where it was to what it became.

      Ballmer wasn't bad; his jumping around on stage shouting "Developers!" showed that he knew what the true value of Windows was: the external developers who wrote Win32 code for retail products or company-internal developers. However, his middle-empire stage was a shift to focusing on selling to enterprise customers. This isn't a bad things by itself, but by taking his eye off the "Developer!" ball and focusing elsewhere, he guaranteed that plenty of developers went elsewhere. For example, with the death of VB plenty of developers shifted to Java rather than .net. The fact that it needed a large shift in support shoes just how far developers had slipped in Microsoft's priority.

      It's interesting to see how Nadella is shifting the focus again and broadening it (Windows 10 on Raspberry Pi, for example). Time will tell if Nadella is simply being an anti-Ballmer or if this glasnost is signs of a more fundamental shift in the way Microsoft does business. I hope it's the latter.

    5. Re:Developers, Developer, Developers by 31415926535897 · · Score: 1

      Different scopes.

      The old CEO wanted to enable developers in house. The new CEO seems to want to enable developers in the community.

    6. Re:Developers, Developer, Developers by omtinez · · Score: 2

      Python list comprehension, which is OK for simple queries but doesn't scale as nicely as LINQ

    7. Re:Developers, Developer, Developers by BaronAaron · · Score: 2

      Depending on what dependencies you use in your code you could have had it running on Linux years ago using Mono.

      I've had good experiences running ASP.NET MVC and console apps on Linux in production environments.

    8. Re:Developers, Developer, Developers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I haven't actually used it, but Java 8 adds an API that is very similar to IEnumerable called Streams. It doesn't have the syntax, but I don't actually use the LINQ syntax anyway.

      As the sibling points out, Python has list comprehensions and map/filter/reduce along with the itertools package for less common operations.

      These are ports of functional language concepts over to imperative languages, so any functional language like Haskell or Ocaml will have similar functionality, but that's probably not what you meant. Although Ocaml is quite usable as an imperative language with a heavily functional bent.

    9. Re:Developers, Developer, Developers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      VB6 and FoxPro served their purpose and needed to end. They were prototypes for various parts of what became .Net.

      VB6 was discontinued right away when Microsoft combined VBRUNxxx.DLL with their Java implementation that got shitcanned by the anti-trust courts. Then they refined it into a common language runtime for a VB variant, a Java variant, and a heavily modified variant of C and all of the object oriented stuff that has cropped up around it. Later, they dropped the Java variant. Later still, they added a functional programming language.

      FoxPro was discontinued when they released LINQ, which basically mimics the one thing FoxPro had going for it that nothing else did.

      Win32 has not become "irrelevant", since all of the newer technologies still rely on those older ones. (.Net "winforms" simply packages up the old Win32 WNDCLASSEX and window class registration and instantiation into a handy Form object, so instead of 80+ lines of boiler-plate code, you use a simple new Form() and be done with it. I fail to see how this is anything but progress.)

      And .Net uses GDI and GDI+ directly, and has done so since day 1. More recently, it also uses Direct3D and Windows Media Framework directly.

      It's actually rather amazing that otherwise well-informed people on tech sites keep parroting this panicky crap that naysayers said years ago without doing any research into whether it's correct or not. It seems that the one thing Microsoft hasn't been able to change is the level of trust people place in them. A good portion of that was earned, but it's also about time that some people at least brush a few of the chips off of their shoulders.

    10. Re:Developers, Developer, Developers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      FoxPro, which is where the idea came from.

    11. Re: Developers, Developer, Developers by Redmancometh · · Score: 1

      Yeah just target .net 2.0 and compile it on the server.

    12. Re:Developers, Developer, Developers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      it was all about the openness. Ballmer killed openness. This guy seems to be doing and saying the right things.

    13. Re:Developers, Developer, Developers by neilo_1701D · · Score: 2

      VB6 was discontinued right away when Microsoft combined VBRUNxxx.DLL with their Java implementation that got shitcanned by the anti-trust courts.

      I though it was because VB6 was a COM product?

      ... Later still, they added a functional programming language.

      Nice sledge :)

      Win32 has not become "irrelevant", since all of the newer technologies still rely on those older ones. (.Net "winforms" simply packages up the old Win32 WNDCLASSEX and window class registration and instantiation into a handy Form object, so instead of 80+ lines of boiler-plate code, you use a simple new Form() and be done with it. I fail to see how this is anything but progress.)

      And .Net uses GDI and GDI+ directly, and has done so since day 1.

      I completely agree with everything you've written... if you're a .net programmer, you're fine. But if you're a C programmer sitting directly on top of Win32, you're screwed

      My point, and I guess I didn't make it clearly, is that although these new technologies are fantastic, there is older code out there that is company-critical to companies who invested heavily in the creation of a solution, based on Microsoft's past history of obsessive backwards compatibility, and now find themselves with no way forwards, other than a costly rewrite.

    14. Re:Developers, Developer, Developers by AqD · · Score: 1

      Nope streams only offers the lambda, not expression (= half-compiled code which may be translated into SQL and XML and many other uses), and it's NOT compatible with existing iterable/collection APIs which means its use is very inconvenient and limited. If you really want to use those features you have to try my library jxtn.core.axi which modifies system interfaces to add such functionality.

      The expression stuff can be done by runtime bytecode analysis (not officially), i.e. reverting your bytecode back into expression and then rewriting it. The tech is just out of research last year and has been only used in Jinq, and it requires JVM bytecode - so not possible in dalvik or pre-compiled situation.

    15. Re:Developers, Developer, Developers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      VB6 was a COM object that implemented a "runtime" component. The same could be said for Microsoft's Java implementation. The runtime that backed VB6 and earlier (VBRUNxxx.DLL) was no less a runtime than the JRE or CLR. OK, it was "less", but it was still a runtime.

      My point was that .Net is an inner platform (as all interpreted-bytecode runtimes are), and thus everything it does can be done, albeit less elegantly, with the underlying native Win32 and COM libraries that it uses.

      I encourage you to read up on what WinRT really is. (That's WinRT, the library, not Windows RT, the ARM port of Windows. WinRT is also called WinMD, just in case you weren't already confused enough.) It allows you to make unmanaged "C++/CX" libraries, then use them from C++/CX, C++/CLI, the other .Net languages, and JavaScript. That's actually how those Direct3D and WMF libraries I linked to before are implemented. WinRT is something of a major overhaul to the good old IUnknown from COM that makes it mostly irrelevant which stack you use to write your apps.

      Far from isolating various developer groups and disciplines, they're actually bringing them all under one roof for the first time. Whether those groups will all play nice with each other, well, that's yet to be seen.

    16. Re:Developers, Developer, Developers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Right on. The sibling poster is a propeller-head (c.f. his mad ramblings about WinRT). Win32 could have been in much better competitive position if Microsoft hadn't wasted so much time and effort trying to reinvent their own wheel. I guess the writing was on the wall even before .NET, when they started gratuitously forcing parts of Windows to only interact via COM instead of exposing the functionality as pure Win32.. :/

    17. Re:Developers, Developer, Developers by Ed+Avis · · Score: 1

      So... what is it you need that Mono doesn't do?

      --
      -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
    18. Re:Developers, Developer, Developers by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I completely agree with everything you've written... if you're a .net programmer, you're fine. But if you're a C programmer sitting directly on top of Win32, you're screwed

      Lots of cutting-edge applications are still written in C or C++ and directly use the Windows API (it's not called Win32 anymore). In fact, I'd go so far as to say the majority of large commercial applications you can think of are native apps: Photoshop, Microsoft Office, most videogames, web browsers, media players, etc, etc. Nearly all the new APIs released with new versions of Windows are available to native applications. There's no reason a company has to abandon their legacy C codebase if they don't want to. BTW, the "way forward" for C developers is called C++, and it's conveniently backwards compatible with your C codebase.

      The major reason one would consider switching to .NET from native code is productivity, not new functionality. The .NET APIs are much easier to use than the much older Windows APIs, and the languages .NET supports like C# are far easier to use as well. You don't even have to completely abandon your C or C++ code either. It's pretty simple to write interop layers to communicate between C# and C, and have done so many times at work.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    19. Re: Developers, Developer, Developers by cyber-vandal · · Score: 1

      VB lives on in .NET although it looks like it might finally be dropped in vNext. Silverlight was dropped because technology moved on but is still supported for another 5 years.

    20. Re: Developers, Developer, Developers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > VB lives on in .NET although it looks like it might finally be dropped in vNext.

      That's not true at all. The Roslyn team is also working on fully managed VB.NET compilers written in VB.NET (well, a mix of VB.NET and C# as the common libs between the C# and VB.NET compilers are in C#). Why would MS bother with such an investment in the language if they had no intention of continuing to maintain it?

    21. Re:Developers, Developer, Developers by ndykman · · Score: 1

      Not really. Sure, many languages have things like LINQ Select/Where (map/filter), but that's just for objects. It's the expression trees where things get interesting. Expression trees allow a provider to generate a different artifact than a map call over objects. LINQ to Entities creates calls which the Entity Framework turns into SQL.

      You can make a custom provider against any data source, really. There is an example of LINQ to Twitter that turns LINQ queries into Twitter API calls (http://linqtotwitter.codeplex.com/).

      This feature requires language support, because when an Expression is needed, the compiler needs to turn a lambda (and so on) into a expression tree, not into compiled CLR code in a closure.

      To be fair, something similar could be done in other languages with proper support. And writing a LINQ provider is non trivial, but it is possible and in certain cases, it can greatly simplify programming.

    22. Re:Developers, Developer, Developers by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 2

      The nice thing about LINQ is that it covers more ground than just basic map/filter/reduce; notably, joins - which makes it possible to actually reasonably translate expression trees to SQL and such. And joins are a pain in the ass to write using raw lambdas, the sugar is very welcome there.

      Deep nested queries are also often convenient with sugar, because it has "let" for temporary values.

    23. Re:Developers, Developer, Developers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      NOT compatible with existing iterable/collection APIs

      Citation needed.

      list.getStream.collect(Collectors.toList());

    24. Re:Developers, Developer, Developers by godefroi · · Score: 1

      .NET isn't an interpreted-bytecode runtime. It never has been. It's always been JIT compiled. Always.

      --
      Karma: Poor (Mostly affected by lame karma-joke sigs)
    25. Re: Developers, Developer, Developers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This will still be PROPRIETARY. LLVM is not GPL. Microsoft has zero incentive to release their compiler source, even if it does use LLVM.

    26. Re:Developers, Developer, Developers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      VB6 and FoxPro served their purpose and needed to end. They were prototypes for various parts of what became .Net.

      If that were true then porting projects from VB6 and FoxPro to .Net should not be the nighmare in an dystopian hell that it is. I like .Net for most things, but whereas VB6 fits COM programming like hand in glove .Net fits COM programming like hand in hedge trimmer - porting a COM project from VB6 to .Net wil give you a bloody mess. Relying on garbage collector to release COM references sounds nice until you discover that you really need to control when they are actually released and discover that .Net will fight you every step of the way. Making COM wrappers IDisposable so that you could control lifetime/refcount with using() constructs? Oh, no, can't do that. Much better to have a function to decrements refcount and no reasonable way to check if your own idea of refcount matches what .Net thinks the refcount should be. And woe unto him that gets it wrong! People are actually warning against using ReleaseComObject despite that this function is the only way you can do COM release correctly. Because so many gets it wrong and don't discover it until it is too late. If there were an updated VB6-alternative that didn't rely on .Net I'd be the first in the queue to buy it. And the same goes for FoxPro.

    27. Re:Developers, Developer, Developers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There is a ton of stuff in .NET that is not in mono.

      mono is not, has not and never will be an acceptable development platform.

      Nothing significant has ever been built that mono can run.

    28. Re:Developers, Developer, Developers by Xest · · Score: 1

      "He pushed them aside by killing development systems (VB6,FoxPro)"

      Except VB6 and Foxpro were never really developer tools. They were tools for non-developers to get basic programming tasks done. That was kind of exactly why they were developed- things like Visual C++ were always the tools targeted at professional developers.

      "the Win32 API, to slowly become more irrelevant with endless layers of cruft built on top"

      Win32 API became irrelevant, because it's become increasingly irrelevant. Why on earth would you want to keep an outdated API that's now decades old in it's design and origins as your primary development target when no one is using it? That just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It doesn't make sense to maintain something that's inefficient to develop with, and I say this as someone who cut my teeth on Windows development with C and Win32 API many years ago. I have fond memories of it but I've no idea why you'd give a shit about it in this day and age.

      Your argument is classic of someone incapable of dealing with change, which, in the world of technology is probably one of the least desirable traits you can have. You can boil your argument down even further when you talk about layers of cruft, you can say using C with the Win32 API is in itself a layer of cruft built on top of just doing everything in pure assembly, which is a layer of cruft on top of just doing everything directly with machine code and fuck the APIs.

      "Ballmer wasn't bad; his jumping around on stage shouting "Developers!" showed that he knew what the true value of Windows was: the external developers who wrote Win32 code for retail products or company-internal developers."

      Except no one's actually done that for the best part of two decades now. Even before .NET really took off it was far and away MFC that was used for the majority of Windows development. Win32 API development was already largely dead when Gates left for all but the most basic things like setting up a message processing stub to get a DirectX or OpenGL program going.

      "However, his middle-empire stage was a shift to focusing on selling to enterprise customers. This isn't a bad things by itself, but by taking his eye off the "Developer!" ball and focusing elsewhere, he guaranteed that plenty of developers went elsewhere."

      So what? The enterprise became more important, fat client applications gave way to web applications. Ballmer doubled the profits of Microsoft during his tenure, so it looks like his focus change was exactly what the majority of businesses and developers needed. The fact there's a handful of luddites that bemoan the decrease in usage of Win32 API is meaningless because you're such an irrelevance in the grand scheme of things- most people can deal with change and follow necessary trends, even if you cannot. That's not a problem with Ballmer or Microsoft, that's a problem with you. You can't blame Ballmer's capability for pursuing necessary change for your inability to change.

      People shifted to Java because it was a paradigm that gained a lot of hype in both business and academic circles and had a 6 year headstart on .NET and that happened well under Gates' reign not Ballmer's. Mis-steps such as VisualJ++ were the reason for that. By the time Gates stepped down as CEO, .NET hadn't even been released so Ballmer's tenure was the one that was responsible for taking all those devs lost during Gates' reign back because a combination of a far more competitive .NET, and Oracle's screwing of Java has helped grow the .NET community massively.

      "It's interesting to see how Nadella is shifting the focus again and broadening it (Windows 10 on Raspberry Pi, for example). Time will tell if Nadella is simply being an anti-Ballmer or if this glasnost is signs of a more fundamental shift in the way Microsoft does business. I hope it's the latter."

      It's neither. It's a continuation of the status quo, or did you completely miss

  2. Anticipating RMS response by krel · · Score: 2

    I anticipate Stallman may have a heart attack soon.

    --
    karma: ouch!
    1. Re:Anticipating RMS response by cb88 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      RMS... doesn't like LLVM either.

      http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/02/08/210241/rms-objects-to-support-for-llvms-debugger-in-gnu-emacss-gudel

    2. Re:Anticipating RMS response by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      To Stallman Open Source without the GPL is just as bad as closed source. He wants to enforce his "Four Freedoms" and the GPL is the tool he uses to enforce them - Open Source while required is not by itself sufficient to meet his criteria. Even better, if LLVM was GPL it still would not guarantee his for freedoms, the GPL cannot perfectly secure modular software ( see the issues with GCC integration in EMACS, he believes the required plug-in would "leak" internal data).

    3. Re:Anticipating RMS response by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      RMS doesn't like the proprietary nature of his circulatory system. He lambastes the NIH nature of the self versus non-self immune system. Also, DNA does not come with source code, documentation, or an acceptable GNU license.

      As such he will not have a heart attack; malaria on the other hand is acceptable. Mosquitoes distribute malaria on a FRAND basis to all who ask, not to mention those who do not ask.

    4. Re:Anticipating RMS response by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      whoosh...

    5. Re: Anticipating RMS response by spongman · · Score: 1

      Rms won't sleep until gcc outputs gpl. (write that in bash)

  3. Re:Features by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Wrong question. You should be asking "when will it be included in the systemd project and so depend on systemd init (and a bunch of other crap)?" /pedantic

  4. Great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Great news. I mean, I'm still not into .NET, but this is a nice move and I appreciate it none-the-less. I know a few people that prefer to do their development on and/or for Linux, and also prefer .NET, so I'm sure they will be happy.

  5. Re:Features by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I would it expect it to compile svchost.exe. So yes, it will compile systemd.

  6. Few understand this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    MS is still evil. Not long time ago we had a story here on Slashdot on locked Windows 10 computers where you can not change the OS anymore.

    They are still working in many dirty ways. However, the current MS understands one critical thing that the MS of Ballmer never got. Developers want free and good tools. The more developers they get for their OS, the more apps and the more users as the users go there where they get the apps they want.

    It is no secret they have had problems attracting developers for Windows mobile devices and a recent survay at Stack Overflow confirms they have lost a lot of developers.

    Unless they get people to develop for their products they are lost. This is why they are giving away for free the development tools in order to get apps also runnable on their platform. For them it is better with cross platform apps than no apps at all.

    I am very happy for the free tools they give away but still sad they remain evil. I have seen way too many "Windows only" devices and worse it will become I am afraid.

    1. Re:Few understand this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This has nothing to do with Windows. .Net is not Windows. No one is forcing you to use MS tools for development. You're free to use whatever tools you like.

    2. Re:Few understand this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well I'm glad that you have such great reading comprehension and felt it necessary to make an off-topic nonsense post. Not only did your post have nothing to do with what I said, but you also seem to be directing the insinuation that I use .NET at me, when I very clearly not interested in .NET at all.

      I'm well aware that .NET is not specific to Windows. However, those that have used it elsewhere (ex: MONO), have often complained about Microsoft not being very open about their share. You are aware that .NET was created by Microsoft and fore Windows, right? You're also aware that they haven't exactly been willing to cooperate with anyone that wished to bring functionality to other OSes, right?

    3. Re:Few understand this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ignore that post. Slashdot fucked up and made it look like you replied to something else entirely. Disregard my rant.

    4. Re:Few understand this by gbjbaanb · · Score: 1

      but nobody sensible develops .NET without Visual Studio. .NET is becoming true to its Java roots - write once (on a Windows box with Microsoft tools and you might as well use Outlook and Office too) run anywhere.

    5. Re: Few understand this by Redmancometh · · Score: 1

      Xamarin is actually a VERY nice visual studio alternative. Not just for mobile either..

    6. Re: Few understand this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You mean Xamarin Studio.

      Xamarin is just a company.

    7. Re:Few understand this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Slashdot did. Okay. Carry on.

    8. Re:Few understand this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Whoosh

      Redhat does require nor stop OEM's from selling anything. MS does.

      MS just took a step towards making the misnamed* secure boot mandatory on Intel-based machines. It will happen and MS will get smacked so hard from it they won't recover so I am hoping they do it sooner rather than later.

      The faster MS is broken into meaningless pieces the faster we can all move forward.

      Seriously, there are people that think secure boot stops things like rootkits. It is laughable. Boot-sector malware is so rare that secure boot is wholly unnecessary.

    9. Re:Few understand this by LordLimecat · · Score: 1

      Im not arguing whether SecureBoot is good or bad, but you're making several false technical statements and Im not a big fan of arguments premised on BS.

      Bootsector malware is (or was) exceedingly common on Windows XP and 7, to the point where I was regularly using tools like aswMBR and GMER to remove it. Thats why there are so many tools to detect it-- it was quite common. Sinowal, TDSS, Whistler, and several other rootkits infect the boot sector.

      In any case Microsoft is not forcing OEMs to do anything. This is about a set of requirements that were given to get a Windows certification; one of them for Windows 8 was that OEMs were REQUIRED to allow other OSes to be installed. That requirement has been removed, which could have any of a number of rationale-- it is possible its for "lockin" reasons, but there are other valid reasons too, such as the rise of locked-down single-OS tablets. Microsoft continuing to have their "other OS" requirement could arguably alienate those OEMs, so they removed that requirement from their certification.

      You have an obvious issue with Microsoft as a whole, but thats not a valid techical argument against a specific one of their technologies. Secureboot IMO has a lot of baggage, but it has the very real benefit that it can defeat a number of very real and very common rootkits like TDL3/4 which have historically been nightmarish to deal with.

  7. Hard to trust them by monkeyxpress · · Score: 1

    I would like to believe that Microsoft really has turned a new corner with this more open strategy but it really is hard. We had to put up with so much rubbish from them over the years with Windows. As someone getting into web development it is also just blatantly obvious they tried to sabotage the adoption of a common standard for a long as possible to prevent the web becoming a cross-platform environment (IE6 I am looking at you). And then there was the whole changing Office pointlessly every two years so you had to buy a faster computer and pay them more money.

    In the end I think they are just a business business. What I mean by that is they don't really subscribe to any ideology, vision or values other than just dominating at all cost. There is no rule that says they can't do that and plenty of other companies do, so I don't blame them, but in the end unless I start hearing from MS employees that there has been a wholesale change in culture I just think this openness stuff will only last until they get back to a dominate position again.

    Having said that they do make some good dev tools and I won't turn my back on them. Because in the end the best thing to keep all the big companies in line is to ensure that none of them can get into a entirely dominate position, even if they promise us they won't be evil...

    1. Re:Hard to trust them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How is getting people to buy Office every two years any different from Apple hyping a new phone every year? All businesses want to be the dominant business is their field. That's what capitalism is!

    2. Re:Hard to trust them by Marginal+Coward · · Score: 1

      I would like to believe that Microsoft really has turned a new corner with this more open strategy but it really is hard.

      "Only Nixon could go to China." How can you ever improve relations with a former enemy if you don't begin to trust them? It takes a bit of a leap of faith, then trust can be built in small steps over a period of time. We see the same sort of thing happening recently with Obama and Raul Castro. They're both taking small steps forward.

      In Microsoft's case, we see them taking a series of small steps toward building credibility in the Open Source world. That won't happen instantly, and there are some folks for whom it will never happen (RMS and followers, you know who you are.) But every time Microsoft takes some small step in the right direction, I see folks here immediately wondering what they're really up to. In fact, last time this sort of thing came up here, someone even brought up the Trojan Horse analogy. Maybe - but probably not. I prefer the simpler explanation that Microsoft's realizes that their business interests have changed. In fact, they would be stupid not to.

      Regardless, the war with Microsoft can never end for those who are unable to trust them under any circumstances. Just as World War II will never end for a Japanese soldier who refuses to leave the jungle. And like World War II, Microsoft's Windows Monopoly was over long ago.

    3. Re:Hard to trust them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      IE6-IE8, maybe. But it's been a while since IE has been standards compliant. You can't blame MS for vendors not moving forward. As for the Office...it's a company. They need continual income and that means they have to continually make updates and, yes, push people forward. They've never FORCED anyone to not use Office 1995. They just don't support it anymore and aren't forcing their new products to work with it.

    4. Re:Hard to trust them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Maybe you believe in the brand too much (good or bad). Lots of smart engineers at MS, lots of shitty managers and marketing and dumb designers. Look at how google is getting a lot shittier now and they were once all about open ecosystems and released good software like gmail and reader and igoogle too. their software is awful now and their designs optionless and crappy, and look a all their failures since their IPO. they are bloated now, due for a reckoning like this entire tech bubble. Companies go thru these cycles, some survive some like yahoo never seem to come back.

    5. Re:Hard to trust them by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 1

      Don't conflate "open source" with "good guys". There's nothing inherently bad about a business wanting their own products and platforms to succeed. You'd be a pretty lousy business if that wasn't your goal. It's the *methods* they use to achieve succeed which are the critical factor in that determination.

      It's clear they're serious about their open source strategy, but that's because it makes good business sense, not because they're suddenly embracing all things FOSS. It's just an acknowledgement that they're not the dominant player anywhere except on the desktop. Thus, they want to make it easy for developers using their tools to port code to Linux on servers, or Android and iOS for mobile, along with Windows on the desktop. If they didn't do that, Windows as a platform would appear increasingly isolated and irrelevant to a broader development strategy.

      So, don't misunderstand, this is just Microsoft working to improve their own products. Since MS themselves are now cross-platform developers, they need Visual Studio to have good cross-platform capabilities as well. Of course, this also benefits their developer customers who are doing cross-platform work as well. The fact that this is actually a benefit to other operating systems is likely completely irrelevant to them - it's just the reality of the current market.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    6. Re:Hard to trust them by fisted · · Score: 1

      They're doing whatever they perceive to be most profitable. If they are assuming closed source is the way to go, then closed source it is. Who gets to decide that, ultimately? The shareholders. What are the shareholders' objectives? Hint: It starts with R and ends in OI

      --
      CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
    7. Re:Hard to trust them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      With an iPhone you can still sms to people with a 20 year old Nokia, you can still phone with people with a 50 year old telephone. You could not exchange documents with someone with a 4 years older Office. And this simple feature, exchanging data, had to be enforced by legal pressure...

    8. Re:Hard to trust them by KingMotley · · Score: 1

      You could not exchange documents with someone with a 4 years older Office. And this simple feature, exchanging data, had to be enforced by legal pressure...

      Say what? Uh, no. Office has always allowed exchanging data to where ever, from where ever. I think you've drank too much of some funky cool aid. Word has always allowed saving to and from the 1997 version (.doc), or to other formats (.txt, .rtf, .xml, .xps, .wps), it also allows saving to .pdf, and the newer .docx format in both strict and non-strict. You could always access the document via COM/OLE as well, and read and manipulate it, and there were public hooks for writing your own code to read/write into whatever format you wanted (they called them filters). The only thing legal pressure did was force them to include the .odt format as well, which is odd, because usually the courts get mad at Microsoft bundling stuff in that could have always been done by a 3rd party, but in this case, it wanted to opposite.

      FIlters is how the older versions of word were given the capability long after release to be able to read newer version of the file format as well. For example, older versions word being able to read .docx, which came out after their release. PDF was also originally added this way as well.

    9. Re:Hard to trust them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Obama and Raul Castro?

      Are there still Russian missiles on Cuban soil? No, looks like they were removed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis -- in December of 1962! So, why is the US still embargoing Cuba??!?

      WW2 hasn't ended; it's just looking for WW3. The common symptom is central banking. Which is why it hasn't ended.

    10. Re:Hard to trust them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      IE(any version) is the least standards complaint of any reasonable browser.

    11. Re: Hard to trust them by spongman · · Score: 1

      http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P...

  8. I don't understand by Blaskowicz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    With LLVM using an intermediate representation of code (LLVM IR) and CLR another : MSIL, now called CIL, does that mean it goes C# -> LLVM bytecode -> .NET bytecode?, does the JIT does both steps at once, why doesn't that mean every single language with a LLVM target can now run on the CoreCLR?, was LLVM modified, was what's in my first question horribly wrong?

    1. Re:I don't understand by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative
      Other direction; the C# -> .NET bytecode step happens elsewhere, this project handles the .NET bytecode -> LLVM bytecode part:

      LLILC is an Open-Source project that Compiles msIL (.NET) code to native binary, using the LLVM compiler framework. We pronounce it "lilac". The project will provide both a JIT ("Just-In-Time") and an AOT ("Ahead-Of-Time") compiler targeting CoreCLR.

      From the Background page of the linked wiki.

    2. Re:I don't understand by HyperQuantum · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I didn't look into the details of the project, but to me it seems to like the following:

      A JIT compiler is used in a virtual machine to run a function/method by compiling it from some sort of bytecode or intermediate representation to native code and then jumping to the generated code to execute it. So in this case this would be when the Common Language Runtime wants to run a CIL method for the first time: it generates LLVM intermediate representation from the CIL, then uses LLVM to compile that to native code.

      So it would be: CIL --> LLVM data --> native code

      This means that the CLR, and thus all code compiled for .NET, can run on all platforms that LLVM can generate native code for.

      --
      I am not really here right now.
    3. Re:I don't understand by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Including Z80.

    4. Re:I don't understand by complete+loony · · Score: 2

      C# -> MSIL / CIL (CLR) -> LLVM bitcode -> machine code.

      The summary is slightly misleading. Though they are working towards using LLVM, they currently have about 90% of their core JIT tests working with LLVM on windows x64, the rest fall back to their current JIT. So you won't be able to use this to run C# on linux / arm for a while yet.

      There's been quite a bit of recent development on JIT support in LLVM. They had an old JIT a few versions ago which had it's own machine code generation pipeline. This was replaced with MCJIT, that leveraged the same code generation pipeline as the AOT path. More recently there's an effort called ORC to build a more flexible API to better handle the use cases that various JIT writers typically wish to implement. Their existing MCJIT API will still exist but it will become just one example implementation of using this underlying API.

      While it is possible to implement garbage collection and exception handling in LLVM, these areas of the compiler could benefit from more improvement. Particularly in the area of compatibility with the native Microsoft stack.

      --
      09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
    5. Re:I don't understand by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This means that the CLR, and thus all code compiled for .NET, can run on all platforms that LLVM can generate native code for.

      Slow down. .NET has tons of Windows dependencies so no, you can't just compile any .NET code to run on any LLVM supported OS.

      smh

    6. Re:I don't understand by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      Or if you want to get evil, asm.js
      Then write a javascript interpreter in C# ..

    7. Re:I don't understand by godefroi · · Score: 1

      This is in support of CoreCLR, the version of .NET without any Windows dependencies (or that's the plan, anyway, they're not there yet, I don't think).

      --
      Karma: Poor (Mostly affected by lame karma-joke sigs)
  9. Make sense, actually by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 2

    I think it's important to understand that the .NET JIT compiler should probably be considered more part of the .NET *runtime*, not necessarily part of the development platform for .NET. Since they want to port .NET to non-Microsoft operating systems, it makes sense to utilize LLVM to target those platforms for the JIT compiler rather than trying to write a new one from scratch. They needed a solid compiler to accompany their open source .NET platform for it to be a more complete open-source solution. Moreover, they've been extending Visual C++'s support for alternative platforms like Android, so it also makes sense that they'd be gaining expertise with LLVM.

    It's probably not the end of their proprietary compiler, or even necessarily an indication they're thinking this way, but it may make more sense for them to utilize LLVM so as to target a larger number of platforms. They just recently rewrote their own .NET compiler a couple of years ago and released it as open source, so it's sort of odd to see a new project so soon. I'm guessing they figured it would be more work to extend that project to support all the platforms they're releasing CoreCLR for than using LLVM. Hard to say.

    Also, there's still the native compiler, used for C/C++, and they've been sinking an enormous amount of development resources into making it compliant with the recent advances in those languages, so it also seems unlikely they're going to toss that work.

    --
    Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    1. Re:Make sense, actually by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I think you misundertand how .NET is split. The new .NET compiler (Roslyn) is actually a program to convert source code (C#, VB) into CIL (common intermediate language). It is the CIL that is contained in a .NET executable file, and the JIT compiler turns this IL code into machine code. The LLILC project is intended to use LLVM as the JIT, and to give you the ability to compile to machine code ahead of time (rather than at runtime).

      dom

    2. Re:Make sense, actually by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 1

      Ah, I see... ok, that makes a bit more sense then. So Roslyn is more or less the front end of the compiler tool chain, while LLVM is the back end, so to speak. Thanks for the clarification.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    3. Re:Make sense, actually by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 1

      I think that "by their proprietary compiler", he was referring to the JIT compiler.

  10. I think that the people at OpenCOBOL... by emil · · Score: 1

    ...would beg to differ, with this fact from the COBOL wiki:

    In 1997, Gartner Group estimated that there were a total of 200 billion lines of COBOL in existence which ran 80% of all business programs.

    I would bet you that COBOL environments have had 1/10th, and perhaps 1/100th of the security problems as systems based on C.

    1. Re: I think that the people at OpenCOBOL... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      1997 was almost two decades ago. That was before the rise of Java and .NET, too. Yes, there is still some COBOL code in use today, but it's nowhere near as much as your very outdated stats suggest.

    2. Re: I think that the people at OpenCOBOL... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Abandon all hope, ye who gaze upon COBOL in .Net!

      I see you clinging to hope, yeah, you, right there. Abandon it!

    3. Re: I think that the people at OpenCOBOL... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      How about 2009 then?

      https://cis.hfcc.edu/faq/cobol

    4. Re: I think that the people at OpenCOBOL... by Ravaldy · · Score: 1

      I would believe these numbers if they pertained to the financial sector but there's no way they account for 80% of the business code running today (in 1997-99, probably). If it's true then I wrote 1 / 2,000,000 of the business code in use.

      There was a huge shift towards web technologies in the early 2000. The % of market share for COBOL would have started to drop significantly within the last 10-15 years. One sign is the removal of COBOL courses in universities and colleges.

    5. Re: I think that the people at OpenCOBOL... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      1997 was almost two decades ago.

      http://www.math-exercises-for-kids.com/

    6. Re: I think that the people at OpenCOBOL... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How is 18 years not "almost two decades"?

    7. Re: I think that the people at OpenCOBOL... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually it was a complete millenia ago!!!eleven!

    8. Re: I think that the people at OpenCOBOL... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It is. The GP AC is a fucking dumbass, that's all.

    9. Re: I think that the people at OpenCOBOL... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Worst part is there are some 3rd party libraries that have a dependency on that product.

    10. Re: I think that the people at OpenCOBOL... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There is still a ton of Cobol in use, not "some" a ton. It still amazes me how much I find out there and how many old programmers are still needed to support it.

    11. Re:I think that the people at OpenCOBOL... by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      I'll agree with you: COBOL systems have much fewer security problems as C systems. This is because nobody used COBOL to do anything fancy. If you wrote a device driver or piece of web software in both COBOL and C, I'd expect a lot more security problems in the COBOL system. Writing a financial reporting program in C is going to give you a lot fewer security problems than something like SSL.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
    12. Re:I think that the people at OpenCOBOL... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's possible to write a worm in COBOL, depending on the system (like an HP3000), along with user-level macros enabled, and "standard" (insecure) password selection. Anybody who claims that a programming language is entirely secure, while allowing direct, unsandboxed read/write access to a disk is more of a fool than I'm giving them credit for.

  11. Open source attempts by Roceh · · Score: 1

    There is a couple of open source projects doing this already: http://csnative.codeplex.com/ https://github.com/xen2/SharpL...

  12. Microsoft by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Please fire any non-engineers tied to the Windows 8.x UI

  13. So cancel GNUCobol then. by emil · · Score: 1

    Did you have directory delete permissions?

    http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnucobol

    1. Re: So cancel GNUCobol then. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why the heck would you use GNU COBOL, an irrelevant, incomplete and unused implementation, to try and back up your pathetically incorrect claim? The fact that you brought it up indicates your COBOL knowledge is nil.

  14. The enemy inside: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    This isn''t the first time Microsoft has contributed to "Open Source." It starts each time with Microsoft contributing code which is actually under an OSI approved license. Over time, Microsoft then attempts to gray the lines between what is Open Source and what is not. Take for example Microsoft CodePlex which they misrepresent as "Project Hosting for Open Source Software." Shortly after it's creation, a Microsoft controlled project called Singularity RDK was added which redefines Open Source as being for only "non-commercial academic purpose" which of course violates the Open Source Definition #6 which "prohibit license traps that prevent open source from being used commercially."

    Some people have pointed out that SourceForge also has projects that don't honor the open source definition. However, no one has been able to point to such a project where SourceForge itself is the author of the project. Microsoft has both set the rules and breaks the rules for CodePlex.

    Microsoft is still following embrace, extend and extinguish. The latest contributions are back at phase 1 but it won't be long until Microsoft is back again at phase 3.

  15. Or perhaps MS wants out of the language biz by gestalt_n_pepper · · Score: 0

    What better way to no rid themselves of an annoyance than to open source everything? Microsoft's treatment of their own development community over the last decade has ranged from apathetic to clueless to abusive. No automated migration path to move code from one platform to another. Dead ending VB6. Effectively dead-ending Winforms. Basically telling ISVs with established businesses and skill sets that their only option is an expensive recoding project, after they re-educate themselves.

    I'm pretty sure this is the beginning of the end. Of developer support, and eventually, of Windows as a desktop OS.

    And good riddance. You're a damn fool if you invest in any Microsoft technology at this point.

    --
    Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
    1. Re:Or perhaps MS wants out of the language biz by KingMotley · · Score: 1

      Dead ending VB6? Are you kidding? They had been saying that it was being phased out before VB6 was released. It's been dead for 17 years now. Give it a rest already. VB6 SUCKED.

    2. Re: Or perhaps MS wants out of the language biz by spongman · · Score: 1

      Tell that to the office team. When we get C# as the embedded language in office, maybe then VB can die. For now, it lives on like a zombie dragged, toothless, by an ex-lover through the programming landscape by its old OLE apis.

  16. Seems like it's time to abandon LLVM. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Microsoft has a history of embracing technologies, extending them, and then killing them.
    LLVM just joined the list of endangered species!

  17. EEE by rahvin112 · · Score: 0

    Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

    Though they won't achieve the third one because LLVM is BSD licensed they WILL add incompatible extensions that will be only compilable with their version of LLVM. It will happen.

    1. Re:EEE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This.

      1. Get people to use C# on *nix
      2. .NET has special features only available on Windows, because Windows.
      3. These features become invaluable
      4. *nix developers develop for Windows.

      1. Embrace
      2, 3. Extend
      4. Extinguish.

      This will take years of course, and as a C# developer who enjoys the command line roots of *nix, I'm happy to see #1.

    2. Re:EEE by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 1

      Where do you see "their version of LLVM" here anywhere?

    3. Re:EEE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      derp

      Just like x86 versions would always require "secure" boot to be disabled at the users discretion, right?

      Windows only LLVM extension will happen.

      It is not a matter of if it will happen, but when.

  18. Re:Features by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Systemd isn't analogous to svchost.exe. It's more like services.exe, which is a much lower-level process. Svchost.exe is a shim to allow non-service programs to piggyback into the service framework without actually complying with the correct interface specifications.

  19. COBOL has slumped to 12% as of 2011 by emil · · Score: 1

    Still nothing to sneeze at.

    "Java and C# .Net are now the languages of choice in the projects that the ISBSG receives. COBOL has slumped to 12% (it used to be 38%) and Visual Basic has dropped back to 5% after peaking at 15%."

    1. Re: COBOL has slumped to 12% as of 2011 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why do you keep using outdated stats that are totally irrelevant today to support your ludicrous claims? Face it, you're wrong. COBOL's usage isn't 80%. It's not 12%. It's much less than that. For every new line of COBOL code written today, there are millions of lines of new code written in other languages. COBOL's proportion is almost nonexistent now.

    2. Re:COBOL has slumped to 12% as of 2011 by Ravaldy · · Score: 1

      The fact is that COBOL is in decline. It isn't used for new projects and most projects are probably in maintenance mode (that's me speculating based on people I know who work for financial institutions). Maybe nothing to sneeze at BUT I wouldn't pick COBOL for a new project..

    3. Re: COBOL has slumped to 12% as of 2011 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Business moves slowly.

      If it was 12% in 2011, it is not much less today.

  20. I'm confused. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why did Microsoft let go of Qt? It was tons better than DotNet and already had Linux/Mac support.

  21. No to .NET by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Microsoft dropped .NET support years ago.

  22. Holy acronyms Batman! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Are the days of Microsoft's proprietary compiler over? Microsoft has announced they've started work on a new .NET compiler using LLVM and targets their CoreCLR — any C# program written for the .NET core class libraries can now run on any OS where CoreCLR and LLVM are supported. Right now the compiler only supports JIT compilation but AOT is being worked on along with other features. The new Microsoft LLVM compiler is called LLILC and is MIT-licensed.

    There's like six or seven acronyms in the summary alone. How are people not familiar with Microsoft supposed to understand this?

    1. Re: Holy acronyms Batman! by spongman · · Score: 1

      You're not. This is a tech website. Click the link near the box where you typed 'Google.com' marked 'Martha Stewart'

    2. Re:Holy acronyms Batman! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Only C# .NET and CoreCLR is MS-related.

      If you don't know what JIT AOT LLVM and MIT licensed mean GTFO, you do not belong here.

  23. Re:I didn't get the memo by JcMorin · · Score: 1

    I see new versions, libraries and more commitment to .NET everywhere... I didn't get the memo they were dropping it.

  24. Odd MS patched it today then, eh? Not... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Today's "Patch Tuesday" & a BIG chunk of 12 updates was .NET (versions 4.5, 4.51, & 4.52) buddy!

    APK

    P.S.=> Quit being a "FUD" spreading troll man... apk

    1. Re:Odd MS patched it today then, eh? Not... apk by theskipper · · Score: 1

      The IP of the MS update server must have been set to 0.0.0.0 in his hosts file. Mystery solved.

  25. Good joke, but... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    See subject: Wouldn't affect it - MS bypasses hosts for update servers...

    APK

    P.S.=> "Onwards & UPWARDS"... apk

    1. Re:Good joke, but... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Is there no way to set your own update servers?

  26. Re:I didn't get the memo by KingMotley · · Score: 1

    Don't believe what Anonymous Cowards say. They are typically clueless. The next version of .NET should be released in the next 1-6 months (I'm guessing around 4).

  27. This makes a LOT of sense for Microsoft by jonwil · · Score: 2

    Right now Microsoft has a JIT compiler running on a few platforms that translates .NET byte code into native code. Instead of reinventing the wheel and writing their own JIT compiler for a bunch other platforms they want to be able to run .NET code on, they are instead using something that already exists in the form of LLVM.

    They aren't abandoning anything, just using LLVM instead of rolling their own JIT compiler on certain platforms where doing so makes sense.

  28. WSUS or SMS, *maybe*, but... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    See subject: MS Update servers are hardcoded into the OS (unless someone can show me differently) as follows:

    http://.update.microsoft.com/

    https://.update.microsoft.com/

    http://download.windowsupdate....

    * Per the Windows HELP system itself, regarding "Windows Update error 80072efd"...

    (Still - using WSUS or SMS possibly can 'override' that so you can 'mass deploy' updates to end point user desktop nodes for example, on an internal LAN).

    APK

    P.S.=> Oddly enough though? Another article MENTIONS hosts files interfering with it per "Windows Update error 80072ee7" so it *MAY* be possible to "override" those above with the WRONG IP Addresses - however, I am *FAIRLY CERTAIN* that's not the case (hence my initial reply regarding hosts affecting it adversely is not possible since MS bypasses hosts for Windows update, afaik)... apk

    1. Re:WSUS or SMS, *maybe*, but... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In Firefox, I get nothing found for the first two and the last one tells me to use the start menu to check for updates.

      Vis WSUS , you definitely can change the update server.

  29. LINQ - functional languages by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    LINQ originates from functional languages, the concepts are from 1960s or so. It is funny how LISP had lot of features, and only lately 50 years later, other languages are starting to use them.
    http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html

  30. Ok, so I was correct on WSUS... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    See subject & for SOME reason, the "*" didn't paste from those 2 links (see the Windows Help file yourself for those errmsg #'s I posted to verify it).

    APK

    P.S.=> The ONLY THING that "threw me" was the 2nd one I posted, seemingly stating you can redirect Windows Update Servers via hosts too though! That contradicts what I said & heard:

    E.G. - I've seen/heard tell -> http://www.pcreview.co.uk/thre... on Windows "hardcoding" the Windows Update Servers & that "seconded my motion"(not the BEST 'most reliable' source, far from the worst too though... but there was others I've seen in the past, from 'better sources' (like MS for example), OR I WOULD NOT HAVE SAID IT)... apk