Our historical coding standards have been indent 4 and tab 8 for over 25 years and the code is in an archive system that allows the checking of differences between any two commits. Changing the indent format would make difference checking difficult with older revisions. We do cross platform development on VMS, Unix, and Windows and need to be able to debug on all three systems. If we used only tabs, the indents would make the code unreadable in the debugger on some systems. Sure, Windows is flexable enough to handle only tabs but the other systems are not. Changing thousands of files with millions of lines of code is not reasonable, and this is only our code. I'm sure our customers would have the same problems.
Microsoft only asked their MVPs which predominately do only Windows development so they don't see the problem (or don't want to) that those of us who do cross platform development have with their decision.
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Our historical coding standards have been indent 4 and tab 8 for over 25 years and the code is in an archive system that allows the checking of differences between any two commits. Changing the indent format would make difference checking difficult with older revisions. We do cross platform development on VMS, Unix, and Windows and need to be able to debug on all three systems. If we used only tabs, the indents would make the code unreadable in the debugger on some systems. Sure, Windows is flexable enough to handle only tabs but the other systems are not. Changing thousands of files with millions of lines of code is not reasonable, and this is only our code. I'm sure our customers would have the same problems. Microsoft only asked their MVPs which predominately do only Windows development so they don't see the problem (or don't want to) that those of us who do cross platform development have with their decision.