It also means(and this is what I think)that you will not be able to play XBox games on the XBox 2, they will have to re-write DirectX, build a RISC OS for it and then there is Live I would say there will have to re-write most of that as well. MS has never writen software for RISC in the past and I think that the time frame they have set themself is very unrealistic.
Actually, Windows NT used to run on a RISC processor, namely the DEC Alpha. Although it doesn't anymore, I'm sure porting it back again wouldn't be difficult since their OS is mostly in processor-independent C/C++. This is assuming they'll be using the current Xbox OS for Xbox 2, but even if they don't, most OS code is processor independent anyway (take a look at Linux and the number of architectures it runs on).
As for DirectX, I imagine it'd be similar to the DirectX situation on computers where the core DirectX code works across all graphics cards, and hardware manufacturers provide drivers that interface between DirectX and the hardware.
Try doing runas cmd.exe and starting Explorer from there. For some reason Explorer refuses to start with runas sometimes, although pretty much everything else works.
Haha no. I was playing Rogue Spear at school and the lab computers lacked sound cards. The graphics card turned out crappy enough that I only played a couple times.
But there are things Gates can do to be more friendly. Don't force windows to want a whole drive all to itself. If I have drive, and want to have a small partition for linux, don't force windows to reformat that partition to ntsc or fat. Let it be. It is a pain to have to do everything after windows is installed.
A minor nitpicking point, but Windows NT/2K/XP/Longhorn is perfectly happy with leaving existing partitions alone. You can also create partitions during both setup and from within Windows and install Linux to those. It's the laptop manufacturers that are enforcing this level of control.
Actually, if Microsoft factored their code properly there would be almost nothing to Internet Explorer -- a few high level calls to standard libraries and that would be that
And actually, it probably is just a few high level calls, since the web browser component of IE is implemented as a series of COM interfaces. The Mozilla ActiveX project attempts to provide a Mozilla implementation of those controls, and from a development standpoint and provided the project finishes implementing all the interfaces, it shouldn't be difficult at all to switch MS programs to using embedded Mozilla instead of embedded IE. Of course, it's doubtful Microsoft would allow that.
In case you're wondering how things would be like if this were possible, imagine opening Internet Explorer but having Mozilla be the web browser component inside. Or clicking on Help and Support Center and getting HTML pages rendered by Mozilla instead of IE. Or opening HTML Help documents (.chm) and seeing Mozilla used instead.
Similarly, you could probaly replace DirectX with your own implementations. Impossible, you say? One time I wanted to play Rogue Spear on a computer without a sound card, but the game refused to run without sound. I ended up writing a stub DirectSound DLL that implemented all the necessary DirectSound interfaces but had them do nothing, and went ahead and played Rogue Spear without problems:D
Try and make a worm that propagates through MacOS X, or Linux, or anything other than Windows and we can talk. Until then, accept what most of the world already has - Windows is not a secure operating system, regardless of how many people are using it.
Of course, a lot of people running Windows aren't exactly security experts, and the default Windows setup is horribly insecure (especially if the latest patches aren't integrated). Windows can be secure if you know what you're doing, but most people don't know what they're doing.
I've talked about this before in another post, but a large portion of the blame lies on application developers that demand Administrator privileges for no good reason. Winamp, for example, requires that an INI be placed in the Windows directory. Other programs require write access to Program Files to run. And still others require write access to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. None of these should happen, at all.
Please, developers, have your applications store settings in HKEY_CURRENT_USER or C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data. It pisses the hell out of me when they need access to other areas for no good reason.
As for solutions, you can actually modify registry permissions for individual keys to allow write access to normal users. You can also do the same with files, but it'd probably be a PITA trying to track down all the necessary registry keys and files.
Last time I also mentioned copy protection as being another reason for Administrator privileges, and cited Microsoft's own Age of Empires as an example (although Microsoft is generally good about not requiring Administrator privileges; you can even code and debug with Visual Studio.NET without them). The annoying part is that while copy protection attempts to add a form of security, it also removes security by forcing users to run as Administrators, so please, unless you're an obscure shareware developer in which case copy protection would probably be helpful, don't copy-protect your apps if the mechanism requires Admin privileges. It'll just annoy everyone.
I was interviewing there and when I heard that they expected at least 60 hours per week I said No thanks. It's just not worth it for me to spend 60 to 80 hours per week at work no matter how great the cafeteria.
I'm currently an intern there and only work 40-hour weeks. It really depends on goals that you and/or your manager have set. I was overwhelmed at first but for some reason my goals have turned into relatively easy ones, easy enough that I'm a couple weeks ahead of schedule and could probably slack off (but I won't in order to make a good impression;) Most offices empty out by around 5 or so.
His hair isn't gray. It's gone. Supporting Windows also causes baldness.
I'm an intern at Microsoft and one of the first things I noticed was the relatively large amount of bald people, so you might have some truth there;) Maybe it's because this is the first time I've worked with an older population, but it's still an odd observation.
Yeah, nitpicking;) An interesting aside: I actually thought the Add/Remove dialog in Windows XP used IE this entire time, but examination with Spy++ showed a class of "DirectUIHWND". If you've seen the VS.NET autorun UI (not the actual installer itself, which is some MSI thing), it uses a mini-HTML control that lacks public interfaces, so normal people can't use it. Hopefully the mini-HTML controls are more secure, and it'd be interesting if they later replaced the current IE HTML component with these.
How long before proper functionality with a core OS component is leveraged against vendors? From a business standpoint it's pretty shrewd. But from the OS design standpoint it's flat out stupid. The OS provides a platform for userspace apps. The OS is not supposed to wrap around userspace apps.
The line between pure OS-level stuff and userspace stuff in Windows is blurred. Aside from the firewall and security fixes, I doubt this antivirus-checking UI is a core OS component. Rather, it's probably just another service (daemon) or some type of autorunning application in userspace.
Hmm, like this free CD available directly from Microsoft? You don't even need to show a proof of purchase.
It's nice but outdated. I ordered one of those a month or two ago and yep, it was the February 2004 version. It'd be better if they updated it every week and had new versions, although I guess that'd be bad for them economically (imagine clueless people who order the CDs weekly).
The fact that they spent three years integrating anything from "explorer.exe" to the kernel with IE?
I see comments like these from time to time, but have yet to see any evidence of kernel integration of IE Microsoft claim that IE is an integral part of Windows appears to have a slightly different meaning than the interpretation of some people: to me it seems like it's integral in that builtin applications and UI use IE (but it could also purely be a legal-type claim that doesn't reflect coding realities). The new Help and Support Center is a web page, for example, and file system Explorer windows can seamlessly become IE windows. Although it isn't a builtin Windows application, Visual Studio.NET makes heavy use of IE, not only in the documentation reader but in stuff like project creation wizards (look carefully at those dialog box buttons; they're IE web page buttons).
Without IE, some of the common UI that most people expect with Windows would not exist. It isn't impossible to build a Windows kernel without IE because it assuredly doesn't even exist in the kernel in the first place, but it'd be difficult to build the UI without IE.
You might wonder why they use IE as UI. Answer: it's probably simpler than writing raw Win32 UI code, which is just plain ugly. This'll probably change with Longhorn and its extensive use for.NET; no more ugly Win32 UI coding.
A long time ago when I was still in middle school my dad bought me a new motherboard. I had a book on how to install computer parts at the time and remembered reading the "how to attach the power cable to the motherboard" very carefully. This was one of the older motherboards that had two power plugs, and repeated several times in the book was the statement that the "black wires should be on the inside when attaching the two plugs".
So I go ahead and install it, and whatd'ya know I attached the plugs backwards. Except I didn't catch it before hearing a zap and seeing sparks fly. I tried attaching it correctly but the computer wouldn't work! Then my stupid middle schooler self felt bad and mindlessly turned the computer on and off out of frustration/anger, which I think messed up my hard drive as it failed a while later. I later got the motherboard replaced.
My pet peeve about windows is the registry. Sure, the staggering number of sometimes quite byzantine file formats of all those different/etc/ and ~/.somethingrc files can be quite daunting, but it's so much better than the registry in real life situations where things can go wrong and you want to edit stuff by hand or restore stuff, it's just not funny.
But does anyone edit the registry by hand to fix catastrophic problems? I consider myself quite proficient with Windows, but realized that I've never had to do that before. I've had some serious problems that needed registry editing, but none serious enough that I couldn't start regedit. With that said, part of the reason might be because some errors on Windows are just plain difficult to examine. A spontaneous bluescreen on startup, for example, would plain suck to fix, and the ability to edit the registry via text files won't help, especially since Windows lacks a usable text-only mode (there's recovery console but that doesn't really count; you can't even edit files in it).
Also, printerdrivers don't run in Ring 0. They do on NT (and on windows 2000/XP as well, if you install old drivers. There's no warning or nothing. Yay.)
That's actually changed with Longhorn: "Longhorn will not support kernel-mode printer DLLs"
What I would love to see is a return to the days when a development environment was automatically included with a system (like QBASIC was with DOS.) I think a lot of young programmers would get a good start if some bundled, easy-to-use development tools were waiting for them on install (Like C# Express right next to WordPad in the Accessories folder.)
The.NET Framework and SDK are free and come with C#.NET, VB.NET, and VJ#.NET (does anyone use this??) command-line compilers. I think.NET is automatically installed with Windows 2003 Server, and it'll definitely be included with Longhorn, so yeah, it looks like development tools will come preinstalled in the future. True, it won't come with an IDE by default, but you could develop with Notepad or the free and open-source SharpDevelop.
It's also unfortunate that a C++ compiler won't come preinstalled, it seems, but Microsoft provides the free Visual C++ Toolkit which has an optimizing C++ compiler. You could also go with an open-source compiler such as gcc.
Does anyone know if this project conversion will also affect Visual Studio.NET 2005? It'd be plain stupid if they have a simpler layout for only the express editions, but if VS.NET 2005 also uses a new format, I guess it's understandable assuming it's to conform to new architecture or support new features.
Also, VS.NET 2002/2003 project files are XML, so assuming VS.NET 2005/2005 Express project files are also XML, it probably won't be difficult to write a tool that reverses the conversion.
Maybe they're trying to protect the idea of commercial software in general, or trying to lock developers into the platform by getting them to commit money to it, or just trying to make short run money by selling tools, but those seem like pretty shaky theories.
Anybody know?
Actually, Microsoft is pushing.NET extremely hard with WinFX, Avalon, and WinFS, all of which are fully managed APIs (basically meaning they're.NET APIs). It seems likely that all future Microsoft APIs will be fully managed considering the size and importance of these APIs, so it makes sense to me for them to concentrate and promote their.NET development tools over unmanaged C++ tools.
In case you're alarmed, I'm sure you'll still be able to write and run unmanaged (C++/existing non-.NET stuff) code. And managed C++, which is basically C++ retargeted to.NET, will be useful as a way to access.NET APIs from unmanaged code.
Instead of providing an IDE with dynamic layouts, cross-platform support, multi-processing, the ability to break into an app, re-compile bits and resume, true object-orientation with inheritance, and with the full source code of the IDE and the ability to extend the IDE (this is Smalltalk), we got Visual Basic and Visual Studio.
VC++ and I think C# both support Edit-and-Continue, which allows you to make a change in the middle of debugging and resume debugging without restarting the program.
Something like Object Pascal would have been far better, with good type safety, yet high speed, and with true object orientation, not the crippled version of VB6.
I agree that VB6 was probably a crappy language, but that's fixed with VB.NET. It is type-safe and is truly object-oriented. I haven't seen performance numbers, but since it is a managed language like C#, I assume performance is similar.
I will say I have no interest in.NET, "managed code" and all the other well-meaning but ultimately frightening things that they are doing to the tools. I can tell you that every two or three years they regild OLE, tack a new name on it and try to sell it as something other than a hodge-podge of incomprehensible and poorly documented cookbook tools. My philosophy with MS development has always been, the development environment is great, the libraries suck.
I can tell you with absolute certainty that managed code, even if you don't intend on using it in the future, is Microsoft's future. They're doing an unbelievable amount of new work in it, and if the documentation sucks now, I'm sure it'll improve in the future primarily because Microsoft's own developers will need it.
I've used OLE in the past (although I'm admittedly not very experienced with it), and although managed code may be OLE reloaded, it's definitely a step above OLE. If you haven't written managed code yet, give it a try. Aside from a few minor issues, I've been blown away by it all, and this is over a year after I first started trying it.
I would have loved to at least give it a try, but it requires you to log in using Microsoft Passport! Bad idea! I think many people are not willing to sign up for Passport - even for goodies like this...
Just make a dummy Hotmail account. It's virtually like downloading a program from other sites that require signing up. Remember, you're an 88-year old accountant from Zimbabwe, with name Aljsfdklsfe LKSJEFLKejf, and password asdf.
The whole reason behind the rebooting problem is the registry, and if MS gets rid of it I'll gladly stop making fun of it. Until then you and the rest of the MS-defender crowd will just have to keep stretching your credibility trying to defend it.
I don't believe so. The rebooting problem is because you can't replace files that are in use on Windows, while on Linux you can.
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It also means(and this is what I think)that you will not be able to play XBox games on the XBox 2, they will have to re-write DirectX, build a RISC OS for it and then there is Live I would say there will have to re-write most of that as well. MS has never writen software for RISC in the past and I think that the time frame they have set themself is very unrealistic.
Actually, Windows NT used to run on a RISC processor, namely the DEC Alpha. Although it doesn't anymore, I'm sure porting it back again wouldn't be difficult since their OS is mostly in processor-independent C/C++. This is assuming they'll be using the current Xbox OS for Xbox 2, but even if they don't, most OS code is processor independent anyway (take a look at Linux and the number of architectures it runs on).
As for DirectX, I imagine it'd be similar to the DirectX situation on computers where the core DirectX code works across all graphics cards, and hardware manufacturers provide drivers that interface between DirectX and the hardware.
Supposedly XP SP2 lets you selectively disable plugins (and I assume ActiveX controls).
Try doing runas cmd.exe and starting Explorer from there. For some reason Explorer refuses to start with runas sometimes, although pretty much everything else works.
Haha no. I was playing Rogue Spear at school and the lab computers lacked sound cards. The graphics card turned out crappy enough that I only played a couple times.
But there are things Gates can do to be more friendly. Don't force windows to want a whole drive all to itself. If I have drive, and want to have a small partition for linux, don't force windows to reformat that partition to ntsc or fat. Let it be. It is a pain to have to do everything after windows is installed.
A minor nitpicking point, but Windows NT/2K/XP/Longhorn is perfectly happy with leaving existing partitions alone. You can also create partitions during both setup and from within Windows and install Linux to those. It's the laptop manufacturers that are enforcing this level of control.
Actually, if Microsoft factored their code properly there would be almost nothing to Internet Explorer -- a few high level calls to standard libraries and that would be that
And actually, it probably is just a few high level calls, since the web browser component of IE is implemented as a series of COM interfaces. The Mozilla ActiveX project attempts to provide a Mozilla implementation of those controls, and from a development standpoint and provided the project finishes implementing all the interfaces, it shouldn't be difficult at all to switch MS programs to using embedded Mozilla instead of embedded IE. Of course, it's doubtful Microsoft would allow that.
In case you're wondering how things would be like if this were possible, imagine opening Internet Explorer but having Mozilla be the web browser component inside. Or clicking on Help and Support Center and getting HTML pages rendered by Mozilla instead of IE. Or opening HTML Help documents (.chm) and seeing Mozilla used instead.
Similarly, you could probaly replace DirectX with your own implementations. Impossible, you say? One time I wanted to play Rogue Spear on a computer without a sound card, but the game refused to run without sound. I ended up writing a stub DirectSound DLL that implemented all the necessary DirectSound interfaces but had them do nothing, and went ahead and played Rogue Spear without problems :D
Too bad all the Mariners highlights this year will probably be of the opposing team :/
Try and make a worm that propagates through MacOS X, or Linux, or anything other than Windows and we can talk. Until then, accept what most of the world already has - Windows is not a secure operating system, regardless of how many people are using it.
Of course, a lot of people running Windows aren't exactly security experts, and the default Windows setup is horribly insecure (especially if the latest patches aren't integrated). Windows can be secure if you know what you're doing, but most people don't know what they're doing.
I've talked about this before in another post, but a large portion of the blame lies on application developers that demand Administrator privileges for no good reason. Winamp, for example, requires that an INI be placed in the Windows directory. Other programs require write access to Program Files to run. And still others require write access to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. None of these should happen, at all .
Please, developers, have your applications store settings in HKEY_CURRENT_USER or C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data. It pisses the hell out of me when they need access to other areas for no good reason.
As for solutions, you can actually modify registry permissions for individual keys to allow write access to normal users. You can also do the same with files, but it'd probably be a PITA trying to track down all the necessary registry keys and files.
Last time I also mentioned copy protection as being another reason for Administrator privileges, and cited Microsoft's own Age of Empires as an example (although Microsoft is generally good about not requiring Administrator privileges; you can even code and debug with Visual Studio.NET without them). The annoying part is that while copy protection attempts to add a form of security, it also removes security by forcing users to run as Administrators, so please, unless you're an obscure shareware developer in which case copy protection would probably be helpful, don't copy-protect your apps if the mechanism requires Admin privileges. It'll just annoy everyone.
I was interviewing there and when I heard that they expected at least 60 hours per week I said No thanks. It's just not worth it for me to spend 60 to 80 hours per week at work no matter how great the cafeteria.
I'm currently an intern there and only work 40-hour weeks. It really depends on goals that you and/or your manager have set. I was overwhelmed at first but for some reason my goals have turned into relatively easy ones, easy enough that I'm a couple weeks ahead of schedule and could probably slack off (but I won't in order to make a good impression ;) Most offices empty out by around 5 or so.
His hair isn't gray. It's gone. Supporting Windows also causes baldness.
I'm an intern at Microsoft and one of the first things I noticed was the relatively large amount of bald people, so you might have some truth there ;) Maybe it's because this is the first time I've worked with an older population, but it's still an odd observation.
Yeah, nitpicking ;) An interesting aside: I actually thought the Add/Remove dialog in Windows XP used IE this entire time, but examination with Spy++ showed a class of "DirectUIHWND". If you've seen the VS.NET autorun UI (not the actual installer itself, which is some MSI thing), it uses a mini-HTML control that lacks public interfaces, so normal people can't use it. Hopefully the mini-HTML controls are more secure, and it'd be interesting if they later replaced the current IE HTML component with these.
How long before proper functionality with a core OS component is leveraged against vendors? From a business standpoint it's pretty shrewd. But from the OS design standpoint it's flat out stupid. The OS provides a platform for userspace apps. The OS is not supposed to wrap around userspace apps.
The line between pure OS-level stuff and userspace stuff in Windows is blurred. Aside from the firewall and security fixes, I doubt this antivirus-checking UI is a core OS component. Rather, it's probably just another service (daemon) or some type of autorunning application in userspace.
Hmm, like this free CD available directly from Microsoft? You don't even need to show a proof of purchase.
It's nice but outdated. I ordered one of those a month or two ago and yep, it was the February 2004 version. It'd be better if they updated it every week and had new versions, although I guess that'd be bad for them economically (imagine clueless people who order the CDs weekly).
The fact that they spent three years integrating anything from "explorer.exe" to the kernel with IE?
I see comments like these from time to time, but have yet to see any evidence of kernel integration of IE Microsoft claim that IE is an integral part of Windows appears to have a slightly different meaning than the interpretation of some people: to me it seems like it's integral in that builtin applications and UI use IE (but it could also purely be a legal-type claim that doesn't reflect coding realities). The new Help and Support Center is a web page, for example, and file system Explorer windows can seamlessly become IE windows. Although it isn't a builtin Windows application, Visual Studio.NET makes heavy use of IE, not only in the documentation reader but in stuff like project creation wizards (look carefully at those dialog box buttons; they're IE web page buttons).
Without IE, some of the common UI that most people expect with Windows would not exist. It isn't impossible to build a Windows kernel without IE because it assuredly doesn't even exist in the kernel in the first place, but it'd be difficult to build the UI without IE.
You might wonder why they use IE as UI. Answer: it's probably simpler than writing raw Win32 UI code, which is just plain ugly. This'll probably change with Longhorn and its extensive use for .NET; no more ugly Win32 UI coding.
that Java is better than C#/.NET: 5.0 > 2.0. I was so confused as to which I should choose. Thanks Sun for helping!
A long time ago when I was still in middle school my dad bought me a new motherboard. I had a book on how to install computer parts at the time and remembered reading the "how to attach the power cable to the motherboard" very carefully. This was one of the older motherboards that had two power plugs, and repeated several times in the book was the statement that the "black wires should be on the inside when attaching the two plugs".
So I go ahead and install it, and whatd'ya know I attached the plugs backwards. Except I didn't catch it before hearing a zap and seeing sparks fly. I tried attaching it correctly but the computer wouldn't work! Then my stupid middle schooler self felt bad and mindlessly turned the computer on and off out of frustration/anger, which I think messed up my hard drive as it failed a while later. I later got the motherboard replaced.
My pet peeve about windows is the registry. Sure, the staggering number of sometimes quite byzantine file formats of all those different /etc/ and ~/.somethingrc files can be quite daunting, but it's so much better than the registry in real life situations where things can go wrong and you want to edit stuff by hand or restore stuff, it's just not funny.
But does anyone edit the registry by hand to fix catastrophic problems? I consider myself quite proficient with Windows, but realized that I've never had to do that before. I've had some serious problems that needed registry editing, but none serious enough that I couldn't start regedit. With that said, part of the reason might be because some errors on Windows are just plain difficult to examine. A spontaneous bluescreen on startup, for example, would plain suck to fix, and the ability to edit the registry via text files won't help, especially since Windows lacks a usable text-only mode (there's recovery console but that doesn't really count; you can't even edit files in it).
Also, printerdrivers don't run in Ring 0. They do on NT (and on windows 2000/XP as well, if you install old drivers. There's no warning or nothing. Yay.)
That's actually changed with Longhorn: "Longhorn will not support kernel-mode printer DLLs"
What I would love to see is a return to the days when a development environment was automatically included with a system (like QBASIC was with DOS.) I think a lot of young programmers would get a good start if some bundled, easy-to-use development tools were waiting for them on install (Like C# Express right next to WordPad in the Accessories folder.)
The .NET Framework and SDK are free and come with C#.NET, VB.NET, and VJ#.NET (does anyone use this??) command-line compilers. I think .NET is automatically installed with Windows 2003 Server, and it'll definitely be included with Longhorn, so yeah, it looks like development tools will come preinstalled in the future. True, it won't come with an IDE by default, but you could develop with Notepad or the free and open-source SharpDevelop.
It's also unfortunate that a C++ compiler won't come preinstalled, it seems, but Microsoft provides the free Visual C++ Toolkit which has an optimizing C++ compiler. You could also go with an open-source compiler such as gcc.
Does anyone know if this project conversion will also affect Visual Studio.NET 2005? It'd be plain stupid if they have a simpler layout for only the express editions, but if VS.NET 2005 also uses a new format, I guess it's understandable assuming it's to conform to new architecture or support new features.
Also, VS.NET 2002/2003 project files are XML, so assuming VS.NET 2005/2005 Express project files are also XML, it probably won't be difficult to write a tool that reverses the conversion.
Maybe they're trying to protect the idea of commercial software in general, or trying to lock developers into the platform by getting them to commit money to it, or just trying to make short run money by selling tools, but those seem like pretty shaky theories. Anybody know?
Actually, Microsoft is pushing .NET extremely hard with WinFX, Avalon, and WinFS, all of which are fully managed APIs (basically meaning they're .NET APIs). It seems likely that all future Microsoft APIs will be fully managed considering the size and importance of these APIs, so it makes sense to me for them to concentrate and promote their .NET development tools over unmanaged C++ tools.
In case you're alarmed, I'm sure you'll still be able to write and run unmanaged (C++/existing non-.NET stuff) code. And managed C++, which is basically C++ retargeted to .NET, will be useful as a way to access .NET APIs from unmanaged code.
Instead of providing an IDE with dynamic layouts, cross-platform support, multi-processing, the ability to break into an app, re-compile bits and resume, true object-orientation with inheritance, and with the full source code of the IDE and the ability to extend the IDE (this is Smalltalk), we got Visual Basic and Visual Studio.
VC++ and I think C# both support Edit-and-Continue, which allows you to make a change in the middle of debugging and resume debugging without restarting the program.
Something like Object Pascal would have been far better, with good type safety, yet high speed, and with true object orientation, not the crippled version of VB6.
I agree that VB6 was probably a crappy language, but that's fixed with VB.NET. It is type-safe and is truly object-oriented. I haven't seen performance numbers, but since it is a managed language like C#, I assume performance is similar.
I will say I have no interest in .NET, "managed code" and all the other well-meaning but ultimately frightening things that they are doing to the tools. I can tell you that every two or three years they regild OLE, tack a new name on it and try to sell it as something other than a hodge-podge of incomprehensible and poorly documented cookbook tools. My philosophy with MS development has always been, the development environment is great, the libraries suck.
I can tell you with absolute certainty that managed code, even if you don't intend on using it in the future, is Microsoft's future. They're doing an unbelievable amount of new work in it, and if the documentation sucks now, I'm sure it'll improve in the future primarily because Microsoft's own developers will need it.
I've used OLE in the past (although I'm admittedly not very experienced with it), and although managed code may be OLE reloaded, it's definitely a step above OLE. If you haven't written managed code yet, give it a try. Aside from a few minor issues, I've been blown away by it all, and this is over a year after I first started trying it.
I would have loved to at least give it a try, but it requires you to log in using Microsoft Passport! Bad idea! I think many people are not willing to sign up for Passport - even for goodies like this...
Just make a dummy Hotmail account. It's virtually like downloading a program from other sites that require signing up. Remember, you're an 88-year old accountant from Zimbabwe, with name Aljsfdklsfe LKSJEFLKejf, and password asdf.
The whole reason behind the rebooting problem is the registry, and if MS gets rid of it I'll gladly stop making fun of it. Until then you and the rest of the MS-defender crowd will just have to keep stretching your credibility trying to defend it.
I don't believe so. The rebooting problem is because you can't replace files that are in use on Windows, while on Linux you can.