Jump-start your project by learning from devs who
write Windows drivers and file systems every day.
Take an OSR seminar!

OSR is Hiring! Click here to find out more.

Windows Internals & Software Drivers Lab, Santa Clara, CA 5-9 August, 2013
Kernel Debugging & Crash Analysis for Windows Lab, Santa Clara, CA 9-13 September, 2013
Upcoming OSR Seminars:
Writing WDF Drivers for Windows Lab, Boston, MA 7-11 October, 2013
Developing File Systems for Windows, Seattle, WA 5-8 November, 2013

Go Back   OSR Online Lists > ntdev
link Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Welcome, Guest
You must login to post to this list
  Message 1 of 109  
16 Sep 11 11:25
Mark Roddy
xxxxxx@gmail.com
Join Date: 25 Feb 2000
Posts To This List: 3420
Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
I think while this issue has already been discussed, it needs its very own thread. I can live with the added cost of the WDK and the clunky VS project management problems, and I am quite willing to revise my entire build system to work with msbuild, however the fact that I cannot build XP drivers means that I cannot incorporate the Win8 toolchain for use here at Virtual Computer, for the foreseeable future. We build all of our drivers with an XP version, a Vista version and a Win7-x64 version. Our customers buy our product because it supports Windows desktop releases from XP onward. I don't think I'm alone in this requirement. Dropping XP is a show-stopping deficiency that should be addressed before the GA release of the Win8 build tools if Microsoft is serious about having third party developers use these tools for driver development. Mark Roddy
  Message 2 of 109  
16 Sep 11 11:37
Doron Holan
xxxxxx@microsoft.com
Join Date: 08 Sep 2005
Posts To This List: 8276
RE: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Since you already ship 3 different versions, could you not build the XP version in the w7 kit and the Vista/win7/win8 versions in the w8 kit? d debt from my phone -----Original Message----- From: Mark Roddy Sent: Friday, September 16, 2011 8:27 AM To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List Subject: [ntdev] Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption. I think while this issue has already been discussed, it needs its very own thread. I can live with the added cost of the WDK and the clunky VS project management problems, and I am quite willing to revise my entire build system to work with msbuild, however the fact that I cannot build XP drivers means that I cannot incorporate the Win8 toolchain for use here at Virtual Computer, for the foreseeable future. We build all of our drivers with an XP version, a Vista version and a Win7-x64 version. Our customers buy our product because it supports Windows desktop releases from XP onward. I don't think I'm alone in this requirement. Dropping XP is a show-stopping deficiency that should be addressed before the GA release of the Win8 build tools if Microsoft is serious about having third party developers use these tools for driver development. Mark Roddy --- NTDEV is sponsored by OSR For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit: http://www.osr.com/seminars To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
  Message 3 of 109  
16 Sep 11 12:09
Mark Roddy
xxxxxx@gmail.com
Join Date: 25 Feb 2000
Posts To This List: 3420
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
In general I do not use two different tool chains on the same source code base for the same product release. I do not want to have to worry about the differences in code generation between one compiler and another, or the complexity of having to deal with different build methods for different versions. My current build system builds everything from user mode on down using the same toolchain for all product versions. Currently, unless compelled to do otherwise, we will stick with the tools that can do that. Mark Roddy On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 11:36 AM, Doron Holan <xxxxx@microsoft.com> wrote: > Since you already ship 3 different versions, could you not build the XP version in the w7 kit and the Vista/win7/win8 versions in the w8 kit? > > d > > debt from my phone > > -----Original Message----- > From: Mark Roddy > Sent: Friday, September 16, 2011 8:27 AM > To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 4 of 109  
16 Sep 11 12:27
Maxim S. Shatskih
xxxxxx@storagecraft.com
Join Date: 20 Feb 2003
Posts To This List: 8629
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> drivers means that I cannot incorporate the Win8 toolchain for use > here at Virtual Computer, for the foreseeable future. +100 Here at StorageCraft we cannot even abandon w2k for now. So, 6001.18002. -- Maxim S. Shatskih Windows DDK MVP xxxxx@storagecraft.com http://www.storagecraft.com
  Message 5 of 109  
16 Sep 11 12:33
Don Burn
xxxxxx@acm.org
Join Date:
Posts To This List: 3179
RE: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Doron, Trying to maintain two tool sets is a great way to create a disaster. Even the minor changes needed is sources from the Vista WDK to the Win7 WDK caused major pain for at least one of my clients who wanted to use the "best tools" but still needs W2k support. They finally threw out the Win7 WDK. Don Burn Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting Website: http://www.windrvr.com Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr "Doron Holan" <xxxxx@microsoft.com> wrote in message news:166811@ntdev: > Since you already ship 3 different versions, could you not build the XP version in the w7 kit and the Vista/win7/win8 versions in the w8 kit? > > d > > debt from my phone > > -----Original Message----- > From: Mark Roddy > Sent: Friday, September 16, 2011 8:27 AM > To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 6 of 109  
16 Sep 11 13:01
David R. Cattley
xxxxxx@msn.com
Join Date: 09 Jul 2002
Posts To This List: 1806
RE: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
As a data-point the path I am headed down is to put in place parallel projects based on VS11/WDK8 that are side-by-side with the existing projects. It will be a maintenance issue to manage changes to both the SOURCES/DIRS and *.vcproj/*.vsprops files but for the most part in the projects I am managing these have long been 'static' anyway. The intersection is only in code assets (libraries) that need to build per-platform and that codebase is already riddled with affordances to target multiple platforms with varying construction tools (NT5, NT6, CE, and a couple of 'dark-side' targets). It seems as though adding in the new VS11/WDK8 projects to build those aspects that need to share to future WIN8 specific is inevitable and unavoidable. I will also provide an 'alternate' (for comparision and test only) set of targets building the NT6 code as a way of comparing the toolset with the current amalgamation of VS8+DDKBUILD+WDK. When we finally play the bagpipes for XP, maybe I will be able to sunset that tool-chain. It was only two years ago that I sunset the VS6+DDKBUILD+DDK support when (exasperated roll of eyes) we finally dropped W2K support. It seems to me that we non-redmondtonians have a much longer tail to consider and thus a much slower head adoption rate. Who other than MSFT is build product *only* for Win8? Without a doubt the stuff is cool and a ton of work went into it. The productivity enhancements are going to be real. And in the end, I see that soon after VS11 & WDK8 go live for producing redistributable code, the solution in my shop will be to have VS11 based projects with the WDK7 targets building just the way they do today - using DDKBUILD.BAT (thanks Mark) and the MSBUILD and (trusty old) BUILD control files will just be there together. Cheers, Dave Cattley --
  Message 7 of 109  
16 Sep 11 15:43
Dejan Maksimovic
xxxxxx@alfasp.com
Join Date: 19 Apr 2011
Posts To This List: 144
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
You're lucky - we need W2000 support as well! (Strangely, there were less issues on W2K than on XP for mini-filters :P) I'm with ya on the XP support. Mark Roddy wrote: > I think while this issue has already been discussed, it needs its very > own thread. > > I can live with the added cost of the WDK and the clunky VS project > management problems, and I am quite willing to revise my entire build > system to work with msbuild, however the fact that I cannot build XP > drivers means that I cannot incorporate the Win8 toolchain for use > here at Virtual Computer, for the foreseeable future. We build all of > our drivers with an XP version, a Vista version and a Win7-x64 > version. Our customers buy our product because it supports Windows <...excess quoted lines suppressed...> -- Kind regards, Dejan (MSN support: xxxxx@alfasp.com) http://www.alfasp.com File system audit, security and encryption kits.
  Message 8 of 109  
16 Sep 11 16:31
anton bassov
xxxxxx@hotmail.com
Join Date: 16 Jul 2006
Posts To This List: 3495
RE: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> I think while this issue has already been discussed, it needs its very own thread. Actually, I think such thread belongs on NTTALK (which, btw, seems to be pretty quiet these days) anyway..... Anton Bassov
  Message 9 of 109  
16 Sep 11 16:34
Doron Holan
xxxxxx@microsoft.com
Join Date: 08 Sep 2005
Posts To This List: 8276
RE: RE:Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
If you want me to see the feedback, don't move it d -----Original Message----- From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of xxxxx@hotmail.com Sent: Friday, September 16, 2011 1:35 PM To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List Subject: RE:[ntdev] Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption. > I think while this issue has already been discussed, it needs its very own thread. Actually, I think such thread belongs on NTTALK (which, btw, seems to be pretty quiet these days) anyway..... Anton Bassov --- NTDEV is sponsored by OSR For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit: http://www.osr.com/seminars To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
  Message 10 of 109  
16 Sep 11 16:45
mm
xxxxxx@gmail.com
Join Date: 24 May 2010
Posts To This List: 860
Re: RE: RE:Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Yeah, really. Mm On Sep 16, 2011 4:34 PM, "Doron Holan" <xxxxx@microsoft.com> wrote: > If you want me to see the feedback, don't move it > > d > > -----Original Message----- > From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [mailto: xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of xxxxx@hotmail.com > Sent: Friday, September 16, 2011 1:35 PM > To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List > Subject: RE:[ntdev] Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption. > >> I think while this issue has already been discussed, it needs its very own thread. > > Actually, I think such thread belongs on NTTALK (which, btw, seems to be pretty quiet these days) anyway..... > > > Anton Bassov > > --- > NTDEV is sponsored by OSR > > For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit: > http://www.osr.com/seminars > <...excess quoted lines suppressed...> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer > > > --- > NTDEV is sponsored by OSR > > For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit: > http://www.osr.com/seminars > > To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer --
  Message 11 of 109  
16 Sep 11 23:13
James Harper
xxxxxx@bendigoit.com.au
Join Date: 01 Dec 2008
Posts To This List: 1510
RE: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> > In general I do not use two different tool chains on the same source code > base for the same product release. I do not want to have to worry about the > differences in code generation between one compiler and another, or the > complexity of having to deal with different build methods for different > versions. > > My current build system builds everything from user mode on down using > the same toolchain for all product versions. Currently, unless compelled to do > otherwise, we will stick with the tools that can do that. > What would you have Microsoft do? For the new build environment to work for you they'd need to hold on to XP _and_ bring back support for W2K (was it you that said you needed Windows 2000?). What if someone wants support for NT4 too? Upgrading to the new build environment while still maintaining the old is going to hurt a bit, but IMHO that's the price of progress. James
  Message 12 of 109  
17 Sep 11 03:32
Daniel Terhell
xxxxxx@resplendence.com
Join Date: 15 Apr 2004
Posts To This List: 785
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Up until three days ago, XP was the most widely installed system on earth so dropping support for that in a new build environment in my book is considered *silly*. Also, if anyone in MS is thinking that this is going to help the world to faster upgrade to Win8, then he or she should think again. We need to develop drivers according to demand and that's it. We need to support Win2K and WInXP as well so I'm little interested in this new build environment. Hope that WinDbg will continue to work on Win8 targets without having to install a new VS. I will pick out some new tools and features such as the new verifier but I will try to avoid the new build environment to reduce the setup and installation burden. . Fortunately there is still MmGetSystemRoutineAddress, that will allow me to build single binaries that work on all OSes. Personally I'm much more interested in new OS features than in a new build environment. Regards, Daniel Terhell Resplendence Software Projects Sp xxxxx@resplendence.com http://www.resplendence.com "Mark Roddy" <xxxxx@hollistech.com> wrote in message news:166810@ntdev... >I think while this issue has already been discussed, it needs its very > own thread. > > I can live with the added cost of the WDK and the clunky VS project > management problems, and I am quite willing to revise my entire build > system to work with msbuild, however the fact that I cannot build XP > drivers means that I cannot incorporate the Win8 toolchain for use > here at Virtual Computer, for the foreseeable future. We build all of > our drivers with an XP version, a Vista version and a Win7-x64 > version. Our customers buy our product because it supports Windows <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 13 of 109  
17 Sep 11 04:11
Mark Roddy
xxxxxx@gmail.com
Join Date: 25 Feb 2000
Posts To This List: 3420
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
I don't need w2k. The decision to drop xp is in my opinion rather wrong headed. Out here one cannot build products without xp support, so this creates a huge barrier to adoption of the new tools. Some developers have a similar issue with w2k, but that installed base is very small. The installed xp base is huge. Mark Roddy On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 11:12 PM, James Harper <xxxxx@bendigoit.com.au> wrote: >> >> In general I do not use two different tool chains on the same source > code >> base for the same product release. I do not want to have to worry > about the >> differences in code generation between one compiler and another, or > the >> complexity of having to deal with different build methods for > different >> versions. <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 14 of 109  
17 Sep 11 04:12
Mark Roddy
xxxxxx@gmail.com
Join Date: 25 Feb 2000
Posts To This List: 3420
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
no thanks, right here is fine. Mark Roddy On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 4:34 PM, <xxxxx@hotmail.com> wrote: >> I think while this issue has already been discussed, it needs its very own thread. > > Actually, I think such thread belongs on NTTALK (which, btw, ?seems to be pretty quiet these days) anyway..... > > > Anton Bassov > > --- > NTDEV is sponsored by OSR > <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 15 of 109  
17 Sep 11 07:57
Volodymyr M. Shcherbyna
xxxxxx@shcherbyna.com
Join Date: 07 Oct 2010
Posts To This List: 143
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
I am supposed to support win2k as well. Actually, the current situation is getting worse with each year, because these days we have to support (de facto) 2k, xp, vista, 7 and 8 is about to appear. If they will release 9 within 2-3 years it means 6 OS to support :) I guess you, like me, already got your hands on Windows 8 development preview and tryed to install your drivers. Most of the code works well, even under verifier. Which is an excellent news! -- Volodymyr "Maxim S. Shatskih" <xxxxx@storagecraft.com> a écrit dans le message de groupe de discussion : 166813@ntdev... >> drivers means that I cannot incorporate the Win8 toolchain for use >> here at Virtual Computer, for the foreseeable future. > > +100 > > Here at StorageCraft we cannot even abandon w2k for now. So, 6001.18002. > > -- > Maxim S. Shatskih > Windows DDK MVP <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 16 of 109  
18 Sep 11 21:05
Maxim S. Shatskih
xxxxxx@storagecraft.com
Join Date: 20 Feb 2003
Posts To This List: 8629
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> appear. If they will release 9 within 2-3 years it means 6 OS to support :) I think w2k will probably be dropped by most teams around the time of Win8 release. And the picture is not this bad. The main difference is Vista+ and pre-Vista, with Vista being just a more buggy version of Win7 :-) > I guess you, like me, already got your hands on Windows 8 development No. Will wait till RC. -- Maxim S. Shatskih Windows DDK MVP xxxxx@storagecraft.com http://www.storagecraft.com
  Message 17 of 109  
18 Sep 11 21:05
Maxim S. Shatskih
xxxxxx@storagecraft.com
Join Date: 20 Feb 2003
Posts To This List: 8629
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> We need to support Win2K According to what I know (from professional people who did the serious research), w2k was already dead in the US around 3 years ago. Very few customers were running it, and even among them, very few of them were deploying the new w2k machines. But in non-US markets the things are different, especially if you will take the server SKUs - the next server after w2k was only in 2003. -- Maxim S. Shatskih Windows DDK MVP xxxxx@storagecraft.com http://www.storagecraft.com
  Message 18 of 109  
18 Sep 11 21:09
mm
xxxxxx@gmail.com
Join Date: 24 May 2010
Posts To This List: 860
Re:Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
There are still w2k machines around in the States. Not many, but if your a small shop, you can't just tell them no. Mm On Sep 18, 2011 9:05 PM, "Maxim S. Shatskih" <xxxxx@storagecraft.com> wrote: >> We need to support Win2K > > According to what I know (from professional people who did the serious research), w2k was already dead in the US around 3 years ago. Very few customers were running it, and even among them, very few of them were deploying the new w2k machines. > > But in non-US markets the things are different, especially if you will take the server SKUs - the next server after w2k was only in 2003. > > -- > Maxim S. Shatskih > Windows DDK MVP > xxxxx@storagecraft.com > http://www.storagecraft.com > > > --- > NTDEV is sponsored by OSR <...excess quoted lines suppressed...> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer --
  Message 19 of 109  
18 Sep 11 21:26
Gregory G. Dyess
xxxxxx@pdq.net
Join Date:
Posts To This List: 290
Re:Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Unfortunately we have "certified" systems running on W2K that our customers are not allowed to upgrade at all. I know it sounds strange, but US federal laws concerning elections-related software is very highly scrutinized and once written is nearly impossible to change without huge expenses. It wouldn't be so bad if the coding standards imposed by the federal government ddn't read like something out of a 1970's-era WORST practices manual! Greg --- xxxxx@storagecraft.com wrote: From: "Maxim S. Shatskih" <xxxxx@storagecraft.com> To: "Windows System Software Devs Interest List" <xxxxx@lists.osr.com> Subject: Re:[ntdev] Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption. Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2011 05:04:32 +0400 > We need to support Win2K According to what I know (from professional people who did the serious research), w2k was already dead in the US around 3 years ago. Very few customers were running it, and even among them, very few of them were deploying the new w2k machines. But in non-US markets the things are different, especially if you will take the server SKUs - the next server after w2k was only in 2003. -- Maxim S. Shatskih Windows DDK MVP xxxxx@storagecraft.com http://www.storagecraft.com --- NTDEV is sponsored by OSR For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit: http://www.osr.com/seminars To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
  Message 20 of 109  
19 Sep 11 00:54
Joseph M. Newcomer
xxxxxx@flounder.com
Join Date: 20 Nov 2008
Posts To This List: 1892
Re:Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Back in the mid-1980s, when I worked at the Software Engineering Institute, we were supposed to suggest how to improve the software process for DoD. I didn't see this, but some of my colleagues found places in the 1980s that were still required to create programs on *punched cards*, because all their QA procedures were geared to procedures that involved how the cards were punched, and then how they were collated into the source, and how they were identified in change logs. These procedures were *unalterable*; it didn't matter that Sun was already producing workstations, that most of the rest of us had been creating programs using text editors like TECO and EMACS, since the late 1960s; their procedures had been created in the 1950s and could not be changed at all. A friend and I once worked at a major manufacturer of <NDA> located in <NDA>. As we were creating 21st-century software, their build procedures consistent of essentially concatenating card decks; they refused to use #include in C. Instead, it was something like cat a.h b.h c.h d.h e.c > program.c and then compiling program.c. What is truly scary is that they are one of the leading producers of <NDA> and there are thousands of <NDA>s out there whose software is built using 1950s techniques. My friend's goal, he stated, was to "drag their software methodology, kicking and screaming, into the 1960s". I spent two years of my life trying to figure out why the most progressive companies refused to do business with the Department of Defense. Or why companies like TI used decade-old design software, two or more generates behind their internal tooling, to build for DoD. It was simple: DoD at that time required that all the software used be placed "in escrow". Then they would put the *maintenance* of the chip, or when required, the "second source", out for bid. A competitor could bid low (lower than cost, even), but the result was they would get copies of all the software used by the original creator. So major corporations would not place their family jewel software in such a situation. When I told DoD "We've idenfitied your problem with software acquisition and software quality: you acquisition process" they said "But that would require that Congress pass a new law allowing us to use modenr methodology" to which my reply was "Well, we've identified theproblem; it's up to you to solve it. If it's going to take an Act of Congress, then it would be a good idea to start that process now. We've identified the problem; the solution is up to you". It was also the case that by their requirements of massive design documents, including such obsolete concepts as "flowcharts" (remember those?), the acquisition process was so long that quite often by the time the software was delivered, the machine on which it was supposed to operate was no longer manufactured. By comparison, something as straightforward as an electronic election application being forced to live on something as modern as Win2K is positively progressive! Microsoft lives in a dream world in which, upon the latest release of product X, they think the entire world will change overnight to use the new version, and there is no attempt to make it possible to maintain these older products. For that matter, if, five years out, someone actually decides to move the implementation to the latest version, you can't even FIND the documentation for the old calls, so you have no idea what they did, or what their parameters meant, so you can't figure out what the new calls should be. The cost of revalidating massive software systems (largely because of the massive documentation requirements, established in the 1950s when programs were a tiny fraction of the size of modern programs) means that the slightest change is unrealistically expensive. I know companies that have not moved from Office 2003 because the retraining cost is far too high. Retraining literally THOUSANDS of employees to use Word, Excel or PowerPoint effectively with the godawful ribbon interfaces is completely infeasible. The Microsoft studies seem to concentrate on how people who have never seen a computer can use the products; it says nothing about how highly-experienced professionals can make the transition effectively. Governments work on 15-year acquisition cycles and 20-year maintenance cycles. In computer years (or is it dog years?) this means that they are almost always working on equipment that is prehistoric. What is amazing is that they don't require buggy whips for government-acquired cars. I still saw MS-DOS based products in use when I taught at military bases, and even scarier, a desire to keep the interfaces "MS-DOS compatible", e.g., prompting for input and getting things typed in (I used to teach GUI programming to these people, and one of the constant questions was "How do we issue a prompt and read the keyboard response to it?") If you think about it, the programming standards are essentially late-1950s "best practice" and if someone has a new idea, there is an insurmountable inertia to overcome to change anything. (Look at the Ada specs: the language has horrible misfeatures because some General once heard from a friend that thus-and-such a construct was unreliable; I was involved in the Ada evaluation effort, and the specs were a joke; in many cases they were mutually incompatible requirments, such as a need for real-time response and a need for garbage collection) joe > Unfortunately we have "certified" systems running on W2K that our > customers are not allowed to upgrade at all. I know it sounds strange, > but US federal laws concerning elections-related software is very highly > scrutinized and once written is nearly impossible to change without huge > expenses. It wouldn't be so bad if the coding standards imposed by the > federal government ddn't read like something out of a 1970's-era WORST > practices manual! > > Greg > <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 21 of 109  
19 Sep 11 05:09
ntdev member 32323
xxxxxx@hotmail.com
Join Date:
Posts To This List: 843
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
On 9/16/2011 5:25 PM, Mark Roddy wrote: > Dropping XP is a show-stopping deficiency that should be addressed > before the GA release of the Win8 build tools if Microsoft is serious > about having third party developers use these tools for driver > development. Sorry, Mark, but this sounds like too much "drama" to me. You will just need several versions of the WDK installed in parallel. As long as this is possible, dropping support for platform [X] in WDK[Y] is a nuisance (read:PITA), but 'no show will be stopped' because of it. Obviously the Microsoft WDK team must focus on the future of Windows development, not on ancient still-in-production-used legacy versions.
  Message 22 of 109  
19 Sep 11 05:14
ntdev member 32323
xxxxxx@hotmail.com
Join Date:
Posts To This List: 843
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
On 9/19/2011 3:25 AM, Gregory G Dyess wrote: > Unfortunately we have "certified" systems running on W2K that our > customers are not allowed to upgrade at all. But then these will also not be allowed upgrade to new hardware and / or to a new driver without re-certification either. No problem then. ;-)
  Message 23 of 109  
19 Sep 11 07:01
Maxim S. Shatskih
xxxxxx@storagecraft.com
Join Date: 20 Feb 2003
Posts To This List: 8629
Re: Re:Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> idenfitied your problem with software acquisition and software quality: > you acquisition process" they said "But that would require that Congress How funny. And some people still believe that military is the driving force under the technical progress. I've heard a guy who was seriously telling that LiIon batteries were invented by the military. He even does not know that they are practically not used in military at all - military and aerospace prefer NiCd. >> insurmountable inertia to overcome to change anything. (Look at the Ada Is Ada still alive? isn't it replaced with C++ with STL and Boost? -- Maxim S. Shatskih Windows DDK MVP xxxxx@storagecraft.com http://www.storagecraft.com
  Message 24 of 109  
19 Sep 11 07:05
Eugene
xxxxxx@mail.ru
Join Date: 22 Feb 2001
Posts To This List: 53
RE: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Someday it had to be happen. Only in upcoming release of our product we have finally dropped w2k. It was really a "brake" for our progress. So, today we have 4 major environments to building defferent versions of products (from NT up to 7). Today VMs offer a huge help of such tasks. You need ESX (or Hyper-V) server, some VMs for different OS environments, good source management software like Perforce and voila! Building and support (and sh! autotesting) different versions will never be a problem for you. As soon as MS declared timelife of theirs OSes we have to someday stop adding new features to product and switch to another version. We are talking about drivers, aren't? So, one of the most goal of our work is to offer the best speed and utilizing OS services.. Change your mind, Mark. We have to go further. In good conscience, what really new can we add to w2k version of our product? May be it is the time to switch your current version to state "support only"? Will you never wanted to throw this whole horrible code that avoids errors of w2k and switch to use new API?
  Message 25 of 109  
19 Sep 11 07:39
Don Burn
xxxxxx@acm.org
Join Date:
Posts To This List: 3179
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Hagen, Have you ever maintained a large project in multiple environments like you are proposing? I have help clients get rid of these. Most of these folks saw a huge problem with quality when they tried to maintain two environments. The result was either crappy software or multiple month delays in releases to get things stable and the same in both environments. It was one thing when Microsoft dropped Win2K support, since by that point it could be argued that was a small part of the overall Windows base. It still made things painful for a lot of us whose clients wanted Win2K versions of the drivers, but since the changes in the environment were small this was not terrible. This is not the case with XP, it is still a major force on the business desktops and I doubt it will be that much smaller by the time Win8 comes out due to the slow economy. This is going to be a significant problem for firms wanting to release drivers that work from XP to Win8. Don Burn Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting Website: http://www.windrvr.com Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr "Hagen Patzke" <xxxxx@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:166898@ntdev: > On 9/16/2011 5:25 PM, Mark Roddy wrote: > > Dropping XP is a show-stopping deficiency that should be addressed > > before the GA release of the Win8 build tools if Microsoft is serious > > about having third party developers use these tools for driver > > development. > > Sorry, Mark, but this sounds like too much "drama" to me. > > You will just need several versions of the WDK installed in parallel. > <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 26 of 109  
19 Sep 11 08:38
Daniel Terhell
xxxxxx@resplendence.com
Join Date: 15 Apr 2004
Posts To This List: 785
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
This is not just the next release of the WDK but a completely new build environment. That means we are likely going to need to maintain separate copies of our source and projects or otherwise end up in a mess. Regards, Daniel Terhell Resplendence Software Projects Sp xxxxx@resplendence.com http://www.resplendence.com "Hagen Patzke" <xxxxx@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:166898@ntdev... > You will just need several versions of the WDK installed in parallel. >
  Message 27 of 109  
19 Sep 11 09:29
Mark Roddy
xxxxxx@gmail.com
Join Date: 25 Feb 2000
Posts To This List: 3420
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
That is the point. As it stands now, rather than orphan xp builds I will orphan win8 builds: they will be the exception and will not happen for our production environment until we have a real world demand for a win8 based component. I'll set up a win8 build system to play around with and that is all for now. Too bad really, sticking a rather dim business decision in the way of widespread adoption of what is likely a major upgrade to the build tools. Mark Roddy On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 8:38 AM, <xxxxx@resplendence.com> wrote: > This is not just the next release of the WDK but a completely new build > environment. That means we are likely going to need to maintain separate > copies of our source and projects or otherwise end up in a mess. > > Regards, > > Daniel Terhell > Resplendence Software Projects Sp > xxxxx@resplendence.com > http://www.resplendence.com <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 28 of 109  
19 Sep 11 09:37
Peter Viscarola (OSR)
xxxxxx@osr.com
Join Date:
Posts To This List: 3930
List Moderator
RE: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Hmmmmm.... Help me here: Why are people so keen to build for specific OS versions? I *know* that we tell less experienced devs "build a single common executable in the build environment of the oldest system you support.". I teach this. And for some folks this is the best guidance. But Mr. Roddy and Mr. Burn are highly experienced devs. They need not follow the rules we give for beginners. What pushes you gentlemen to want to build you XP driver in the XP build environment? I assume you're building a single executable for all platforms, no? If not, why not. If so, why not build in,say, the Win8 build environment or if that's too scary maybe Vista? If it's executable format (NT Target Version or whatever it is) you can fix that easily. If you were really keen on ensuring you got the right definitions in the header files, you could even define the appropriate version constants, no??? I'm nit saying you don't have a point ... I just would lime to know the technical details of what's driving your requirement. Peter OSR
  Message 29 of 109  
19 Sep 11 09:55
Don Burn
xxxxxx@acm.org
Join Date:
Posts To This List: 3179
RE: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Peter, I have multiple clients who build a pre Vista and post Vista driver, they only changes are in conditionals. For right now they plan to build in the Win7 environment for their targets and ignore the improved tools of Win8. This isn't terrible, but in the past they would have made the effort to move to the newer environment at least for a "tool check". I had one client who wrote a script to fix the small changed from Vista to Win7 so they could keep building a Win2k driver, but run the latest tools for checking by using the Win7 WDK. So these clients have at least lost the ability to easily perform the "tool check" with the latest tools. What makes things worse, is that at least one client knows they could get rid of some really messy code in their product by utilizing capabilities of Win8. If this had been a build environment they told me they would have had dev's working on a Win8 version shortly, with the conditionals being extended so they created a pre Vista, a Vista/Win7, and Win8 version, but with the change in the development environment they have delayed the Win8 version as being too big a step. All of these are complex large build environments. I suspect for the simple driver a lot of us will learn how to ensure the conversion tool works correctly with our sources (modifying the sources if needed) and just live with creating a project file when we want to work with Win8. Don Burn Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting Website: http://www.windrvr.com Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr "xxxxx@osr.com" <xxxxx@osr.com> wrote in message news:166918@ntdev: > Hmmmmm.... > > Help me here: Why are people so keen to build for specific OS versions? > > I *know* that we tell less experienced devs "build a single common executable in the build environment of the oldest system you support.". I teach this. And for some folks this is the best guidance. > > But Mr. Roddy and Mr. Burn are highly experienced devs. They need not follow the rules we give for beginners. > > What pushes you gentlemen to want to build you XP driver in the XP build environment? I assume you're building a single executable for all platforms, no? If not, why not. If so, why not build in,say, the Win8 build environment or if that's too scary maybe Vista? > <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 30 of 109  
19 Sep 11 10:13
ntdev member 32323
xxxxxx@hotmail.com
Join Date:
Posts To This List: 843
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Sorry, I always forget that most people on this Windows-only list do _not_ routinely have to build for multiple hardware platforms, multiple OS, and multiple OS versions for each of these platforms. The prospect of having multiple toolchain, build files, and source code layout versions must be horrifying, even "showstopping", for you.
  Message 31 of 109  
19 Sep 11 10:28
ntdev member 32323
xxxxxx@hotmail.com
Join Date:
Posts To This List: 843
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
On 9/19/2011 3:39 PM, xxxxx@osr.com wrote: > Help me here: Why are people so keen to build for specific OS versions? +1 Maybe for marketing reasons? Maybe it looks better to have a special driver package for WinX/WinY/WinZ/WinA/WinB/WinC each. Our BulkUSB-derived WDM driver - built in WDK6001 (XP free) - runs on Win98SE/ME/2K/XP/Vista/7. With the next major overhaul I might remove W98SE support (WDMSTUB.SYS served very well, thanks Walter Oney!). So far the driver has proven to be rock-solid (our device can not suspend, I've been told we have been lucky in that respect). If Win8 still runs WDM, there is little reason to even recompile it.
  Message 32 of 109  
19 Sep 11 10:33
ntdev member 32323
xxxxxx@hotmail.com
Join Date:
Posts To This List: 843
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
On 9/19/2011 3:55 PM, Don Burn wrote: > I suspect for the > simple driver a lot of us will learn how to ensure the conversion tool > works correctly with our sources (modifying the sources if needed) and > just live with creating a project file when we want to work with Win8. For the simple driver you might even consider trying a different technology, e.g. UMDF/KMDF (if your hardware is supported by it). As WDF was announced to be kept downward compatible, you will always get a better WDF version but can even keep your driver binary.
  Message 33 of 109  
19 Sep 11 10:41
Joseph M. Newcomer
xxxxxx@flounder.com
Join Date: 20 Nov 2008
Posts To This List: 1892
Re:Re:Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
LiIon was, as best I recall, created to solve a problem in energy density that DoD faced. I wasn't "invented by the military" but I had a friend who was working on what we would now call a "ruggedized laptop" and battery power was their biggest problem, and I remember him telling us about a new technology that was being developed--LiIon. But the thing to remember about these organizations is that they are incredibly conservative. It takes decades before the specifications are allowed to change, and even longer before new technology is adopted (there are some rare exceptions to this, but they are anomalous). So the idea that DoD research funding produced LiIon and DoD still uses NiCd is not inconsistent, or even surprising. Ada is still alive, but it is a tiny niche market. It is used in a small number of aerospace companies. C++ dominates. joe >> idenfitied your problem with software acquisition and software quality: >> you acquisition process" they said "But that would require that Congress > > How funny. And some people still believe that military is the driving > force under the technical progress. > > I've heard a guy who was seriously telling that LiIon batteries were > invented by the military. He even does not know that they are practically > not used in military at all - military and aerospace prefer NiCd. <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 34 of 109  
19 Sep 11 10:52
anton bassov
xxxxxx@hotmail.com
Join Date: 16 Jul 2006
Posts To This List: 3495
RE: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
>> idenfitied your problem with software acquisition and software qualit > > you acquisition process" they said "But that would require that Congress > How funny. And some people still believe that military is the driving force under the technical progress. You've got a peculiar understanding of technical progress, Max. Do you really think you are "the driving force under the technical progress", in your words, whenever you buy a "new" product that, despite offering a couple of new features, is basically still the same 20-year old product???? I would say that you are just a milking cow for a corporation that offers this product, i.e. someone who has more money than reason (I don't mean you personally, of course).... Anton Bassov
  Message 35 of 109  
19 Sep 11 11:15
Mark Roddy
xxxxxx@gmail.com
Join Date: 25 Feb 2000
Posts To This List: 3420
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
The lowest common version is xp. I would be happy to stop right there but here at Virtual Computer we have some components that require vista+ so I have a vista 32 bit build, and we made an arbitrary decision to limit 64bit support to win7+ so I have a win7x64 bit build too. Note however that for almost everyone responding in this thread the base version is xp: not supported by the win8 tools. On Monday, September 19, 2011, <xxxxx@osr.com> wrote: > Hmmmmm.... > > Help me here: Why are people so keen to build for specific OS versions? > > I *know* that we tell less experienced devs "build a single common executable in the build environment of the oldest system you support.". I teach this. And for some folks this is the best guidance. > > But Mr. Roddy and Mr. Burn are highly experienced devs. They need not follow the rules we give for beginners. > > What pushes you gentlemen to want to build you XP driver in the XP build environment? I assume you're building a single executable for all platforms, no? If not, why not. If so, why not build in,say, the Win8 build environment or if that's too scary maybe Vista? > > If it's executable format (NT Target Version or whatever it is) you can fix that easily. > > If you were really keen on ensuring you got the right definitions in the header files, you could even define the appropriate version constants, no??? > > I'm nit saying you don't have a point ... I just would lime to know the technical details of what's driving your requirement. > > Peter > OSR > > > --- > NTDEV is sponsored by OSR > > For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit: > http://www.osr.com/seminars <...excess quoted lines suppressed...> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer > -- Mark Roddy --
  Message 36 of 109  
19 Sep 11 11:15
Gregory G. Dyess
xxxxxx@pdq.net
Join Date:
Posts To This List: 290
Re:Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Not exactly. It's only OUR code that is frozen. They can add new printers, etc as old ones are obsoleted. We're just not allowed to change our code without going through recertification. That can cost upwards of $1 Million! Greg --- xxxxx@hotmail.com wrote: From: Hagen Patzke <xxxxx@hotmail.com> To: "Windows System Software Devs Interest List" <xxxxx@lists.osr.com> Subject: Re:[ntdev] Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption. Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2011 11:13:35 +0200 On 9/19/2011 3:25 AM, Gregory G Dyess wrote: > Unfortunately we have "certified" systems running on W2K that our > customers are not allowed to upgrade at all. But then these will also not be allowed upgrade to new hardware and / or to a new driver without re-certification either. No problem then. ;-) --- NTDEV is sponsored by OSR For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit: http://www.osr.com/seminars To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
  Message 37 of 109  
19 Sep 11 11:20
Don Burn
xxxxxx@windrvr.com
Join Date: 23 Feb 2011
Posts To This List: 650
Re: Re:Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
+1 I have a client I still keep in touch with, whose certified system is NT 4 Embedded. The cost of upgrading and getting the recertification means they are still cranking out hardware that most of us would consider beyond obsolete. This is a medical device. Don Burn Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting Website: http://www.windrvr.com Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr "Gregory G Dyess" <xxxxx@PDQ.NET> wrote in message news:166936@ntdev: > Not exactly. It's only OUR code that is frozen. They can add new printers, etc as old ones are obsoleted. We're just not allowed to change our code without going through recertification. That can cost upwards of $1 Million! > > Greg > > --- xxxxx@hotmail.com wrote: > > From: Hagen Patzke <xxxxx@hotmail.com> > To: "Windows System Software Devs Interest List" <xxxxx@lists.osr.com> > Subject: Re:[ntdev] Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption. > Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2011 11:13:35 +0200 <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 38 of 109  
19 Sep 11 11:23
Mark Roddy
xxxxxx@gmail.com
Join Date: 25 Feb 2000
Posts To This List: 3420
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
It is showstopping in the sense that I work for a very small company that cannot afford the expense involved in conversion and complexity, not because it is too difficult if there is no defined value in spending my time converting it won't happen. On Monday, September 19, 2011, Hagen Patzke <xxxxx@hotmail.com> wrote: > Sorry, I always forget that most people on this Windows-only list do > _not_ routinely have to build for multiple hardware platforms, multiple > OS, and multiple OS versions for each of these platforms. > > > The prospect of having multiple toolchain, build files, and source code > layout versions must be horrifying, even "showstopping", for you. > > --- > NTDEV is sponsored by OSR <...excess quoted lines suppressed...> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer > -- Mark Roddy --
  Message 39 of 109  
19 Sep 11 12:55
David R. Cattley
xxxxxx@msn.com
Join Date: 09 Jul 2002
Posts To This List: 1806
RE: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2011 09:39:19 -0400 > From: xxxxx@osr.com > To: xxxxx@lists.osr.com > Subject: RE:[ntdev] Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption. > > Hmmmmm.... > > Help me here: Why are people so keen to build for specific OS versions? <...excess quoted lines suppressed...> In the network driver space there are sometimes two completely different ways to do things on NT5 and NT6 and no 'intersection' to leverage as common ground. I maintain a couple such drivers that have bifurcated at the NT5 / NT6 DDI boundary. The NT5 drivers build in the XP/2K3 environments. The NT6 drivers build in the Vista environments. The lowest common version rule in this case got 'reset' at the NT6 boundary. Regards, Dave Cattley --
  Message 40 of 109  
19 Sep 11 13:23
Tim Roberts
xxxxxx@probo.com
Join Date: 28 Jan 2005
Posts To This List: 8258
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
xxxxx@flounder.com wrote: > I know companies that have not moved from Office 2003 because the > retraining cost is far too high. I still run Office 2003, not because I cannot be retrained (or so I believe), but because I see no need. Office 2003 does everything I need it to do, and it uses less resources and doesn't crash as often as the newer versions. -- Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.
  Message 41 of 109  
19 Sep 11 20:54
Peter Viscarola (OSR)
xxxxxx@osr.com
Join Date:
Posts To This List: 3930
List Moderator
RE: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
I'm hearing lots of mixed messages here. My question is: What prevents you from building your driver in the Win 8 WDK as a Vista driver (for example) and shipping that for use on XP?? That's not what we tell BEGINNERS to do, but I don't see... In most cases... Why it wouldn't work. And in fact in most cases in DOES work.... Or at least it did in the past. In terms of compile-time conditionals based on OS Version, that's a small problem, but can you no just set the appropriate definition before compiling? Peter OSR
  Message 42 of 109  
19 Sep 11 22:18
Doron Holan
xxxxxx@microsoft.com
Join Date: 08 Sep 2005
Posts To This List: 8276
RE: RE:Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Fundamentally therr is nothing in the kit that will prevent what you propose. There are a couple of places where we are overaggressive in setting values on your behalf , we are looking at how to address that ina later drop (and this needs to work for the advanced scenario where you want to target win x APIs and want to run on x-1, where x-1 is within the bounds of the target releases we support in the kit) d debt from my phone -----Original Message----- From: xxxxx@osr.com Sent: Monday, September 19, 2011 5:54 PM To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List Subject: RE:[ntdev] Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption. I'm hearing lots of mixed messages here. My question is: What prevents you from building your driver in the Win 8 WDK as a Vista driver (for example) and shipping that for use on XP?? That's not what we tell BEGINNERS to do, but I don't see... In most cases... Why it wouldn't work. And in fact in most cases in DOES work.... Or at least it did in the past. In terms of compile-time conditionals based on OS Version, that's a small problem, but can you no just set the appropriate definition before compiling? Peter OSR --- NTDEV is sponsored by OSR For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit: http://www.osr.com/seminars To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
  Message 43 of 109  
20 Sep 11 01:30
Eriksson
xxxxxx@gmail.com
Join Date: 16 Aug 2007
Posts To This List: 171
RE: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> This is not the case with XP, it is still a major force on the > business desktops and I doubt it will be that much smaller > by the time Win8 comes out That pretty much sums it up. XP is huge. It would be invaluable if the upcoming ddk could reconsider accommodating such a common and critical requirement. I also agree juggling two ddk versions on my system is chaos. I'd have to also sprinkle my source code with conditionals depending if it is compiled using the older or newer ddk, which would happen for example when the newer ddk defines structures a filter would want to understand if they came through. It would be a real shame if XP support is not on the newer DDK and be stuck at the old one indefinitely because this upcoming ddk might just be the most radical and compelling ddk ever released.
  Message 44 of 109  
20 Sep 11 03:21
Daniel Terhell
xxxxxx@resplendence.com
Join Date: 15 Apr 2004
Posts To This List: 785
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
If you link against the lib of your target OS at least you are sure all interfaces are exported by the kernel of that OS if you receive no linker errors. Now everytime we have to test it and load the driver on the older OS to find out. It is very easy for new interfaces to sneak in without being aware of it. Plus, I like the supported way of doing things. It's not very professional to tell to your clients "but it works anyway" if the right build environment for your real target is also available. Regards, Daniel Terhell Resplendence Software Projects Sp xxxxx@resplendence.com http://www.resplendence.com <xxxxx@osr.com> wrote in message news:166985@ntdev... > I'm hearing lots of mixed messages here. > > My question is: What prevents you from building your driver in the Win 8 > WDK as a Vista driver (for example) and shipping that for use on XP?? > > That's not what we tell BEGINNERS to do, but I don't see... In most > cases... Why it wouldn't work. And in fact in most cases in DOES work.... > Or at least it did in the past. > > In terms of compile-time conditionals based on OS Version, that's a small <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 45 of 109  
20 Sep 11 08:24
Mark Roddy
xxxxxx@gmail.com
Join Date: 25 Feb 2000
Posts To This List: 3420
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
The message, as far as I am concerned is: support XP if you want widepsread adoption of the Win8 tools. And no, I am not going to introduce any instability into the stuff I build by experimenting with Vista down-level builds on XP, thanks. I have all the bugs I need already. At this point in time the only reason I'll use the Win8 tools in a production environment without XP support would be because I have acquired a requirement for Win8 functionality in one or more components. Mark Roddy On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 8:56 PM, <xxxxx@osr.com> wrote: > I'm hearing lots of mixed messages here. > > My question is: What prevents you from building your driver in the Win 8 WDK as a Vista driver (for example) and shipping that for use on XP?? > > That's not what we tell BEGINNERS to do, but I don't see... In most cases... Why it wouldn't work. ?And in fact in most cases in DOES work.... Or at least it did in the past. > > In terms of compile-time conditionals based on OS Version, that's a small problem, but can you no just set the appropriate definition before compiling? > > Peter > OSR <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 46 of 109  
20 Sep 11 08:57
Don Burn
xxxxxx@windrvr.com
Join Date: 23 Feb 2011
Posts To This List: 650
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
+1 I've tried the game of "down-level" builds and have never had a good experience. It is a nightmare that is not worth the pain for anyone. The claim of just run a quick test may work for a trivial driver, but running an N week system test only to find that trying to push the tools had a problem is a great way to delay shipment by a few quarters. Don Burn Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting Website: http://www.windrvr.com Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr "Mark Roddy" <xxxxx@hollistech.com> wrote in message news:167009@ntdev: > > And no, I am not going to introduce any instability into the stuff I > build by experimenting with Vista down-level builds on XP, thanks. I > have all the bugs I need already. >
  Message 47 of 109  
20 Sep 11 10:47
George Garner Jr.
xxxxxx@gmgsystemsinc.com
Join Date: 07 Jun 2011
Posts To This List: 168
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
I have come to the conclusion that this is all much ado about nothing. DDKBuild should continue to work with the current WDK within the VS2011 IDE the same as it does within the VS2010 IDE. Those who want build for XP (or Windows 2003 which no one has mentioned) may continue to do so using the W7 WDK. I see no reason why you cannot have a separate configurations within the same project, one that invokes DDKBuild with the W7 WDK and one that builds for WVista and later using the W8 WDK. Maybe MS could ease the transition a bit by adding the option to create XP and Windows 2003 configurations to the conversion utility. It is after all not exactly rocket science to create a configuration which: 1. sets a single environment variable; and 2. invokes DDKBuild or similar utility with a command line. Or else maybe MS should open source the conversion utility so that we can do that for them. I think in any event that there will be a simple solution for this problem and I am grateful that we are finally moving to a modern build system. Welcome to the 21st century!
  Message 48 of 109  
20 Sep 11 10:52
Don Burn
xxxxxx@windrvr.com
Join Date: 23 Feb 2011
Posts To This List: 650
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
You obviously have not managed a big project this way. It still means one does the settings and sources for the XP project one way and the other projects through VS. This is a configuration nightmare to ensure that things keep in sync for a big project. Don Burn Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting Website: http://www.windrvr.com Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr "George M. Garner Jr." <xxxxx@gmgsystemsinc.com> wrote in message news:167023@ntdev: > I have come to the conclusion that this is all much ado about nothing. > DDKBuild should continue to work with the current WDK within the VS2011 > IDE the same as it does within the VS2010 IDE. Those who want build for > XP (or Windows 2003 which no one has mentioned) may continue to do so > using the W7 WDK. I see no reason why you cannot have a separate > configurations within the same project, one that invokes DDKBuild with > the W7 WDK and one that builds for WVista and later using the W8 WDK. > Maybe MS could ease the transition a bit by adding the option to create > XP and Windows 2003 configurations to the conversion utility. It is > after all not exactly rocket science to create a configuration which: <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 49 of 109  
20 Sep 11 11:22
George Garner Jr.
xxxxxx@gmgsystemsinc.com
Join Date: 07 Jun 2011
Posts To This List: 168
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
On 9/20/2011 10:51 AM, Don Burn wrote: > You obviously have not managed a big project this way. It still means > one does the settings and sources for the XP project one way and the > other projects through VS. This is a configuration nightmare to ensure > that things keep in sync for a big project. > > > Don Burn > Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting > Website: http://www.windrvr.com > Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr <...excess quoted lines suppressed...> Actually, if you use DDKBuild the only "setting" that is different for an XP vs. a W2k3 or w7 project is a single environment variable. I don't know what you mean by "sources." If you mean source code you will not need separate source code. You will need the same source code with condition compilation the same as you have to do now if you want to use w7 features on w7 and fall back to xp features with the XP driver. Really, I think that you are exaggerating the level of difficulty. Maybe you have an unnecessarily cumbersome development system. I don't see how MS can be held responsible for that. At a minimum the W7 WDK should continue to work for you for some time to come. There is nothing that requires you to use the W8 WDK.
  Message 50 of 109  
20 Sep 11 11:41
Don Burn
xxxxxx@windrvr.com
Join Date: 23 Feb 2011
Posts To This List: 650
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
And we aren't talking about tow DDKBuild projects we are talking about a Win8 (with no BUILD) and a DDKBUILD project where all the problems I mentioned are there. Yes, you can do this with or without DDKBuild when everything used the same basic system, but now we have to incompatible development environments and the headaches these will cause. Don Burn Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting Website: http://www.windrvr.com Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr "George M. Garner Jr." <xxxxx@gmgsystemsinc.com> wrote in message news:167027@ntdev: > On 9/20/2011 10:51 AM, Don Burn wrote: > > You obviously have not managed a big project this way. It still means > > one does the settings and sources for the XP project one way and the > > other projects through VS. This is a configuration nightmare to ensure > > that things keep in sync for a big project. > > > > > > Don Burn > > Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting > > Website: http://www.windrvr.com <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 51 of 109  
20 Sep 11 13:23
Mark Roddy
xxxxxx@gmail.com
Join Date: 25 Feb 2000
Posts To This List: 3420
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
For example one has a common source base. A modification to project configuration is made by modifying the Sources file (XP style change). Somebody has to remember to go to the VS11 side and make the equivalent change to the VS project. This is not exactly ideal, right? How about instead of inflicting this sort of nonsense on everyone outside of Redmond, making one simple change to the WIN8 build tools: ADD XP SUPPORT BACK INTO IT. Mark Roddy On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 11:41 AM, Don Burn <xxxxx@windrvr.com> wrote: > And we aren't talking about tow DDKBuild projects we are talking about a > Win8 (with no BUILD) and a DDKBUILD project where all the problems I > mentioned are there. ?Yes, you can do this with or without DDKBuild when > everything used the same basic system, but now we have to incompatible > development environments and the headaches these will cause. > > > Don Burn > Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting > Website: http://www.windrvr.com <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 52 of 109  
20 Sep 11 13:47
Doron Holan
xxxxxx@microsoft.com
Join Date: 08 Sep 2005
Posts To This List: 8276
RE: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Just like everyone else, we are constrained by resources (dev, QA, PM). And that constraint is not just across the WDK team itself, but across all of windows. Saying that you add XP support back into the WDK means that across windows, we need to test an additional OS and configuration in addition to what we currently have. It is not as easy as putting it into the build env and saying we are done, even though from your perspective that is what is in the end product. I am listening to the feedback, there is attention being paid to the points being made. That is no way a promise or commitment that we will add it back though. d -----Original Message----- From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Mark Roddy Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 10:23 AM To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List Subject: Re: [ntdev] Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption. For example one has a common source base. A modification to project configuration is made by modifying the Sources file (XP style change). Somebody has to remember to go to the VS11 side and make the equivalent change to the VS project. This is not exactly ideal, right? How about instead of inflicting this sort of nonsense on everyone outside of Redmond, making one simple change to the WIN8 build tools: ADD XP SUPPORT BACK INTO IT. Mark Roddy On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 11:41 AM, Don Burn <xxxxx@windrvr.com> wrote: > And we aren't talking about tow DDKBuild projects we are talking about > a > Win8 (with no BUILD) and a DDKBUILD project where all the problems I > mentioned are there. ?Yes, you can do this with or without DDKBuild > when everything used the same basic system, but now we have to > incompatible development environments and the headaches these will cause. > > > Don Burn > Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting <...excess quoted lines suppressed...> --- NTDEV is sponsored by OSR For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit: http://www.osr.com/seminars To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
  Message 53 of 109  
20 Sep 11 14:11
Don Burn
xxxxxx@windrvr.com
Join Date: 23 Feb 2011
Posts To This List: 650
RE: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Having run compiler and tools groups, I certainly understand the problem of the extra test environments. This is a big extra effort, but I do believe either we need this. As alternatives we need a reasonable way to take a VS11 driver project and turn it back into a build project that can be run on the Win7 WDK or a way to compare a BUILD project's configuration to a VS11 driver project. I will admit I have not had a chance to experiment with the Win8 WDK environment enough to know if there is a viable approach of saying all changes to the config are done in SOURCES and then run the conversion tool on every build. Don Burn Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting Website: http://www.windrvr.com Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr "Doron Holan" <xxxxx@microsoft.com> wrote in message news:167040@ntdev: > Just like everyone else, we are constrained by resources (dev, QA, PM). And that constraint is not just across the WDK team itself, but across all of windows. Saying that you add XP support back into the WDK means that across windows, we need to test an additional OS and configuration in addition to what we currently have. It is not as easy as putting it into the build env and saying we are done, even though from your perspective that is what is in the end product. > > I am listening to the feedback, there is attention being paid to the points being made. That is no way a promise or commitment that we will add it back though. > > d > > -----Original Message----- > From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Mark Roddy > Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 10:23 AM > To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 54 of 109  
20 Sep 11 14:36
Doron Holan
xxxxxx@microsoft.com
Join Date: 08 Sep 2005
Posts To This List: 8276
RE: RE:Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
You could run the conversion on every build if you want. We are not going to product a vcxproj -> sources (un)converter. That is an opportunity for others in the community if they choose to pursue it. As for cmd line comparison, you could easily shim the call to cl.exe and link.exe to your own stub program that captures the cmd line, calls the real thing, and then you compare the results of the two invocations. We did that for the initial porting to msbuild, it is a pretty simple utility to write. d -----Original Message----- From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Don Burn Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 11:11 AM To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List Subject: RE:[ntdev] Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption. Having run compiler and tools groups, I certainly understand the problem of the extra test environments. This is a big extra effort, but I do believe either we need this. As alternatives we need a reasonable way to take a VS11 driver project and turn it back into a build project that can be run on the Win7 WDK or a way to compare a BUILD project's configuration to a VS11 driver project. I will admit I have not had a chance to experiment with the Win8 WDK environment enough to know if there is a viable approach of saying all changes to the config are done in SOURCES and then run the conversion tool on every build. Don Burn Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting Website: http://www.windrvr.com Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr "Doron Holan" <xxxxx@microsoft.com> wrote in message news:167040@ntdev: > Just like everyone else, we are constrained by resources (dev, QA, PM). And that constraint is not just across the WDK team itself, but across all of windows. Saying that you add XP support back into the WDK means that across windows, we need to test an additional OS and configuration in addition to what we currently have. It is not as easy as putting it into the build env and saying we are done, even though from your perspective that is what is in the end product. > > I am listening to the feedback, there is attention being paid to the points being made. That is no way a promise or commitment that we will add it back though. > > d > > -----Original Message----- > From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com > [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Mark Roddy > Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 10:23 AM <...excess quoted lines suppressed...> --- NTDEV is sponsored by OSR For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit: http://www.osr.com/seminars To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
  Message 55 of 109  
20 Sep 11 18:07
George Garner Jr.
xxxxxx@gmgsystemsinc.com
Join Date: 07 Jun 2011
Posts To This List: 168
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
On 9/20/2011 1:22 PM, Mark Roddy wrote: > For example one has a common source base. A modification to project > configuration is made by modifying the Sources file (XP style change). > Somebody has to remember to go to the VS11 side and make the > equivalent change to the VS project. > > This is not exactly ideal, right? > Well, what sort of change? Some changes will be automatically reflected in the VS project. For example, if you use the IDE to add a source file it will automatically be added to the VS build. You will still have to add the source file to the w7 BUILD sources file. But then you would have had to do that anyway. I can see a little bit of legitimacy to your complaint to the extent that there currently is no way in the VS build environment to apply a single setting to a group of configurations, or to all configurations, without resetting all of the other parameters. But that is a defect in the VS build environment which could be fixed without adding support for XP. There are still people using w2k and nt4, as we have heard on the list. Why shouldn't MS also support these OS builds as well? Where do you draw the line? Why is XP so sacred?
  Message 56 of 109  
20 Sep 11 18:20
Tim Roberts
xxxxxx@probo.com
Join Date: 28 Jan 2005
Posts To This List: 8258
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
George M. Garner Jr. wrote: > There are still people using w2k and nt4, as we have heard on the list. Only in trivial numbers. > Why shouldn't MS also support these OS builds as well? Where do you > draw the line? Why is XP so sacred? You draw the line at XP, because it IS different. It's just a fact. XP was significantly better than what came before, and arguably better than what came immediately after. I believe it has been reported that only within the last few weeks did XP finally fall below 50% of the installed base of Windows computers. That's a huge fraction. -- Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.
  Message 57 of 109  
20 Sep 11 18:20
Don Burn
xxxxxx@windrvr.com
Join Date: 23 Feb 2011
Posts To This List: 650
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
First while XP is not sacred until a couple of weeks ago it was the most popular version of Windows on the business desktop, and it still has a huge share of that space, so it is important. As far as settings are concerned, keeping multiple copies is still a great way to mess things up, and we not talking the simple problem of ddkbuild of "Oh I forgot to add my file to the sources" where nothing works, we are talking about trying to track down what compiler settings are different across two completely different environments. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have helped a number of clients who has VS user space code and BUILD kernel code who got sick and tired of keeping things in sync, that they asked for my help to move everything under BUILD. Don Burn Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting Website: http://www.windrvr.com Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr "George M. Garner Jr." <xxxxx@gmgsystemsinc.com> wrote in message news:167051@ntdev: > On 9/20/2011 1:22 PM, Mark Roddy wrote: > > For example one has a common source base. A modification to project > > configuration is made by modifying the Sources file (XP style change). > > Somebody has to remember to go to the VS11 side and make the > > equivalent change to the VS project. > > > > This is not exactly ideal, right? > > > > Well, what sort of change? Some changes will be automatically reflected <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 58 of 109  
20 Sep 11 19:04
Michal Vodicka
xxxxxx@authentec.com
Join Date: 25 Mar 2011
Posts To This List: 120
RE: Re:Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> -----Original Message----- > From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [mailto:bounce-475468- > xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Don Burn > Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2011 12:20 AM > To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List > Subject: Re:[ntdev] Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to > adoption. > > As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have helped a number of clients who > has VS user space code and BUILD kernel code who got sick and tired of <...excess quoted lines suppressed...> And now it'd be a good time to move to everything to the MSBuild. Which'd be much easier if WDK 8 supports XP. Nobody cares about Vista but XP support is requested often. I understand MS has problem with resources but we have the same problem and it duplicates the work at our side. It was MS who decided to make major change so IMHO they should invest resources to make transition smooth for the rest of the World. Michal NOTE: The information in this message is intended for the personal and confidential use of the designated recipient(s) named above. To the extent the recipient(s) is/are bound by a non-disclosure agreement, or other agreement that contains an obligation of confidentiality, with AuthenTec, then this message and/or any attachments shall be considered confidential information and subject to the confidentiality terms of that agreement. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient named above, you are notified that you have received this document in error, and any review, dissemination, distribution or copying of this message is strictly prohibited. If you have received this document in error, please delete the original message and notify the sender immediately. Thank You! AuthenTec, Inc. http://www.authentec.com/
  Message 59 of 109  
21 Sep 11 04:04
ntdev member 32323
xxxxxx@hotmail.com
Join Date:
Posts To This List: 843
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
On 9/20/2011 11:46 PM, George M. Garner Jr. wrote: > Why is XP so sacred? As I see it, and put very bluntly, it's suddenly interesting because "Mr. A" and "Mr. B" are personally affected. When long time ago I mentioned that our driver needed to support Win98SE up to Vista, only very few people (hello, Tim!) could relate to that. Everyone else basically suggested to ditch support for these ancient 'legacy' OS versions, and our customers should just ditch them, too. Now with MS dropping XP support from WDK, a lot of people realize for the first time in their developer life, what it means to have your 'home environment' declared "legacy" by someone. That it means to have to maintain incompatible build environments for just different _versions_ of the same operating system. And this is highly annoying for them. People with large projects who have to to support different operating systems had this problem long ago, solved it, and moved on. For WDK8, I suggest to "keep calm and carry on": one day Win7 will be "legacy", and support for it will be dropped from the then-current WDK.
  Message 60 of 109  
21 Sep 11 04:34
Mike Kemp
xxxxxx@sintefex.com
Join Date: 30 May 2006
Posts To This List: 234
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Underfunding driver development is probably something that most people here can relate to. It is a pity that a great new step towards driver developability (if there is such a word) that leads to better drivers, and especially UM drivers, gets 90% done then stops with half the installed Windows base unsupported. It's pretty obvious that driver development support has been in the dark ages since Windows started, and as a result Windows has always suffered from bad drivers undermining the product stability. I have to run un-WHQL-ed drivers from oscilloscopes to pro audio interfaces where the market is too small for mission critical debugging, so I have my share of Vista crashes and hangs which no doubt would be better had the development environment been better. So hopefully someone can prod higher up in MS to properly resource addressing one of the final weak links in the product. Mike >>>>>> ----- Original Message ----- From: Doron Holan To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 6:47 PM Subject: RE: [ntdev] Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption. Just like everyone else, we are constrained by resources (dev, QA, PM). And that constraint is not just across the WDK team itself, but across all of windows. Saying that you add XP support back into the WDK means that across windows, we need to test an additional OS and configuration in addition to what we currently have. It is not as easy as putting it into the build env and saying we are done, even though from your perspective that is what is in the end product. I am listening to the feedback, there is attention being paid to the points being made. That is no way a promise or commitment that we will add it back though. d
  Message 61 of 109  
21 Sep 11 08:42
George Garner Jr.
xxxxxx@gmgsystemsinc.com
Join Date: 07 Jun 2011
Posts To This List: 168
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
On 9/20/2011 6:19 PM, Tim Roberts wrote: > George M. Garner Jr. wrote: >> There are still people using w2k and nt4, as we have heard on the list. > > Only in trivial numbers. > >> Why shouldn't MS also support these OS builds as well? Where do you >> draw the line? Why is XP so sacred? > > You draw the line at XP, because it IS different. It's just a fact. XP > was significantly better than what came before, and arguably better than <...excess quoted lines suppressed...> The question is not how many computers there are with XP installed but how many developers there are who won't be able to handle having two WDK's as part of their build environment, one for XP and one for everything else. The people who need to support W2k and NT4 got used to this a long time ago; and so will you. XP is an inherently unstable operating system. The sooner it goes away the better.
  Message 62 of 109  
21 Sep 11 08:49
Mark Roddy
xxxxxx@gmail.com
Join Date: 25 Feb 2000
Posts To This List: 3420
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
XP is almost half the installed base. Win98SE, or W2K do not have significant market share. This is not an arbitrary issue based on personal taste, it is a very real world issue that affects almost everyone in the business we are in. Mark Roddy On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 4:03 AM, Hagen Patzke <xxxxx@hotmail.com> wrote: > On 9/20/2011 11:46 PM, George M. Garner Jr. wrote: >> Why is XP so sacred? > > As I see it, and put very bluntly, it's suddenly interesting because > "Mr. A" and "Mr. B" are personally affected. > > When long time ago I mentioned that our driver needed to support Win98SE > up to Vista, only very few people (hello, Tim!) could relate to that. > Everyone else basically suggested to ditch support for these ancient > 'legacy' OS versions, and our customers should just ditch them, too. <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 63 of 109  
21 Sep 11 08:51
Don Burn
xxxxxx@windrvr.com
Join Date: 23 Feb 2011
Posts To This List: 650
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
No the question is not having two WDK's I have had multiple WDK's/DDK's on my systems for 15 years. The question is maintaining two totally different development environments for a single product, that is a nightmare scenario that has been around before Windows even came out, and most people who could did anything in their power to avoid it. You state " is an inherently unstable operating system.", care to give any facts to back that up? Most firms I deal with consider XP to be quite stable, and that most versions of Windows are not stable till the first or second service pack. Don Burn Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting Website: http://www.windrvr.com Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr "George M. Garner Jr." <xxxxx@gmgsystemsinc.com> wrote in message news:167077@ntdev: > On 9/20/2011 6:19 PM, Tim Roberts wrote: > > The question is not how many computers there are with XP installed but > how many developers there are who won't be able to handle having two > WDK's as part of their build environment, one for XP and one for > everything else. The people who need to support W2k and NT4 got used to > this a long time ago; and so will you. > > XP is an inherently unstable operating system. The sooner it goes away > the better.
  Message 64 of 109  
21 Sep 11 08:55
Mark Roddy
xxxxxx@gmail.com
Join Date: 25 Feb 2000
Posts To This List: 3420
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Again, it is not simply two WDKs smoothed over by DDKBUILD, it is two separate development environments. I could live with two WDKs. I will live with two separate development environments if I am compelled to do so by a requirement for Win8 drivers, otherwise I'll have to stay with the excellent Win7 WDK, as there is no other way to justify the cost and complexity of moving to the new environment. My point is that this is unfortunate. There is probably a lot of intangible value in the new build tools, too bad the wall was set up keeping XP out. Mark Roddy On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 8:41 AM, George M. Garner Jr. <xxxxx@gmgsystemsinc.com> wrote: > On 9/20/2011 6:19 PM, Tim Roberts wrote: >> >> George M. Garner Jr. wrote: >>> >>> There are still people using w2k and nt4, as we have heard on the list. >> >> Only in trivial numbers. >> >>> ? Why shouldn't MS also support these OS builds as well? ?Where do you >>> draw the line? ?Why is XP so sacred? <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 65 of 109  
21 Sep 11 10:37
George Garner Jr.
xxxxxx@gmgsystemsinc.com
Join Date: 07 Jun 2011
Posts To This List: 168
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Again, the question is not how much of the Windows install base is still running XP. The question is how many developers will not be able to handle two build environments within their build system. A lot of companies already produce separate drivers for XP/w2k3 and Vista/w7. I think that the number of developers for which this really is a "show stopper" is truly small.
  Message 66 of 109  
21 Sep 11 11:00
ntdev member 43013
xxxxxx@barila.net
Join Date:
Posts To This List: 120
RE: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> -----Original Message----- > From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [mailto:bounce-475572- > xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of George M. Garner Jr. > Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2011 8:37 AM > To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List > Subject: Re:[ntdev] Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to > adoption. > > Again, the question is not how much of the Windows install base is still > running XP. The question is how many developers will not be able to <...excess quoted lines suppressed...> Your assertion that there is little difference between using completely different meta-build systems and building different binaries using the same meta-build system is fallacious. Even those who are screaming the loudest build, at the very least, two binaries (i386 and amd64). It is not about multiple versions of the build product. It's about now needing to use multiple versions of the meta-build information that aren't easily synchronized in both directions to build downlevel OS'es. I suspect there would have been almost universal acclaim for the w8 WDK, with very little lament over the long overdue demise of SOURCES+build.exe, had the w8 WDK contained support for XP as a target platform. d, with all due respect, XP is still way too large a part of the installed base to ask the dev community to use a toolset that doesn't support it. BTW, I have a brain-dead simple activity monitor mini-filter. I could have targeted Windows 2000, but there was little incremental value in that. But XP and 2003 are still a major part of the installed base. So my brain-dead simple filter targets XP x86 and 2003 x64. They "just work"(tm) on newer Windows versions. I would *love* to move to the Win 8 WDK as the production build environment. But if XP/2003 isn't in it, I won't. At least not for a non-trivial period of time, until XP and 2003 are insignificant enough to not have to build for them anymore. Philip D. Barila
  Message 67 of 109  
21 Sep 11 11:04
Mark Roddy
xxxxxx@gmail.com
Join Date: 25 Feb 2000
Posts To This List: 3420
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Without a requirement for win8 specific driver builds why would anyone undertake this? Mark Roddy On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 10:36 AM, George M. Garner Jr. <xxxxx@gmgsystemsinc.com> wrote: > Again, the question is not how much of the Windows install base is still > running XP. ?The question is how many developers will not be able to handle > two build environments within their build system. ?A lot of companies > already produce separate drivers for XP/w2k3 and Vista/w7. ?I think that the > number of developers for which this really is a "show stopper" is truly > small. > > --- > NTDEV is sponsored by OSR > <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 68 of 109  
21 Sep 11 11:07
Maxim S. Shatskih
xxxxxx@storagecraft.com
Join Date: 20 Feb 2003
Posts To This List: 8629
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> in the VS project. For example, if you use the IDE to add a source file Am I correct that, if you edit the VS's/MSBUILD's project files via IDE, then the IDE reorganizes this XML a lot during save, so that the future diff/comparisons of the historical versions of the project file are killed? Also am I correct that the VS's project/build settings windows does only support the simplest possible MSBUILD features? For instance, let's take my script (I have published it on this forum once) of taking SVNVERSION and embedding it to the INF file, while working around the STAMPINF's timezone bug. Can _such_ a script be implemented using VS's build settings UI? It needs a lot of Exec tasks. I'm afraid of this HTML-like things - where you open HTML in some "too smart" editor, and it replaces < with &lt; and > with &gt;, as also the single quote within the JScript string literals with &#8216;, which then makes your page buggy. So, if there any XML sentence will will make the MSBUILD project file _not openable with VS at all_? what if I will miss the DTD statement for it? -- Maxim S. Shatskih Windows DDK MVP xxxxx@storagecraft.com http://www.storagecraft.com
  Message 69 of 109  
21 Sep 11 11:19
Maxim S. Shatskih
xxxxxx@storagecraft.com
Join Date: 20 Feb 2003
Posts To This List: 8629
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> 'legacy' OS versions, and our customers should just ditch them, too. Dropping legacy is OK, but please define "legacy". The OS which runs on _half_ of the US's (or even world's) business desktops is surely not legacy, it is a mainstream OS and not a "long tail" marketing-wise. And yes, if Win8 WDK calls it "legacy" - then sorry, I think most people will still use Win7's (or even Vista SP2's like we at StorageCraft use) WDK to build for Win8. Yes, no new Win8's features used - but who cares? most new features introduced since NT4 times provide _minor conviniences_ with can be easily ignored. Also don't forget MmGetSystemRoutineAddress and copy-pastes from the new OS's headers. The things are NOT such only with major architecture changes - like PnP, NDIS 6 vs 5 and WDDM vs old GDI-based video driver model. But in this case, the new code base must be developed anyway, and using another build tools is a minor issue. This is just plain _the second project_ which can be done using its own tools. Now about Win98SE. This OS was a tiny minority even in 2004, and thus was not mainstream, legacy and "long tail" one. And correct, not all companies gather these long tails, especially if this requires the major effort of running the second (in this case - VxD-based) project. -- Maxim S. Shatskih Windows DDK MVP xxxxx@storagecraft.com http://www.storagecraft.com
  Message 70 of 109  
21 Sep 11 11:20
Maxim S. Shatskih
xxxxxx@storagecraft.com
Join Date: 20 Feb 2003
Posts To This List: 8629
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> non-trivial period of time, until XP and 2003 are insignificant enough 2003 will probably die sooner then XP. -- Maxim S. Shatskih Windows DDK MVP xxxxx@storagecraft.com http://www.storagecraft.com
  Message 71 of 109  
21 Sep 11 11:44
Maxim S. Shatskih
xxxxxx@storagecraft.com
Join Date: 20 Feb 2003
Posts To This List: 8629
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> You draw the line at XP, because it IS different. It's just a fact. XP > was significantly better than what came before, Not much. Just it was _marketed_ as the first common desktop OS of the NT line. More marketing then technical reasons. > what came immediately after. Well, the most important cause of Vista failure is _unable to run properly of the common hardware of that time_. Actually, Win7 is only marginally better then Vista in boot speed, and, on modern hardware, Vista also runs OK and not much worse then Win7. Things like pleasing Intel by stamping a Vista logo on their outdated slow chipset (865?) is what ruined Vista commercially. The whole Vista failure thing is in _mass perception_ and not technical. BTW, the server version of Vista have not suffered from such a failure. -- Maxim S. Shatskih Windows DDK MVP xxxxx@storagecraft.com http://www.storagecraft.com
  Message 72 of 109  
21 Sep 11 12:00
Doron Holan
xxxxxx@microsoft.com
Join Date: 08 Sep 2005
Posts To This List: 8276
RE: Re:Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Why dont you try it and see what happens? That is the advice we give for development , apply it here as well. No vs does not rewrite the entire project file when changing one setting. You can put whatever tasks you want into the build. In fact, I think msbuild excels here because you can easily chain yourself between build steps in an ordered and supported manner, unlike nmake. As fas the UI goes with respect to your custom targets, they are ignored. You can easily wire in your own UI (it is simple xaml) to configure your targets if you want. d debt from my phone -----Original Message----- From: Maxim S. Shatskih Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2011 8:07 AM To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List Subject: Re:[ntdev] Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption. > in the VS project. For example, if you use the IDE to add a source file Am I correct that, if you edit the VS's/MSBUILD's project files via IDE, then the IDE reorganizes this XML a lot during save, so that the future diff/comparisons of the historical versions of the project file are killed? Also am I correct that the VS's project/build settings windows does only support the simplest possible MSBUILD features? For instance, let's take my script (I have published it on this forum once) of taking SVNVERSION and embedding it to the INF file, while working around the STAMPINF's timezone bug. Can _such_ a script be implemented using VS's build settings UI? It needs a lot of Exec tasks. I'm afraid of this HTML-like things - where you open HTML in some "too smart" editor, and it replaces < with &lt; and > with &gt;, as also the single quote within the JScript string literals with &#8216;, which then makes your page buggy. So, if there any XML sentence will will make the MSBUILD project file _not openable with VS at all_? what if I will miss the DTD statement for it? -- Maxim S. Shatskih Windows DDK MVP xxxxx@storagecraft.com http://www.storagecraft.com --- NTDEV is sponsored by OSR For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit: http://www.osr.com/seminars To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
  Message 73 of 109  
21 Sep 11 13:07
George Garner Jr.
xxxxxx@gmgsystemsinc.com
Join Date: 07 Jun 2011
Posts To This List: 168
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> I have a brain-dead simple activity monitor...< Why does this driver have to be built using the w8 WDK? Won't the w7 WDK continue to work for you for some time to come. Really, how many of you have a requirement to build kernel mode metro apps that will also run on XP anyway? Have you tested your W7 driver on Windows 8? Doesn't it work? > Your assertion that there is little difference between using > completely different meta-build systems and building > different binaries using the same meta-build system is > fallacious. < I wasn't referring to different XP vs. w7 builds of the same code base. I was referring to the fact that a lot of companies already have produced completely new WDF drivers for use on Vista and later while still shipping their "legacy" drivers for use on XP/2003. This is a trend that already has been occurring in the market place. And I think that this trend will continue.
  Message 74 of 109  
21 Sep 11 13:32
Don Burn
xxxxxx@windrvr.com
Join Date: 23 Feb 2011
Posts To This List: 650
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Of all my customers I know of one that did not want XP support on their WDF drivers (and a fair number expect Win2K). I have never heard of "if you are writing with WDF we don't care about XP". In fact, your example can be stretched to disprove your assertion, remember the community fought hard and got WDF on Win2K. Now many of us will just use the Win7 WDK, but then we will miss: 1. Improved checking tools, there has not been a release where PreFast and SDV haven't gotten better, but I guess if we want XP we don't need to make our code good. 2. We want to use features from Win8 where we can to improve code quality, but since maintaining two code bases is a great way to reduce code quality those nice features will not be used on the system they were intended for. I don't know where you get your input on this, but it certainly does not match the reality of most companies in the Windows space I know. Don Burn Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting Website: http://www.windrvr.com Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr "George M. Garner Jr." <xxxxx@gmgsystemsinc.com> wrote in message news:167107@ntdev: > > I have a brain-dead simple activity monitor...< > > Why does this driver have to be built using the w8 > WDK? Won't the w7 WDK continue to work for you for some time to come. > Really, how many of you have a requirement to build kernel mode metro > apps that will also run on XP anyway? Have you tested your W7 driver on > Windows 8? Doesn't it work? > > > Your assertion that there is little difference between using > > completely different meta-build systems and building <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 75 of 109  
21 Sep 11 13:47
ntdev member 43013
xxxxxx@barila.net
Join Date:
Posts To This List: 120
RE: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> -----Original Message----- > From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [mailto:bounce-475629- > xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of George M. Garner Jr. > Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2011 11:07 AM > To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List > Subject: Re:[ntdev] Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to > adoption. > > > I have a brain-dead simple activity monitor...< > <...excess quoted lines suppressed...> It doesn't have to be built on the w8 WDK. But the improved tools (SDV and/or prefast might actually comprehend a minifilter in the w8 WDK. I can hope.) in the w8 WDK should result in a net improvement in code quality, unless it's already perfect (it's not). If we aren't using the w8 WDK to build the final product, there is more friction in using the w8 WDK, so it will be used less (or not at all). It's really rather surprising to see MSFT take the decision to remove support for very nearly 50% of the installed base in a tool which has such a profound effect on the overall stability of the OS. It's even more surprising to see anyone outside of MSFT defending such a decision. Phil Philip D. Barila
  Message 76 of 109  
21 Sep 11 15:40
Pavel A
xxxxxx@fastmail.fm
Join Date: 21 Jul 2008
Posts To This List: 1885
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Welcome to VC++ forums, Maxim. That is a perfect place for VS questions. http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vcgeneral/threads http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vseditor/threads So the old dream of writing drivers in Visual Studio comes true... Welcome to the paradise. --pa On 21-Sep-2011 18:06, Maxim S. Shatskih wrote: >> in the VS project. For example, if you use the IDE to add a source file > > Am I correct that, if you edit the VS's/MSBUILD's project files via IDE, then the IDE reorganizes this XML a lot during save, so that the future diff/comparisons of the historical versions of the project file are killed? > > Also am I correct that the VS's project/build settings windows does only support the simplest possible MSBUILD features? > > For instance, let's take my script (I have published it on this forum once) of taking SVNVERSION and embedding it to the INF file, while working around the STAMPINF's timezone bug. > > Can _such_ a script be implemented using VS's build settings UI? It needs a lot of Exec tasks. > <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 77 of 109  
21 Sep 11 15:43
Maxim S. Shatskih
xxxxxx@storagecraft.com
Join Date: 20 Feb 2003
Posts To This List: 8629
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> I was referring to the fact that a lot of companies already have > produced completely new WDF drivers for use on Vista and later while > still shipping their "legacy" drivers for use on XP/2003. This is a > trend For me, the prevailing trend is to forget about the device and its drivers in half a year after it will be out of production :-) I never ever saw a combination of WDF and non-WDF driver for a hardware piece. Also note that there is not only hardware drivers, but software with kernel-mode components, and with this software, the life is harder a bit. -- Maxim S. Shatskih Windows DDK MVP xxxxx@storagecraft.com http://www.storagecraft.com
  Message 78 of 109  
21 Sep 11 15:45
Maxim S. Shatskih
xxxxxx@storagecraft.com
Join Date: 20 Feb 2003
Posts To This List: 8629
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> It's really rather surprising to see MSFT take the decision to remove It's yet another step of squeezing XP out of existence. Just like lack of StorPort for XP :-) -- Maxim S. Shatskih Windows DDK MVP xxxxx@storagecraft.com http://www.storagecraft.com
  Message 79 of 109  
21 Sep 11 15:59
Pavel A
xxxxxx@fastmail.fm
Join Date: 21 Jul 2008
Posts To This List: 1885
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
On 21-Sep-2011 18:18, Maxim S. Shatskih wrote: >> 'legacy' OS versions, and our customers should just ditch them, too. > > Dropping legacy is OK, but please define "legacy". Legacy = anything that does not have the latest "activation" feature :) Or, cannot run Internet Explorer 9. -- pa
  Message 80 of 109  
22 Sep 11 03:32
ntdev member 32323
xxxxxx@hotmail.com
Join Date:
Posts To This List: 843
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
On 9/21/2011 7:31 PM, Don Burn wrote: > Of all my customers I know of one that did not want XP support on their > WDF drivers (and a fair number expect Win2K). Question: How do you handle Win2K with the Win7 WDK?
  Message 81 of 109  
22 Sep 11 13:38
J. J. Farrell
xxxxxx@bcs.org.uk
Join Date: 14 Jul 2003
Posts To This List: 200
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
George M. Garner Jr. wrote: > Again, the question is not how much of the Windows install base is still > running XP. The question is how many developers will not be able to > handle two build environments within their build system. A lot of > companies already produce separate drivers for XP/w2k3 and Vista/w7. I > think that the number of developers for which this really is a "show > stopper" is truly small. Which companies and, more to the point, why? I've not personally come across anyone shipping different drivers for w2k3 and w2k8, but that's not saying much.
  Message 82 of 109  
22 Sep 11 13:45
Mark Roddy
xxxxxx@gmail.com
Join Date: 25 Feb 2000
Posts To This List: 3420
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Network and display driver architectures diverge across the xp/vista boundary. Storport/scsiport is another break point for driver divergence. Mark Roddy On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 1:37 PM, J. J. Farrell <xxxxx@bcs.org.uk> wrote: > George M. Garner Jr. wrote: >> >> Again, the question is not how much of the Windows install base is still >> running XP. ?The question is how many developers will not be able to handle >> two build environments within their build system. ?A lot of companies >> already produce separate drivers for XP/w2k3 and Vista/w7. ?I think that the >> number of developers for which this really is a "show stopper" is truly >> small. > > Which companies and, more to the point, why? I've not personally come across <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 83 of 109  
22 Sep 11 13:50
Don Burn
xxxxxx@windrvr.com
Join Date: 23 Feb 2011
Posts To This List: 650
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Beyond the ones Mark mentions there is the limited support in XP for registry monitoring and even file system mini-filters. Another area is crash dump filtering which is present for Vista+ but not before. Speaking of crash dump support virtual storport driver need to be running Win7, for ones before that there are games than have to be played to support crash dumps. Don Burn Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting Website: http://www.windrvr.com Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr "Mark Roddy" <xxxxx@hollistech.com> wrote in message news:167192@ntdev: > Network and display driver architectures diverge across the xp/vista > boundary. Storport/scsiport is another break point for driver > divergence. > > Mark Roddy > > > > On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 1:37 PM, J. J. Farrell <xxxxx@bcs.org.uk> wrote: > > George M. Garner Jr. wrote: <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 84 of 109  
22 Sep 11 13:57
Maxim S. Shatskih
xxxxxx@storagecraft.com
Join Date: 20 Feb 2003
Posts To This List: 8629
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> registry monitoring and even file system mini-filters. Another area is > crash dump filtering which is present for Vista+ but not before. It is present in pre-Vista using hooking, which still works in Vista+. TrueCrypt uses this. Register a Ps image load callback, and, in this callback, find the just-loaded module descriptor and hook the DriverEntry pointer there. -- Maxim S. Shatskih Windows DDK MVP xxxxx@storagecraft.com http://www.storagecraft.com
  Message 85 of 109  
22 Sep 11 20:39
Eriksson
xxxxxx@gmail.com
Join Date: 16 Aug 2007
Posts To This List: 171
RE: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
It isn't right to jettison the #2 operating system in the world like this. If XP is being dropped because of limited test resources, then why not consider putting in XP support and taking out the Vista build environments. Vista is just a fly on the wall compared to XP. And the logic regarding XP can be applied to Vista "you can always build for Vista using the w7 kit".
  Message 86 of 109  
23 Sep 11 12:34
Maxim S. Shatskih
xxxxxx@storagecraft.com
Join Date: 20 Feb 2003
Posts To This List: 8629
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> It isn't right to jettison the #2 operating system in the world like this. #2 OS in the world works only on proprietary hardware (proprietarized EFI hardware, BTW), and its vendor is pushing hard to prosecute the hacker attempts to run it on the usual PC. The vendor does not object running Windows on their hardware, though. #3 OS in the world will not be jettisoned for sure. Surely Novell or RedHat (isn't Novell acquired by Red Hat, BTW?) will release the EFI-signed GRUB or similar bootloader. And, for these companies, the ability to replace the kernel with the one built off kernel.org is among their business goals and ethical principles. I can hardly imagine Red Hat TiVoizing the kernel itself (the way Google did it for smartphones). >If XP is being dropped because of limited test resources, Probably Vista will be dropped sooner then XP :-) And it is not limited test resources, it is mainly the compat burden to carry in MS's own frameworks and apps. For instance, if they will drop XP, they will be able to develop Office.Next based on D2D and not GDI (IE9 is already such), to finally push the whole PC world to switch to WPF/Silverlight instead of USER32 (Windows Phone 7 is already such), to use TxF and TxR everywhere, to use fast NDIS6 Ethernet, to add the new NT6-only stuff to .NET and so on. Some platform-level stuff can be backported to XP, like KMDF or FltMgr. But not all. Also note, that, given the new smartphone-style UI of Win8 and the iPhone-like total secrecy around it, MS has made a decision to _push the PC ecosystem hard to follow the smartphone ecosystem_. Looks like losing the well-established (since early 2000ies) WinCE/Mobile smartphone market to Apple and Google, the 2 companies which recenly were _nothing_ on the mobile market, was a hard traumatic pshychological blow to MS's bosses. -- Maxim S. Shatskih Windows DDK MVP xxxxx@storagecraft.com http://www.storagecraft.com
  Message 87 of 109  
23 Sep 11 17:07
John Nichols
xxxxxx@gmail.com
Join Date: 01 Sep 2011
Posts To This List: 19
RE: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
It has been with some interest that I read the entire 86 messages for this set. I think you all have valid points. In teaching and working with engineering types, the interesting issue is the three groups of people: 1. those that want to push ahead at all costs 2. those who follow along 3. the poor bastards at the coal face who have to maintain the lights, power and the sewage treatment works. Two members of my family work in this building I am in, the computer support people say one is high maintainence and one is not. The one who is high maintainence resists every freaking change in computers and needs endless support. I maintain a joint computer at home, and I can tell you it is not fun. We recently had a major problem with WIN7 and so I wanted to do a reinstall. I was very careful, I went and bought a new hard drive. Got EASYBCD (great program) and then installed a second copy of WIN7 on the new drive. I then let my wife slowly copy stuff across and fixed the problems as we went. A month later I switched EASYBSD to boot from the new drive and then fixed the issues as they arose. I will wait at least 6 months before I pull out the old drive. In the mean time my 7 year old is learning to add, so I went to show her RPN, as I only use HP calculators, my head is still spinning from the bollacking I got for not teaching her the school way. In Texas every body at school uses TI calculators, whihc are not RPN. My point is that we have to live in a world that is slow to evolve. MS has the problem that the XP is everywhere, look at all the banking computers. In my room there are three computers, one is still XP because I have an $80,000 bit of equipment that will only run with XP and there is no way to update it and I am cannot replace it. With due respect MS is going to have to live with XP for a long time. MS you have created a ghost that will not go away no matter what you do. To much investment, look at US customary units, even with the metric system even NASA uses customary. I agree with the identified problem of having two systems to maintain and update it is a recipe for disaster. But the world has its fill of disasters and we are not going to change it. So keep arguing, you are all right and we slowly progress. PS: I got OSRUSBFX2 working from VS2010 in 64 bit. Moving from Build to VS is a horror exercise. Thanks for all the help. I took one look at doing the move to FORTRAN and decided that I can call the program from Fortran. Regards JMN
  Message 88 of 109  
23 Sep 11 22:07
anton bassov
xxxxxx@hotmail.com
Join Date: 16 Jul 2006
Posts To This List: 3495
RE: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> Surely Novell or RedHat (isn't Novell acquired by Red Hat, BTW?) will release the EFI-signed GRUB > or similar bootloader. And what about those who write bootloaders (for example, work on a new version of GRUB or develop something totally new, probably, just as a hobby)???? In general, the only thing that comes to my mind when I hear about EFI and safe boot is "Death of a PC concept". Historically the PC has been an open and loosely-coupled architecture (which is, in fact, pretty uncommon thing in the computer world) which allows the same machine to be capable of running various OS's that may come from various sources, be booted by different bootloaders and come on any bootable device. However, this move turns it into conceptually some other kind of device - something more of a phone or PDA, rather than IBM-compatible PC. After all, the scenario when motherboard firmware decides which particular bootloader is allowed to boot the machine seems to contradict the very concept of open and loosely-coupled architecture of the original IBM PC, don't you think..... I guess the next logical step is restricting UM apps that can run on the target machine only to the ones approved by MSFT (and written in some .NET language, of course - after all, MSFT seems to be following Google's path and tries to turn Windows into something Android-like so that it tries to trick OEMs into turning a PC into a smartphone)..... Anton Bassov
  Message 89 of 109  
24 Sep 11 00:26
Joseph M. Newcomer
xxxxxx@flounder.com
Join Date: 20 Nov 2008
Posts To This List: 1892
RE:Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Microsoft lives in a fantasy world where the entire world outside Microsoft will convert, overnight, from release N to release N+1, and a week after release N+1 is available, nobody touches release N for any reason. The reality is quite different. The user community of Office 2003 well-and-truly HATES Office 2007. Besides being nearly impossible to use effectively, it is unbelievably slow to load files, and almost as slow to save them. Someone who knows how, in six mouse clicks, to add a trend line to an Excel 2003 graph has to spend an hour trying to figure out how to do the same task in Excel 2007. And I have to field some of these questions. WinXP was a disaster compared to Win2K, as far as the UI went. And they were *almost* identical! By the time people were traumatized by Vista and Win7, they had pretty much given up on MS. I know hard-core Windows users who now own Macs. Win8 will convert a few more. Can You See Something Wrong With This Picture? Those of us providing direct support to the people who have to keep the lights on (and the budget balanced, and the mailing lists active) see a quite different picture than the isolated UI nerds that keep changing things for no apparent reason. joe > It has been with some interest that I read the entire 86 messages for this > set. > > I think you all have valid points. > > In teaching and working with engineering types, the interesting issue is > the three groups of people: > > 1. those that want to push ahead at all costs > 2. those who follow along <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 90 of 109  
24 Sep 11 03:36
Pavel A
xxxxxx@fastmail.fm
Join Date: 21 Jul 2008
Posts To This List: 1885
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
<xxxxx@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:167278@ntdev... >> Surely Novell or RedHat (isn't Novell acquired by Red Hat, BTW?) will >> release the EFI-signed GRUB >> or similar bootloader. > > And what about those who write bootloaders (for example, work on a new > version of GRUB or develop something totally new, probably, just as a > hobby)???? > > In general, the only thing that comes to my mind when I hear about EFI and > safe boot is "Death of a PC concept". Historically the PC has been an open <...excess quoted lines suppressed...> So you still think that the question who really owns the PC (either that specific brick under your table and the platform) is rhetoric and belongs to nttalk? IMHO this question is valid, and trying to answer it (only trying because IMHO there's no easy answer) helps understand technical requirements and directions to satisfy (or challenge) them. --pa > I guess the next logical step is restricting UM apps that can run on the > target machine only to the ones approved by MSFT (and written in some .NET > language, of course - after all, MSFT seems to be following Google's path > and tries to turn Windows into something Android-like so that it tries to > trick OEMs into turning > a PC into a smartphone)..... > > > > Anton Bassov
  Message 91 of 109  
24 Sep 11 04:49
anton bassov
xxxxxx@hotmail.com
Join Date: 16 Jul 2006
Posts To This List: 3495
RE: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> So you still think that the question who really owns the PC (either that specific brick under your table > and the platform) is rhetoric and belongs to nttalk? >IMHO this question is valid.. I just don't see a connection here - you seem to be speaking of NTTALK as of something not serious.... The question in itself is certainly not rhetorical, and finding an answer to it is a full-time job for quite a few people in this world (needles to say that answers to it that are considered valid may vary across jurisdictions) . The problem is that discussing a topic like that will almost invariably result in flaming, and I am not sure all NTDEV readers will appreciate it.... Anton Bassov
  Message 92 of 109  
24 Sep 11 04:54
Pavel A
xxxxxx@fastmail.fm
Join Date: 21 Jul 2008
Posts To This List: 1885
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
<xxxxx@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:167287@ntdev... >> So you still think that the question who really owns the PC (either that >> specific brick under your table >> and the platform) is rhetoric and belongs to nttalk? > >>IMHO this question is valid.. > > > I just don't see a connection here - you seem to be speaking of NTTALK as > of something not serious.... > <...excess quoted lines suppressed...> On this I have to agree with you. -- pa
  Message 93 of 109  
24 Sep 11 09:19
Peter Viscarola (OSR)
xxxxxx@osr.com
Join Date:
Posts To This List: 3930
List Moderator
RE: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Look: if you write software that multiple customers use (as opposed to some in-house stuff) and you do not work as a Windows dev at Microsoft (where there's a separate group that worries about "down level" builds) you almost certainly have to worry about XP. It's a reality. It's true for OSR and it's true for *most* of our clients. One might have guessed, a couple of years back, that XP would be a non-issue when Win8 eventually shipped ... But it doesn't look like it'll turn out that way. Maintaining two entry separate build systems... Having your test, release, and dev people all maintain and use two entirely separate sets of project meta-data is clearly a PITA. It's not like maintaining the Win7 WDK and the XP DDK so you can do down level builds. It's much more difficult. And it's really hard to know if you've got it right. That is, perhaps, my biggest concern. How do you know both projects are the same without slot of effort. Ideally, the converter program would "round trip" - do sources to msbuild and msbuild to sources conversions. This has quite a few advantages, aside from making support for two environments easier. OTOH, I'm not convinced there aren't practical work-arounds that make adoption of the Win 8 kit possible even while you support XP. Building for Vista in the Win8 WDK and running that driver on XP is one. And if you DO have to do separate builds... Once a project is done, how often do you really modify the meta data? Maybe the devs all use the Win8 tools and you test folks manuallyconver the project back to sources, or check for changes. In the rea,world we have to support XP... On that we agree. Our lives would be much easier if MSFT supported XP in the Win8 WDK.... We agree on that. Not having XP support in the Win8 WDK will probably delay adoption... We agree on that. I'm just not convinced it's the end of the world. Peter OSR
  Message 94 of 109  
24 Sep 11 09:51
Don Burn
xxxxxx@windrvr.com
Join Date: 23 Feb 2011
Posts To This List: 650
RE: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
I have to agree it is not the end of the world, but it certainly is a PITA. I do believe it will mean that the hard work of the WDK dev's to bring us a better environment (yes we can argue whether all of it is better) will be underutilized for quite some time until XP truly shrinks to the percentages that we see for Win2k. Don Burn Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting Website: http://www.windrvr.com Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr "xxxxx@osr.com" <xxxxx@osr.com> wrote in message news:167290@ntdev: > Look: if you write software that multiple customers use (as opposed to some in-house stuff) and you do not work as a Windows dev at Microsoft (where there's a separate group that worries about "down level" builds) you almost certainly have to worry about XP. It's a reality. It's true for OSR and it's true for *most* of our clients. One might have guessed, a couple of years back, that XP would be a non-issue when Win8 eventually shipped ... But it doesn't look like it'll turn out that way. > > Maintaining two entry separate build systems... Having your test, release, and dev people all maintain and use two entirely separate sets of project meta-data is clearly a PITA. It's not like maintaining the Win7 WDK and the XP DDK so you can do down level builds. It's much more difficult. And it's really hard to know if you've got it right. That is, perhaps, my biggest concern. How do you know both projects are the same without slot of effort. > > Ideally, the converter program would "round trip" - do sources to msbuild and msbuild to sources conversions. This has quite a few advantages, aside from making support for two environments easier. > > OTOH, I'm not convinced there aren't practical work-arounds that make adoption of the Win 8 kit possible even while you support XP. Building for Vista in the Win8 WDK and running that driver on XP is one. > > And if you DO have to do separate builds... Once a project is done, how often do you really modify the meta data? Maybe the devs all use the Win8 tools and you test folks manuallyconver the project back to sources, or check for changes. > <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 95 of 109  
24 Sep 11 10:34
Mark Roddy
xxxxxx@gmail.com
Join Date: 25 Feb 2000
Posts To This List: 3420
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
I also agree it is not the end of the world. "Showstopping barrier to adoption" was hyperbole on my part to get this party going. What it is is a barrier to adoption, and that seems silly. What it also reflects is a political decision within microsoft to construct that barrier, which goes way beyond silly and into enraging. I'll maintain a Win8 development sandbox using combined Win8 and Win7 WDK build tools, but I won't deploy that into our production build environment until there is a compelling reason to do so. Mark Roddy On Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 9:51 AM, Don Burn <xxxxx@windrvr.com> wrote: > I have to agree it is not the end of the world, but it certainly is a PITA. > ?I do believe it will mean that the hard work of the WDK dev's to bring us a > better environment (yes we can argue whether all of it is better) will be > underutilized for quite some time until XP truly shrinks to the percentages > that we see for Win2k. > > > Don Burn > Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting > Website: http://www.windrvr.com <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 96 of 109  
24 Sep 11 10:56
George Garner Jr.
xxxxxx@gmgsystemsinc.com
Join Date: 07 Jun 2011
Posts To This List: 168
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
On 9/24/2011 9:51 AM, Don Burn wrote: > I do believe it will mean that the hard work of the WDK dev's to > bring us a better environment (yes we can argue whether all of it is > better) will be underutilized for quite some time until XP truly shrinks > to the percentages that we see for Win2k. > People typically wait until SP1 before widespread adoption of a Microsoft product. This is due to the perception that it takes until then to achieve an acceptable level quality to use in a production setting. Win8+VS.Next won't be released until sometime next year (at the earliest). The first service pack will likely wait until at least a year after that. This means that we will be at least 2 years down the road before we see widespread adoption of w8+vs.next. Two years down the road XP will be pretty close to EOL. Given the probable timeline for product adoption, this would seem to be as good a time as any to drop XP support.
  Message 97 of 109  
24 Sep 11 11:04
Maxim S. Shatskih
xxxxxx@storagecraft.com
Join Date: 20 Feb 2003
Posts To This List: 8629
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> And what about those who write bootloaders (for example, work on a new version of GRUB or develop >something totally new, probably, just as a hobby)???? I think OEMs will develop the Pro version of the hardware, which will be the same as Std, except being not Windows-only, and wil cost 50% more. This is for hobbyists. >Historically the PC has been an open and loosely-coupled architecture (which is, in fact, pretty > uncommon thing in the computer world) Yes, this is because MS-DOS was too pathetic, so, everbody needed to talk to bare hardware to bypass MS DOS's limitations. That's why the PC makers were making their hardware "tradition compatible". Note that PC is not a _standard_. First of all, there was never any enforcing bodies on any details on old PC architecture - they appreared only with PCI and USB, and later ACPI. Let's take, for instance, MBR partition table and Type values. There is no a single organization in the world which govern these values, and this was one of the driving forces under GPT. This was all tradition-driven standards. > However, this move turns it into conceptually some other kind of device - something more of a phone or PDA, Yes. > I guess the next logical step is restricting UM apps that can run on the target machine only to the ones approved by >MSFT Well, even Android is not such. They do allow installing packages not from Market, but from files. >(and written in some .NET language, of course - after all, MSFT seems to be following Google's path Google does not restrict you from running unmanaged code, they have System.LoadLibrary. And, if you're about cancelling USER32+MFC and replacing this with WPF - then this is a wise move and _the_ progress. For UIs, modern frameworks (usually based on managed code, but there is no major point in being "managed"- ObjC is not managed, and Cocoa is very good) are just plain good. -- Maxim S. Shatskih Windows DDK MVP xxxxx@storagecraft.com http://www.storagecraft.com
  Message 98 of 109  
24 Sep 11 11:08
Maxim S. Shatskih
xxxxxx@storagecraft.com
Join Date: 20 Feb 2003
Posts To This List: 8629
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> And if you DO have to do separate builds... Once a project is done, how often do you really modify the meta >data? Yes. The whole issue of build scripts is about _existing complex projects_, which are based on _now-legacy_ build stuff. Starting a new project from scratch is as simple in MSBuild as in BUILD. -- Maxim S. Shatskih Windows DDK MVP xxxxx@storagecraft.com http://www.storagecraft.com
  Message 99 of 109  
24 Sep 11 11:15
Maxim S. Shatskih
xxxxxx@storagecraft.com
Join Date: 20 Feb 2003
Posts To This List: 8629
Re: RE:Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> line to an Excel 2003 graph has to spend an hour trying to figure out how > to do the same task in Excel 2007. Oh yes. The ribbon UI is counter-intuitive and evil. Correct. I never saw a user who _loved_ being transitioned to 2007. > who now own Macs. Win8 will convert a few more. And I know the users who tried to convert to Mac, find it a clumsy pathetic toy and returned back to Windows. What they say about Mac's usability: "It's designed for morons who are touching computer for the first time in their life, and it is only simple to do the simplest possible things there, anything more or less sophisticated is much more clumsy then in Windows". Yes, the percent of "back-converters" with Apple is much smaller then with Linux, but it does exist. Now note that you cannot buy XP anymore, you can only by a Win7 license _which allows you to install any OS from XP up_. Also note that the hardware lives some limited number of years, lesser then the Windows release cycle. So, people will use Win7/8 on new machines, just because they are new. -- Maxim S. Shatskih Windows DDK MVP xxxxx@storagecraft.com http://www.storagecraft.com
  Message 100 of 109  
24 Sep 11 12:15
Prokash Sinha
xxxxxx@garlic.com
Join Date: 23 Feb 2000
Posts To This List: 1027
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
This is not entirely true, Joe !!! MS is more of a consumer based company than Apple. It is more open than Apple ( open hardware). For software open Apple source is a mockery. Essential parts are not there ( and sure that should be), but sorry don't paint a picture that is not true would be my first request to Apple .... Sure there are things from MS ( as well as lot of other vendors) that may not suit the need or even overly complex with bloated feature(s). The office suite is one. It would be have been nice if they had a default ( back to some version ) type setting. The new features, are sometime to attract audience with new mind set(s) to use more integrated features ( internet, video, etc), I guess!!. Yes, people are moving to Mac, because the UI is bit more natural , and fun for people who are not computer savvy. Also the striking price point. But still it is an isolated bunch. Whereas, Windows are in all kinds of business, it is there like Utility company, but much much more complex... Now for the part of Metro ( or new UI), touch interface is very important ( a change from mouse and key - and in the future they may no longer be available), and _unified_ OS is another thing. Who in their right mind, would like to have 5 different core teams ( with 5 different code branches each with zillion lines of appetizer that satisfies us ). So the feel, look, and the mechanics should have the common root and _derive the features_ as needed. BTW, already Apple started to worry about orthogonal OS(s)..., if not then they will soon. But sure, XP is still going strong. I had a bit of trouble to find my way thru the Win 7 interface, since last 5 or more years I was using XP for ( either development and / or office works ). Are they in a fantasy world? Definitely NOT. -pro On Sep 23, 2011, at 9:26 PM, xxxxx@flounder.com wrote: > Microsoft lives in a fantasy world where the entire world outside > Microsoft will convert, overnight, from release N to release N+1, and a > week after release N+1 is available, nobody touches release N for any > reason. > > The reality is quite different. The user community of Office 2003 > well-and-truly HATES Office 2007. Besides being nearly impossible to use > effectively, it is unbelievably slow to load files, and almost as slow to > save them. Someone who knows how, in six mouse clicks, to add a trend > line to an Excel 2003 graph has to spend an hour trying to figure out how <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 101 of 109  
24 Sep 11 12:32
Joseph M. Newcomer
xxxxxx@flounder.com
Join Date: 20 Nov 2008
Posts To This List: 1892
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Comments inline... > This is not entirely true, Joe !!! > > MS is more of a consumer based company than Apple. It is more open than > Apple ( open hardware). For software open Apple source is a mockery. > Essential parts are not there ( and sure that should be), but sorry don't > paint a picture that is not true would be my first request to Apple .... ***** What is real fun is to take some academic who is a frothing-at-the-mouth "open source" (usually GPL-only) fanatic and ask him why he uses a Mac, which is a closed architecture. Or why it is immoral for Microsoft to steal the PARC interface work, but not immoral for Apple to do so. ***** > > Sure there are things from MS ( as well as lot of other vendors) that may > not suit the need or even overly complex with bloated feature(s). The > office suite is one. It would be have been nice if they had a default ( > back to some version ) type setting. The new features, are sometime to > attract audience with new mind set(s) to use more integrated features ( > internet, video, etc), I guess!!. ***** The problem with the concept of "abstract audience" is that no such thing exists. What I do in Word is a couple sigmas out from the "normal" user, but look at any specific user and they are often expert in Office arcana you have never heard of. So I object to the concept of "bloat". All those features are used by someone, somewhere, and most of them are necessary for some percentage of the user population to get their work done. ***** > > Yes, people are moving to Mac, because the UI is bit more natural , and > fun for people who are not computer savvy. Also the striking price point. > But still it is an isolated bunch. Whereas, Windows are in all kinds of > business, it is there like Utility company, but much much more complex... **** But the point is, we developers are a fraction of a percent of the world market. There are MILLIONS of copies of Office out there, and people who are expert in it, and don't need change for the sake of change. And millions of Windows users for whom XP is just fine, thank you. They don't need and don't want a different interface just because some graphics nerd thinks it is much cooler. **** > > Now for the part of Metro ( or new UI), touch interface is very important > ( a change from mouse and key - and in the future they may no longer be > available), and _unified_ OS is another thing. Who in their right mind, > would like to have 5 different core teams ( with 5 different code branches > each with zillion lines of appetizer that satisfies us ). So the feel, > look, and the mechanics should have the common root and _derive the > features_ as needed. BTW, already Apple started to worry about orthogonal > OS(s)..., if not then they will soon. **** There are many very real problems with touch-screen interfaces, which make them quite unsuitable for desktops. What I want is a multi-touch PAD that I can place on my desk, but there is this horrid fixation that it is supposed to have a SCREEN under it! **** > > But sure, XP is still going strong. I had a bit of trouble to find my way > thru the Win 7 interface, since last 5 or more years I was using XP for ( > either development and / or office works ). ***** If it ain't broke, don't try to fix it. Microsoft has internally got this idea of "capturing minds" without any consideration for the tens of millions of minds they have already captured, and who really don't want what they see as pointless and gratuitous changes that seem to be entirely based on someone's ego. **** > > Are they in a fantasy world? Definitely NOT. **** Well, it is a substantially different world than the one I seem to be in, and the one I'm in has hundreds of "ordinary" users who don't see the point of UI changes, either in the OS or the tools. **** > > -pro > > > On Sep 23, 2011, at 9:26 PM, xxxxx@flounder.com wrote: > >> Microsoft lives in a fantasy world where the entire world outside >> Microsoft will convert, overnight, from release N to release N+1, and a >> week after release N+1 is available, nobody touches release N for any >> reason. <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 102 of 109  
24 Sep 11 12:55
Don Burn
xxxxxx@windrvr.com
Join Date: 23 Feb 2011
Posts To This List: 650
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
Maybe not a fantasy world but definitely living in the future at least compared to us mere mortals. My wife for years was a sale support engineer for a major computer company, the people in her position and most of the salesman got to the point they did not want Microsoft along for a sales call. The reason they did not want Redmond was simple, if the call had been in the last 6 months and the customer was looking for an immediate solution, Microsoft would be in there telling them how great Win8 would be. There were cases where sales were either deferred or lost to a non-PC solution thanks to Microsoft sales. In many ways they fit the old joke about IBM: "Three women were together and they starting talking about their sex lives. The first one said 'My husband is a bricklayer he is so strong that he keeps going all night'. The second one said 'My husband is a therapist and arouses me multiple times a night'. The first two turn to the third woman and ask 'How is it for you?'. The third woman say 'I don't know how sex will be, you see my husband is an IBM salesman and he just sits on the end of the bed and tells me how good it is going to be'" Substitute Microsoft for IBM. Note: I think most of the Microsoft folks who post here do not fit this and do understand our problems, but many of the executives and sales types certainly are so in the future that our present looks like the Jurassic age. Don Burn Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting Website: http://www.windrvr.com Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr "Prokash Sinha" <xxxxx@garlic.com> wrote in message news:167302@ntdev: > > Are they in a fantasy world? Definitely NOT. >
  Message 103 of 109  
24 Sep 11 13:28
Prokash Sinha
xxxxxx@garlic.com
Join Date: 23 Feb 2000
Posts To This List: 1027
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
On Sep 24, 2011, at 9:31 AM, xxxxx@flounder.com wrote: > Comments inline... >> This is not entirely true, Joe !!! >> >> MS is more of a consumer based company than Apple. It is more open than >> Apple ( open hardware). For software open Apple source is a mockery. >> Essential parts are not there ( and sure that should be), but sorry don't >> paint a picture that is not true would be my first request to Apple .... > ***** > What is real fun is to take some academic who is a frothing-at-the-mouth > "open source" (usually GPL-only) fanatic and ask him why he uses a Mac, <...excess quoted lines suppressed...> <<<<< Agreed about the general sentiment. As I said I don't care or mind if Apple don't give the source, but they should not paint a different picture. And sure, I don't expect any valued IP should be open . Yep, the PARC interface was the first, but I would not go that far to call it a steal. DId they have a patent? And a whole lot of legal questions... Which we don't know and should avoid... For the academics, they are mostly in a state of flux - when they talk about these things :) >>>>> >> >> Sure there are things from MS ( as well as lot of other vendors) that may >> not suit the need or even overly complex with bloated feature(s). The >> office suite is one. It would be have been nice if they had a default ( >> back to some version ) type setting. The new features, are sometime to >> attract audience with new mind set(s) to use more integrated features ( >> internet, video, etc), I guess!!. > ***** > The problem with the concept of "abstract audience" is that no such thing <<<<<< It took 3 release to get to the top of the chart for Windows 3.1, and the code base was perhaps less than 1/10th. And only constant thing in Technology is change, so I'm not that keen on taking the side that all is in the "abstract world". Yes I know that extra feature is being used, and I get thru the basics I need - but as you mentioned lot of them are frustrated to switch from word 2003 to 2007. >>>>> >> >> Yes, people are moving to Mac, because the UI is bit more natural , and >> fun for people who are not computer savvy. Also the striking price point. >> But still it is an isolated bunch. Whereas, Windows are in all kinds of >> business, it is there like Utility company, but much much more complex... > **** > But the point is, we developers are a fraction of a percent of the world > market. There are MILLIONS of copies of Office out there, and people who > are expert in it, and don't need change for the sake of change. And <<<<< Agreed. But MS like any other company can say "Use it on your own", we can no longer provide support for it. Do you want to run a company supporting DOS? Everything has a price tag. Should they run the DOS support team with a web site, it is free and please "Donate if you like it'? Look everything will either die or become obsolete. Gran Torino was beautiful in 1974. The movie is good too, but the product is dead, right? >>>>> >> >> Now for the part of Metro ( or new UI), touch interface is very important >> ( a change from mouse and key - and in the future they may no longer be >> available), and _unified_ OS is another thing. Who in their right mind, >> would like to have 5 different core teams ( with 5 different code branches >> each with zillion lines of appetizer that satisfies us ). So the feel, >> look, and the mechanics should have the common root and _derive the >> features_ as needed. BTW, already Apple started to worry about orthogonal >> OS(s)..., if not then they will soon. <<<< For a tablet or other form factor, that is all we will have... For desktop, sure it is different. But the point is to derive features from the core... >>>> >> >> But sure, XP is still going strong. I had a bit of trouble to find my way >> thru the Win 7 interface, since last 5 or more years I was using XP for ( >> either development and / or office works ). > ***** > If it ain't broke, don't try to fix it. Microsoft has internally got this > idea of "capturing minds" without any consideration for the tens of > millions of minds they have already captured, and who really don't want > what they see as pointless and gratuitous changes that seem to be entirely <<<< What was wrong with hooking an Antenna, and tune to local TV stations? Why do we need VCR/TVR/<you name it>? It is not called fixing, it is moving toward better options - contemporary, evolutionary, or whatever. Lot of cos did not move to Win 7, because the shitty world economy sits on our head like a rock!! >>>>> >> >> Are they in a fantasy world? Definitely NOT. > **** > Well, it is a substantially different world than the one I seem to be in, > and the one I'm in has hundreds of "ordinary" users who don't see the > point of UI changes, either in the OS or the tools. > **** <<<< Yes >>>> >> >> -pro >> >> >> On Sep 23, 2011, at 9:26 PM, xxxxx@flounder.com wrote: >> >>> Microsoft lives in a fantasy world where the entire world outside >>> Microsoft will convert, overnight, from release N to release N+1, and a >>> week after release N+1 is available, nobody touches release N for any
  Message 104 of 109  
24 Sep 11 13:46
Prokash Sinha
xxxxxx@garlic.com
Join Date: 23 Feb 2000
Posts To This List: 1027
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
LOL ... about IBMer. Why do you or we have to call mere mortals??? I don't know about Sales and Marketing, so I can not comment or even I can not expect that their thought process should go with my liking.... But, all I can say is that for our side of business - we go thru lot of design/debugging/testing and other processes to get it right. They must have something similar there too, at least I hope so! Otherwise it will send wrong signal to the mass, with eventual perils. Btw, you are totally engaged with MS products, so you will hear stories( like the one you just explained), and it would hurt you. But if I tell you about the sorry stories about - (1) Changing monthly billing dates (2) Receiving a bill after the final date of pay without penalty (3) Asking to fix internet and persistently hear that the cable modem needs to be replaced ( and that was for last four year, and the modem still working) (4) etc.... then you will see those isolated cases will occur- sure I'm not saying it is good. Then also I tend to believe that it is also likely to happen... Responsible people takes notes about it, and try to fix it. Others tend to whine away. In my book MS belong to the former category, and the other example I gave you are of later class. -pro On Sep 24, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Don Burn wrote: > Maybe not a fantasy world but definitely living in the future at least compared to us mere mortals. > > My wife for years was a sale support engineer for a major computer company, the people in her position and most of the salesman got to the point they did not want Microsoft along for a sales call. The reason they did not want Redmond was simple, if the call had been in the last 6 months and the customer was looking for an immediate solution, Microsoft would be in there telling them how great Win8 would be. There were cases where sales were either deferred or lost to a non-PC solution thanks to Microsoft sales. > > In many ways they fit the old joke about IBM: > > "Three women were together and they starting talking about their sex lives. The first one said 'My husband is a bricklayer he is so strong that he keeps going all night'. The second one said 'My husband is a therapist and arouses me multiple times a night'. The first two turn to the third woman and ask 'How is it for you?'. The third woman say 'I don't know how sex will be, you see my husband is an IBM salesman and he just sits on the end of the bed and tells me how good it is going to be'" > > Substitute Microsoft for IBM. Note: I think most of the Microsoft folks who post here do not fit this and do understand our problems, but many of the executives and sales types certainly are so in the future that our present looks like the Jurassic age. > <...excess quoted lines suppressed...>
  Message 105 of 109  
25 Sep 11 23:22
Maxim S. Shatskih
xxxxxx@storagecraft.com
Join Date: 20 Feb 2003
Posts To This List: 8629
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> steal the PARC interface work, but not immoral for Apple to do so. Please define "steal". For me, the main point of theft is - _depriving the legitimate owner from the ability to use the thing and its fruits_. Everything else is not theft, it is everything else. For instance, use of pirated software is not theft, it is more like an illegal free ride on a train or city bus. So, just re-using somebody else's engineering is NOT theft, it is probably illegal, but under _other_ laws then the theft law, and, more so, it all depends upon the degree of legal protection connected to the original work. Have Compaq and others stolen from IBM in late 1980ies? have the KDE team stolen from the Windows shell team? No. And no. Same is true on MS and PARC work (the latter not being protected legally). -- Maxim S. Shatskih Windows DDK MVP xxxxx@storagecraft.com http://www.storagecraft.com
  Message 106 of 109  
26 Sep 11 04:46
anton bassov
xxxxxx@hotmail.com
Join Date: 16 Jul 2006
Posts To This List: 3495
RE: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> For me, the main point of theft is - _depriving the legitimate owner from the ability to use the thing > and its fruits_. > Everything else is not theft, it is everything else. For instance, use of pirated software is not theft, > it is more like an illegal free ride on a train or city bus. Sorry, Max, but you are simply ridiculous - you are mixing up the legal definition of theft (that, btw, may vary across jurisdictions) with the colloquial usage of this word , which normally covers a wide range of actions that may include various criminal offenses against property (from burglary and shoplifting to fraud and embezzlement), violations that get resolved by the civil courts (for example, copyright violations), as well as technically legal actions that are simply considered immoral (like raising taxi fares in a city with public transportation system disrupted by the emergency). It would be OK if you said it in some NG for lawyers (from their perspective such definition is, in terms of ignorance, apparently comparable to referring to the hard disk as to "computer memory" in the programming NG), but when you say it elsewhere........well, the only thing that I can say here is "what a bore"..... Anton Bassov
  Message 107 of 109  
26 Sep 11 06:24
Maxim S. Shatskih
xxxxxx@storagecraft.com
Join Date: 20 Feb 2003
Posts To This List: 8629
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> Sorry, Max, but you are simply ridiculous - you are mixing up the legal definition of theft (that, btw, may vary >across jurisdictions) Correct. I only mean the moral background of theft. Given that lots of engineering and technical research (and most academic science) runs the same way as GPL software, it would be strange to say "MS and Apple stolen the Xeroc PARC GUI". Wasn't PARC project an open one? are you really sure? BTW - this offtopic reminds me the last winter story in Moscow, when we have airports shut down due to ice storm, and in one of them (building complex size the same as in Salt Lake City, 2 times lesser flights then in SLC but crowds of people due to not so good organization) there was also a power outage which halted the suburban train traffic from the airport to the city. Taxi drivers were wanting around USD 400 for a ~50km ride from the airport to the city, and lots of people were offended due to this. And when one of these "offended ones" were mourning about this in the blog, others quickly reminded him on his own occupation (the realty agent) in words like "you're a capitalist guy, you're not doctor or teacher or law enforcement agent, thus you're not the social worker. And for you the capitalist, your favourite free market supply/demand laws are now here at work! yes, this is your beloved free market which raised the airport taxi price to $400! why are you complaning? it is _your_ system, and you're earning money the same way". -- Maxim S. Shatskih Windows DDK MVP xxxxx@storagecraft.com http://www.storagecraft.com
  Message 108 of 109  
27 Sep 11 16:46
Pavel A
xxxxxx@fastmail.fm
Join Date: 21 Jul 2008
Posts To This List: 1885
Re: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
<xxxxx@flounder.com> wrote in message news:167303@ntdev... .......... > What I want is a multi-touch PAD that > I can place on my desk, but there is this horrid fixation that it is > supposed to have a SCREEN under it! Mr. Newcomer, here is your wish realized (albeit expensive): http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/touch-technology -- pa
  Message 109 of 109  
27 Sep 11 16:59
ntdev member 43013
xxxxxx@barila.net
Join Date:
Posts To This List: 120
RE: Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to adoption.
> -----Original Message----- > From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [mailto:bounce-476511- > xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Pavel A. > Sent: Saturday, September 24, 2011 6:32 PM > To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List > Subject: Re:[ntdev] Win8 WDK: no XP support is a showstopping barrier to > adoption. > > <xxxxx@flounder.com> wrote in message news:167303@ntdev... > .......... <...excess quoted lines suppressed...> Or just a general search for "multi-touch pad" (with "USB" optional) should provide you hours (a few minutes, at least) of browsing enjoyment. :-D Phil Philip D. Barila
Posting Rules  
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You must login to OSR Online AND be a member of the ntdev list to be able to post.

All times are GMT -5. The time now is 17:49.

Contact Us - Osr Online Homepage - Top

Copyright ©2012, OSR Open Systems Resources, Inc.
Based on vBulletin Copyright ©2000 - 2005, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Modified under license