Developers Prefer XP Over Vista, Survey Shows...

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Developers Prefer XP Over Vista, Survey Shows

Heather Havenstein, Computerworld


Saturday, May 17, 2008 9:05 AM PDT

Stymied by a lack of user interest in Microsoft Vista , many North American developers are still not targeting the new operating system when writing new applications, according to a survey released last week. The survey did find some growth in Vista development will come in 2009.......

...and in further developments, many IT departments in major companies are foregoing Vista, until they
a) get the bugs worked out
b) are giving a compelling advantage to actually use it...

Many are just waiting for the next (isn't there always a next?... version

When I was in the business, I would never let my clients buy anything with "serial number 1" on it. Serial number, version number, whatever, The first releases were almost always worve even than the beta versions.

I was not alone in this mode.

Pops

By 2009 I hope to have replaced this XP doorstop with a MAC, or something running LINUX. Screw Microspoof. I've had to reload and reconfigure XP from scratch every eight to 15 months for the last five years. I don't even want to know what Vista looks like.

There's definitely something nice about being able to pull the disk drive out of any Mac or Linux box, put it in another, and have it just work, same goes for making an exact copy of the disk that just works (tried norton ghost on XP, and booting from the new disk wouldn't give me a log in prompt). Linux/Macs both have all the tools you need to copy a disk included (along with a lot more stuff that isn't part of Windows). It's a lot easier to upgrade to a new computer than with Windows.

I've finally had to buy a Vista machine, mainly to test that my applications run on it.
I mainly develop business / educational software and until now most of my target customers have been sticking with XP. However, I'm now starting to develop more apps targeted at the general public and I've had a few CD's returned because of problems running the software on Vista. So it was time to bite the bullet and get a Vista machine so I can iron out installation and compatibility issues.

Thus far I dislike Vista. However, surprisingly my Vista laptop boots quicker than my XP laptop. The thing I dislike most about Vista is that too many things seem to be hidden. I use the "Send To" feature quite a lot and I spent ages looking for that or the equivalent in Vista. The "help" included with Vista doesn't even have any matches to "SendTo". After some searching on the internet it turns out that it does exist you have to run Shell:Sendto to make it appear. Bit of a pain. This looks like the start of a long slow painful learning curve finding things again.

It wouldn't be so bad if Microsofts documentation was better. The MSDN stuff is crap. I'm picking up Visual Studio 2008 at the moment and the help is dreadful. Microsoft is fairly good at giving the documentation of individual methods/events/properties of objects but dreadful at putting things together in a useful way. For example, my next task is to find a way to pull files from a website in the background using a VS 2008 Windows forms application. The help just doesn't seem to exist. I've tried a few approaches and thus far just manage to either get a fail code or corrupt memory and need a reboot. Grrr.

I've developed MS based software since the days of DOS 3.1 and their documentation seems to have got worse over the years not better. I've had to do lots of code on a basis of try this and see if it works rather than working to a defined and clear methodology. Especially things like Office automation code, working around bugs in various versions of office etc.

The same thing happened when XP first came out... people stayed on 2000 until after SP2 was released, which is when people flocked to XP en masse... I've seen microsoft OS comparisons that list XP and XPSP2 as separate OS's...

Anyway, if I can get wine to work, I would probably switch all my remaining microsoft builds over to linux. No way in hell I'm gonna get a mac though... there's even more software cruft in mac than on a windows system (at least in my experience...)