How Microsoft Dropped the Ball With Developers

cremou writes "As part of an Ars Technica series on how one developer migrated from Windows to OS X (and why), this second article concentrates on how Microsoft bungled the transition from XP to Vista. The author looks at some unfortunate decisions Microsoft made that have made Windows an unpleasant development platform. 'So Windows is just a disaster to write programs for. It's miserable. It's quite nice if you want to use the same techniques you learned 15 years ago and not bother to change how you do, well, anything, but for anyone else it's all pain... And it's not just third parties who suffer. It causes trouble for Microsoft, too. The code isn't just inconsistent and ugly on the outside; it's that way on the inside, too. There's a lot of software for Windows, a lot of business-critical software, that's not maintained any more. And that software is usually buggy. It passes bad parameters to API calls, uses memory that it has released, assumes that files live in particular hard-coded locations, all sorts of things that it shouldn't do.'"

With those arguements, any platform can suck

"It passes bad parameters to API calls, uses memory that it has released, assumes that files live in particular hard-coded locations, all sorts of things that it shouldn't do."

Those are basically programming errors, not problems with the API. Don't get me wrong, I find Win32 to be a pain in the ass sometimes, but this article just reeks of flamebait.

Re:With those arguements, any platform can suck

I think you missed the point.

The problem is that many major legacy applications depend on undocumented behavior because they make sloppy use of the Windows API (e.g. by assuming that a particular function will not segfault when passed a bad argument). For those to keep working, newer revisions of the API implementation must have the same undocumented behavior, which causes a maintenance nightmare.

Re:With those arguements, any platform can suck

No I didn't miss the point. Using an undocumented API is another example of bad programming. Yes, even HAVING undocumented API's is bad as well. Like I said, I was not excusing the mess that is Win32, I was just sayin'...

Re:With those arguements, any platform can suck

Maybe the point was that MS fosters bad programming by keeping legacy API calls around indefintely, whilst other systems do not. I'm the last guy to ever go pro-apple on /., having "been there, done that", but he really does have a point. MS is afraid to deprecate bad ways in favor of keeping some minor share of customers happy.

While this has short term benefits, the long term imposes a hefty penalty, the same penalty MS (and some of its developers) is paying now.

What part of "Undocumented" is hard to understand?

The problem is that many major legacy applications depend on undocumented behavior because they make sloppy use of the Windows API (e.g. by assuming that a particular function will not segfault when passed a bad argument). For those to keep working, newer revisions of the API implementation must have the same undocumented behavior, which causes a maintenance nightmare.

So, you problem is that programmers make use of undocumented API calls. While "undocumented" does not always equal "unsupported", using them is just plain stupid. Whether it is Windows, Linux, MS-DOS, DR-DOS, OSux using the system in an undocumented/unsupported way is well, U N S U P P O R T E D. Don't blame the OS or the those that coded it, blame those that wrote against the API in an unsupported way.

RTFA turns out to be a effort in slogging through another of the author's attempts to explain why anyone on Windows is just benighted. He blames HIS short comings on the OS.

Re:What part of "Undocumented" is hard to understa

Because programmers are, you know, just leaving the Windows platform in droves! Because it's annoying to develop on!

(sarcasm off)

Windows has always been annoying to develop on; when you've got the lions share of the market, and the customers want "windows," that where most programmers are, annoying or not.

So maybe they "dropped the ball," I say they never had the ball to drop, and they don't give a crap because if you want to make money, you work on Windows.

Now... how is this different than last year, or the year before, or ten years ago?

Re:With those arguements, any platform can suck

"Those are basically programming errors, not problems with the API."

I think you missed the point. For the sake of backwards compatibility, Microsoft supports applications which do all these things, and drags all the associated crap into future versions of Windows so they still run.

For that matter, so do hardware developers: back when I was writing drivers for Windows I had to deliberately put bugs in our code to support applications which only worked because of bugs in the Microsoft versions of the drivers and would crash if we didn't replicate those bugs ourselves. We also spent weeks working around abuse of the API by a certain big computer company that can't program PCs worth a damn (or even, apparently, read API documentation).

Re:With those arguements, any platform can suck

Pretty much; if they stop supporting old bugs, a lot of old software will break. I'm sure I found an old Windows 3.1 bug in XP some time back, but I can't remember what it was (something to do with driver installation, I think).

Linux, in comparison, provides a fair amount of backwards compatibility, but doesn't have to overly worry because most software comes in source form and can be fixed when a kernel or library change breaks it. Windows doesn't have that option.

DOS/Windows programming culture

The culture of DOS programming was corrupted from the beginning and you can partly blame IBM for a crappy BIOS. Were it not for the crappy BIOS, programmers wouldn't have had to resort to writing directly to hardware to get an acceptable speed on the screen. And it just kept going on from there. And now when a developer wants more "something" from the OS than they can get naturally, they write VxDs to help gain an advantage.

The culture is all about writing code to get past deficiencies and shortcomings in DOS/Windows.

Windows programmers don't respect the rules... and if they do, they write what appears to be crappy software.

Re:DOS/Windows programming culture

Yes, but making the hardware suck to scrape a couple of pennies off the price didn't help the BIOS. Actually, I blame IBM more for not choosing a better processor than the x86. There were sane architectures out there at the time (e.g., Motorola 68000). A lot of the craptacular nature of the BIOS (not to mention DOS and early Windows programming) came out of that particular decision. But, back then, IBM was a fairly craptacular company anyway. It seems to have improved a bit since then (although, it's hard to tell; with a company the size of IBM, you may be looking at the stern of the oil tanker and everything looks fine, while on the bow, fires are raging).

As a dev who makes his living writing for .Net...

I am 'this' close to jumping ship. I use Ubuntu on machines at home and find it fast and clean, even on older hardware.

I have access to all MS software as our MSDN and Gold Certified Partner plan administrator. I have tried Vista on a couple machines. Even on a brand new Dell dual core laptop with 2 gigs of ram, it was sluggish and still could not use the full aero interface. Yet I installed Ubuntu on a 4 year old 600m with 512MB ram and got a full interface with snappy performance.

I don't need aero to develop code. The features I was most interested in all got cut from Vista... most notably the filesystem upgrades. Now add frequent updates to the framework that require $1200 software packages to use to the fullest extent. Then add the insane cost of a legit SQL Server license on which to deploy it. Plus as a domain admin, I find the administration to be a drag. And I still don't trust them for a second on security. It all adds up to a monumental drag.

I am a frustrated .Net developer. I don't know that it is that much better on the other side of the fence frankly, at least as far of the coding environments go. But I KNOW for a fact that I prefer linux to Windows.

Re:As a dev who makes his living writing for .Net.

I want to second this concept. Back in 1998, when I started a company of my own, I insisted that my partners and I purchase a $500 MSDN license so we could do current development on Microsoft platforms.

In 2004, when I joined a company that was well funded by venture capitalists, they required that I cost-justify the $2000 MSDN license cost. I argued that we were developing consumer applications and we needed the license.

In 2007, I can no longer justify $3500ish for MSDN. It just doesn't work anymore. They offer reduced versions of MSDN, each of which eliminates all the reasons why a person would subscribe to MSDN. They offer only 10 application installs for your $3500. They offer only a few OS installs. After you've installed a few, they stop letting you install more development copies and insist that you call them for more authorization. It just doesn't work anymore, and I'm sad because I really liked being able to develop code without artificial roadblocks in my path.

Same techniques 15 years ago? Not just Windows...

It's quite nice if you want to use the same techniques you learned 15 years ago and not bother to change how you do, well, anything

Apparently the author never heard of vi and gcc on Linux...

But give them credit where credit is due...

Microsoft has dropped the ball in a number of areas, particularly with regard to user-interface APIs which this article focuses mostly on, but in other ways it is far and away the easiest platform to develop for - mainly because of the quality of their development tools. Having done lots of development across Windows, Mac, and Linux with all kinds of editors, IDEs and debuggers, nothing comes close to Visual Studio in terms of functionality, quality, and just being solid. It's not perfect, but it's way better than anything else out there. For that reason alone Microsoft deserves some kudos from developers.

"one developer"

"how one developer migrated from Windows to OS X"

That pretty much says it all: "one developer"

The argument about old krufty code in Windows and the Win32 API has been around since.... the Win16 API! It didn't really seem to slow down Win32.

On the flip side is the argument that the need for backwards compatibility is holding back Windows - yet developers complain about the migration from XP to Vista?

All smells like we-will-find-anyway-to-condemn-Windows to me. Note: I do all of my development on LINUX, so I'm not a Windows booster. I think lots about Windows just stinks but there is an issue of credibility here.

If you want a clean new coherent API and you want to develop on Windows Microsoft has provided an option: .NET

Cult of Backward Compatibility

The False God of Backward Compatibility has Microsoft by the short hairs. Even new programming environments like .Net have Win32, Win16, and DOS lurking right around the corner. There's no fresh start anywhere in the Microsoft environment, everything reeks of DOS.

Which would have been find if DOS (Win16, Win32, etc..) were a multi-platform, extensible OS to begin with -- but it wasn't. It was a quick hack that lives on and on.

I'm a developer that works primarily in Windows, with 15 years of heavy-hitting Unix programming experience behind me.

Re:Cult of Backward Compatibility

It's not a false god, not when you're coding for a business that has to meet both regulators and profitability expectations.

Code written for Windows 95/NT (back in 1996) still works today on the Windows platform. 12 years later.

Try that with System 7 code on OS X.

Yes, this is part of why writing business-logic code sucks. You seldom get to just re-write anything to be really, truly good instead of something perennially built-upon and increasingly hacked-together. No one will pay for a change that doesn't deliver "business value". (And no, greater stability/performance is almost never enough, as that argument usually demands an associated headcount reduction) But at least the app still works and can continue to deliver. And since some will doubt, yes, I do maintain/enhance such code.

The market speaks - this sort of backwards compatibility is a conscious choice by MS, and it does sell their OS. Not concidentially, it also sells mainframes and *UX systems. And I'm convinced it's one of the big reasons Apple isn't bigger in the corporate world. Steve's demands for newer/better/faster totally supplanting the old are well known, and rightly feared.

Glory days are here

Despite what's underneath Windows, programming it through the .NET platform is very slick. Most of what had to classically be linked to in obscure ways is wrapped in the Framework Class Library. Most people complain it's large but after you learn the basic structure you can find immediately what you need using the documentation. Microsoft has also abstracted away the trickyness of DLLs and you can program against mostly any functionality using your language of choice [dotnetpowered.com].

When articles claim Microsoft dropped the ball I think it's more wishful thinking than anything, because Windows programmers are in their Enterprise glory days right now, no longer restricted to VB and half-assed object models. Not anymore. We now have full OO features and much much more, and Java is playing cathup feature-wise. It's nice for a change.

I don't care how messy Microsoft's underlying code is, as long as they've tested it and ensure it works enough for me to program against it. The Microsoft security updates help a lot too. They're very frequent which means there are a lot of security flaws but they take care of them quickly (I'm sure I will get numerous examples where they didn't take care of security quickly but if you're on Windows update you see them coming thought all the time).

Windows programming

Back before my current gig, I was a software developer for companies that hired me to do their work and for several packages I wrote for my own profit. This story comes from the programs I developed for my own profit.

Because the software I wrote was also licensed for source code if the user wanted it, I picked Visual Basic as the platform to use. I wanted to use Visual C, but you could more easly find programmers that could get by in Visual Basic than VC. I should have picked VC rather than VB for a lot of reasons, the main one being that if you had experience in VC, you were at least likely not to be a total idiot. Not so with VB. I found that VB programmers were idiots at the approximate rate of 7:10, while VC programmers were likely to be idiots at an estimated 1:10 ratio... which isn't to say that all VB programmers were idiots, only that they were cheaper labor, and therefore less likely to have a solid background in programming logic.

That said, we'll focus only on my own development problems, just so we are dealing with only one (possible) idiot... me. I started out with VB 2.x. The upgrade to 3.x went fine, with very few problems. When 4.0 came out, I found I had to rewrite about 20% of my code. Sure, there were conversion programs, but they didn't quite fit in with exactly what I wanted the program to do. It'd get it about 90% right, but then I'd have to slog through the rest of the automated code to correct that last 10%. It was faster to discard that code and re-write it.

Then 5.x came out. Only about 50% of my code still worked. And again, the automated process to "ease" transisition left something to be desired. When Visual Studio 6.0 came out, it was a nightmare. only 20% of the code ported. At that point, I sent the 5.x code out to all the people that bought the program (with source or not), and told them that the code was now moribund, I would not be maintaining it, and that I was releaseing the source code to the public domain (5 floppies included). As I recall, that was about 1998-1999 or so.

As late as March 2008, I've been contacted about the code. Of course, it's morphed far past anything I'd written, and I could only help with the general business case logic involved, not the actual code. But having to deal once again with Microsoft development tools, one would have to offer me far, far more money than it would be worth. No, I'm done with Microsoft "development" games. I'm done with school yard bullies trying to take my lunch money. I'm done, PERIOD, with closed source, whenever I have a choice.

The appalling GUI inconsistency

One of the nice things from this article was actually this nice screenshot [arstechnica.com] of a selection of current versions of MS software running on Vista. The thing to notice is that not a single one of those applications has a GUI the same as any of the others. There are different toolkits, completely different look and feel, some have menus, some don't; it's a horrible, horrible mess. And yet despite that, we still get people complaining about GNOME vs. KDE and the clash of different toolkits and how that's what is holding Linux back. You can run GNOME and KDE apps side by side and, while they'll have differences, they'll sit together far more elegantly than the mishmash that is Windows. I think I'll have bookmark that screenshot so I can bring it up the next time a Windows fanboy starts decrying the excessive number of GUI toolkits on Linux.

not sure they have a choice

I'm not big on the M$ love. I'm a mac/linux proponent. However, I think that M$'s current problem with a really horrible API (I'm saying this having programmed for win32, GTK, QT, WX, and Cocoa) isn't an easy to solve problem.

They could pull an Apple, and completely redo their windowing system. Apple benefited from using NeXT's system, which was well thought out, uses a language well suited to windowing systems (objective-c), and could be altered based on previous user experience.

However, in doing so they would lose all compatibility they current have. Keeping compatibility, even if it creates a developer's nightmare, is in the end what keeps them on top of the market.

That is not to say it's not impossible for them to do so. Apple did provide a virtual machine to run old OS9 software with the first releases of OS X. However, since both Mac and Linux machines also have the same options (currently running Parallels on my machine), it would still take the clear advantage M$ has in the market away.

It's not clear whether their bad API spells the eventual doom of the company. The more pragmatic developers will still value making products that more people can use over writing nice looking code. Additionally, wrapper libraries, such as WxWidgets or Qt can help hide much of the ugliness.

Re:Long Answer?

Actually it is more like:

I hate Windows. It robs me of my creative juices.
Because I am creative, you know... man?
So I "Switched".
Now, I code for OS X and every day is a beautiful rainbow for me.

Re:Long Answer?

Exactly. He illustrates it well. That's coming awfully close to being, you know, creative. And creativity is one of the well-known risk factors for becoming a Mac fanboy.

Re:Long Answer?

I have my taskbar at the top, because it effectively reverses the order of the start menu. This makes shutdown the bottom option, which is where it should be, as i use it precisely once per session.

Re:how much MS bashing can you fit in?

well, it does indirectly but not as blatantly as the article would have one believe. Don't forget that if the API's were properly designed to begin with, it would have been impossible to give invalid parameters to the function or allow the use memory that has been released.

I have no idea what hes on about with the hard-pathed file references.

The problem is so many corporate coders back in the day (and still) would use whatever shortcuts they could within the api including "undocumented features" like the former two issues. If Microsoft were to fix these issues without compatibility for these "features", it would break tons of legacy applications. Therefore, ongoing developing must include these already-incorrectly-designed portions of the API as well as whatever they really want to be working on.

Just because a company does something poorly to begin with and people adapted to it, doesnt mean the company isnt to blame for the issues.

Course that doesnt make this article NOT a flaming pile of rhetoric, it just makes it slightly less than complete and utter bullshit.