
Vista's big problem: 92 percent of developers ignoring it - markbao
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-9969231-16.html
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vlad
I think that counts corporate developers, and corporations are not switching
to Vista yet. And anything you write for XP will port to Vista, so there is no
reason to target Vista specifically. To port to Vista, you may have to add a
manifest file to your software and possibly rewrite some parts like installer
scripts, rethink some of the flow of the program due to user prompts that
might popup and scare the user, and update documentation to warn users. But
developers had the same problem of having to test in Windows XP separately
from Windows 2000 and Windows 98 when XP came out.

Microsoft's own latest software remains compatible with Windows XP, and while
Vista is one extra operating system you will have to test for, Virtual
Machines let you run multiple operating systems on one computer.

That's not to say I miss my Vista system that I ditched for my mac. :)

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kilowatt
My recent experience with Vista has been hell.

It virtualizes c:\Program Files for "compatibility" so that you can see
bizarre situations like writing to a file and then having it not exist where
you thought it was.

To avoid these virtual store problems, you have to embed XML in your
application's executable to get the infamous ALLOW or DENY window to bother
the user. If you use Visual Studio 2005 to do it, watch out! There's a bug in
a certain class of unpatched XP that _blue screens the computer_ because of
the way the XML is structured that Visual Studio's manifest tool spits out
when it merges manifest fragments. It's all overly complicated.

I would never develop Windows software if there wasn't a market for it--it's
exciting to see the underdogs picking up marketshare.

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vaksel
Give it time. The computer manufacturers are no longer supporting XP. If you
buy a Dell now, you have to get Vista. So before long everyone will port over
to Vista.

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andrewf
Not that surprising. Two years ago I was a fulltime commercial desktop
application developer, and our minimum supported spec was Windows 98.

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xlnt
This statistic is misleading. All those xp developers could be making vista-
compatible programs without specifically making vista the primary target OS.

