"Joel on Software" on the Windows API

[jrtom]

"How Microsoft Lost the API War"

It's not clear to me that the future is as clear-cut in this regard as Joel makes it out to be. But it's an interesting article.

Comments

[red-frog.livejournal.com]

I'm supposed to be up on it, anyway. :)

The thing is, some of it is Web-based, but there's also a ton you can do with the new interfaces. Avalon has some new stuff in it that ISVs are very interested in, but so far as I know is not alien enough to prevent today's apps from running. Yes, Web forms are cool, and, sadly, no one's doing much with them so far as I know. My query to readers of that column was about a year ago.

As for new things not working on Longhorn, too early to really tell, but that's not the plan as I understand it. For those apps that won't run (like the DOS apps that demand hardware access that NT OSes don't allow), we have VMs. An OS that will not support legacy apps is a dead OS, at least in the mainstream Windows world. A smaller market like Mac, selling largely to true believers, can maybe force the change better. Inertia in the Windows world is HUGE.

As for trimming, that worries me. A bunch of stuff was already supposed to be in R2 (interim release) and didn't make it. Then again, they could just implement all the stuff that was supposed to be cool about NTFS and never made easy to take advantage of, and they'd be better off.

Anyway... back to work. :)