Rob Kenny - Application Compatibility | Charles

Rob Kenny, Lead Developer for Vista's Application Compatibility dev team, talks to Scoble about Vista, its "app compat" story, and the complexities involved in making sure apps work on OS version to version.

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moofish Living in Scotland, UK

Nov 18, 2005 at 2:56 PM

Please do tell what 600 applications looks like in the start menu.
DevilsRejection addicted to rss

Nov 20, 2005 at 4:03 PM

Man I want to see how LUA will make or break Vista.

This whole concept of the registry... it's ancient, why are we still using it?
ejohnson8

Nov 21, 2005 at 2:08 AM

Some great suggestions about how to write a future OS compatiable app. Since there are no books that address this topic, someone should publish an whitepaper to MSDN.
LarryOsterman

Nov 21, 2005 at 8:48 AM

DevilsRejection wrote:

Man I want to see how LUA will make or break Vista.

This whole concept of the registry... it's ancient, why are we still using it?

Why is it "ancient"? It has its issues (it's not fully transacted (it's transacted at the level of individual operations, but not across multiple operations), it doesn't do a good job of storing large data structures, it's got a relatively weak notification story), but it's a perfectly fine data store.

And it's WAY better than random text .config files or any of the alternatives.
rev23dev

Nov 21, 2005 at 1:46 PM

sounds great, but so many companies, including ones that were just mentioned in here, i.e. photoshop, put in checks for operating system and simply won't let you install/run if it doesn't test right... so... tell them to stop doing stuff like that
efortier

Nov 22, 2005 at 8:40 AM

I've watched a lot of videos from channel 9 and always download the new stuff; I really enjoy the fact that microsoft is working hard to show us what goes on behind the scenes and how they work on their products.

I don't want to undermine the hard work of people involved in making those videos, but the constant giggling and out-of-nowhere laughter of one of the interviewer is incredibly annoying.

It's especially bad when the laughter covers part of the answers of the people in videos.

Lastly, please, when you ask a question of your guests let them answer and don't cut their answer in the middle. An interview with Jim Allchin comes to mind where the interviewer asked a question and in the middle of the answer he said something and we never got to know the full answer to the original question.

--Eric
scobleizer I'm the video guy

Nov 25, 2005 at 7:03 AM

efortier wrote:

I've watched a lot of videos from channel 9 and always download the new stuff; I really enjoy the fact that microsoft is working hard to show us what goes on behind the scenes and how they work on their products.

I don't want to undermine the hard work of people involved in making those videos, but the constant giggling and out-of-nowhere laughter of one of the interviewer is incredibly annoying.

It's especially bad when the laughter covers part of the answers of the people in videos.

Lastly, please, when you ask a question of your guests let them answer and don't cut their answer in the middle. An interview with Jim Allchin comes to mind where the interviewer asked a question and in the middle of the answer he said something and we never got to know the full answer to the original question.

--Eric

Eric, that interviewer is me. I'll try to do better.