Lon^

Rory wrote:


What else out there is this cheap, official, and not going to break after system updates?

Allegro

Yeah ok its not as simple as XNA and I am not sure about it working on consoles (maybe PSP?) but you asked  infact you had the guy right there who started it or at least contributed a major part to it, the one and only Shawn Hargreaves!

Regarding the video, up until now I also laughed at XNA for game development but after seeing that video of the first person shooter and how smoothly it ran I will definately have a play at some point!

Loved the video btw, informative and funny. I would have to agree with DanielMD though that the idea of this never being done before etc is over the top but otherwise good stuff.

I have to say that I found roughly the first half of the video quite unimpressive really with the GUI changes and Apps and stuff I mean I know its showing off these new APIs and things but if developers really wanted to they could implement these newsreaders etc.

The second half, wow! thats a totally different story and I am quite sad that it seemed the video seemed to finish just as we were getting to what vista IMO is really about. The performance monitoring is going to be sooo handy when things are chugging along and you have no idea why, and then there was the ready boost stuff which obviously only the OS can offer but then the real beast is that self repair system. That is something that really needs the OS to do it, I mean you have things from sysinternals but they dont automatically try and repair the system in clever ways like what was mentioned. I wouldnt agree entirely with "you have to be a magician to fix things" but I can see this is going to be immensly handy with all the spyware,viruses, dodgy drivers (the list goes on!) flying about these days. Good stuff!

I agree the live show idea + niners input would be cool but personally I think it would be a nightmare to make it truely live, what happens if you get people making mindless comments, mindless bashing etc...

How about if you allowed people to sign up for shows in advance with different people each week or something and then you agree with the participants on a time. You could give them each a link or something that only they can use to access the live video feed to contribute there thoughts. You then edit, cut etc and upload the final video for all to see. This way niners can get involved but your safe from getting fired

What ya think?

Just watched it and gotta say that it seems like a really good idea overall, got better and better as it went along. The only thing I would say needs to go is the part about people being forced to take sides which doesn’t really work IMO although the cloning thing was quite a laugh .

Looking forward to the next episode, hope this wasn’t the last!

Indeed an excellent vid. Cant wait to see the performance improvements especially from the  internal flash. Makes me think changing to vista may be worth it after all although of course I will have to see the benchmarks first .

I think when he said 2GB he meant in the near future i.e. 6 - 12 months, obviously in the distant future 32GB like you say will hopefully be standard. For now with RAM prices so (relatively) high, this technology should fill the gap and stop us having to use the ancient and slow hd so much!

As for that screensaver I think the executable format has changed so out of the box you wont be able to use it on XP although someone has probably hacked it to work from the betas.

Staceyw,

You can already cancel Async IO using the CancelIO function:
CancelIO

The only problem in WinXP is that this only cancels I/O on the current thread although I think you could probably cancel all I/O by storing thread handles from createthread and queueing APCs to them. As long as you had alertable waits this should work.

I think Vista is going to improve on this by implementing a CancelIOEx which should cancel I/O on all threads without the extra work:
CancelIOEx

I'll second that about the hung I/O, it’s so incredibly annoying when you click a cancel button and nothing happens! It’s just unfortunate that in order to use it you would have to throw away XP compatibility but in a few years when everyone is using vista this shouldn’t be a problem.

As far as user mode drivers, I've moaned about this before but understand that as Charles says for an input device its really not going to matter and will improve stability etc. It’s not going to matter for your mp3 player because presumably you’re only going to upload a few files to your iPod etc and then close the tool so CPU usage here is irrelevant.

If on the other hand I am playing a game and I want to write stuff out to the display then I really want that to be as fast as possible. Any more CPU power I get including more cores etc I want that devoted to the game and not to drivers. Take Alan wake for example, its going to use four cores.

I can definitely see the argument for reliability over speed for business use, you would rather have all user modes there but in a gaming environment I would rather spend time buying hardware that I know has solid kernel mode drivers and then get the speed. Maybe two versions of the OS are required, one for gaming that is streamlined to have less background services e.g. no indexing etc, basically the gaming OS would be streamlined to run one game as fast as possible (like the Xbox and 360 OS's). You could then have a business version with all the great features mentioned in the video. With the coming of hardware virtualisation (run both versions at the same time) and more and more people having many machines in the home maybe this won’t be an issue in times to come.

Anyway enough of my rambling thanks for the interview

I realise you probably cant tell me this which I can perfectly understand I mean its not optimised yet etc but...

Do you have any rough benchmarks at the moment comparing a user mode driver  to kernel mode and if so what were the results and the device being testing?

On a seperate note, sorry if this is mentioned elsewhere but will the user mode process run at a higher priority to normal apps?

Great interview, always good to hear more about driver dev and making it harder to crash the system!

The only thing that does worry me is the eagerness to get managed code going. In one sense obviously it would be great to make drivers in a (relative to C) easy language. You get less errors and thus hopefully a better quality product but at what cost.

I had a company laptop with a few managed services and they were certainly draining the memory. When this is taken into consideration with vista using 500MB (yeah I know its beta but still) even when idle and the fact the drivers will surely be slower anyway running in user mode it does make me a bit concerned.

Fingers crossed for an easy to use and performant driver framework