Rebecca Norlander - why is XPSP2 so big?

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There’s a couple things. If you haven’t picked up SP1, then you know you get all the bits for SP1 as well, because the goal is to have you as up to date as possible. 

The hard thing about SP2 is that one of the things I didn’t talk about earlier, because it doesn’t really necessarily impact developers was we recompiled a bunch of the core system binaries with a new GS flag which helps mitigate buffer overruns. 

If you recompile, though, then you’ve changed those bits, and those bits need to make it into the service pack. That’s one of the reasons that it grew beyond what most service packs were.

Then we had a decision to make. Should we go ahead and make it large and get all these things recompiled with the tool that we think is fairly effective, or should we wait and kind of dribble those things out over time?  The consensus for the customers and from internally was, first of all, if you’re really going to go for it, then go for it. Right?

Do the right thing the first time, and don’t wait or torture people with the endless number of updates over time.  The second thing was people were like, Wow, if I’m going to take a hit and you’re going to make it big and you’re going to do all this work, just give it to me in one chunk. Don’t tell me in two months that there’s another 50 megs or another N megs that I have to download in order to really get myself up to SP2. We bit the bullet. It’s big, but there’s a lot of technology reasons that that’s the case.