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Windows: A software engineering odyssey (2000)

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Re: Windows: A software engineering odyssey (2000)

#21

Post by forrestthewoods »

alexvoda wrote: post #16
forrestthewoods wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ehhh can’t say I’m a fan of folder remapping. It gets a little too auto-magical and since all tools access the file system directly different users can see different things. That’s just begging for bugs and “works on my machine”. I’m moderately confident the correct path is monorepo + centralization + virtual filesystem. Not every tool plays nice with VFS but at this point most do. The D in DVCS is almost entirely a…

The Distributed part is definitely not a waste. Some people have different workflows from yours and depend on it heavily.

Tell me more. When is the D relevant? When is it super critical?

Working offline is distinct from distributed. In practice almost all development is defacto centralized on GitHub (or other central host).

> In software development, distributed version control (also known as distributed revision control) is a form of version control in which the complete codebase, including its full history, is mirrored on every developer's computer.

That’s a super mega anti-feature to me. Git still sucks for large binary files which is an insane limitation.

Re: Windows: A software engineering odyssey (2000)

#22

Post by lozenge »

LispSporks22 wrote: post #5

Can’t imagine how these Windows engineers feel about the enshitification of their baby. So much time invested into it - must be hard to see it taking this current trajectory.

The kernel is better than ever. As for the shell, it's always had junk on it for commercial reasons - remember MSN and baking IE into the OS, or how the system requirements were ridiculously low for the reasons of marketing and to placate OEM manufacturers? And how OEMs were allowed to add loads of junk software on computers wearing their "Designed for Windows" stickers?

I'm pretty sure XP came with a digital app store right at the top of the redesigned Start menu, Windows Media Player had ten music stores integrated all selling DRM'd WMA files...

The system requirements especially, must have created a lot of work right down into the kernel team.

Re: Windows: A software engineering odyssey (2000)

#23

Post by blkhawk »

lozenge wrote: post #22
LispSporks22 wrote: post #5

Can’t imagine how these Windows engineers feel about the enshitification of their baby. So much time invested into it - must be hard to see it taking this current trajectory.

The kernel is better than ever. As for the shell, it's always had junk on it for commercial reasons - remember MSN and baking IE into the OS, or how the system requirements were ridiculously low for the reasons of marketing and to placate OEM manufacturers? And how OEMs were allowed to add loads of junk software on computers wearing their "Designed for Windows" stickers? I'm pretty sure XP came with a digital app sto…

Well they got slapped for including IE forcible by the EU and there was never an App Store like that over XPs lifetime to my knowledge? Also you could quite easily replace the whole Shell. Sadly not anymore if you do that now stuff you need access to will just stop working because everything "metro" will need the explorer shell actively running in the background.

Re: Windows: A software engineering odyssey (2000)

#24

Post by drewcoo »

inglor wrote: post #20
jamesfinlayson wrote: post #4

> Source control system (Windows 2000) > Branch capability sorely needed, tree copies used as substitutes, so merging is a nightmare Ouch, and it looks like they only had version control with branching for the last nine months of development.

Branching is an overstatement. SourceDepot didn't _really_ do branching. You had patches you'd float with "changelists" on top of enlistments. Each part large enough in thhe org (for example Excel or Word) gets a "branch" and it gets "forward integrated" and "reverse integrated" to the main "branch". From your perspective the tool used to submit stuff (usubmit usually) you just push to the same branch as everyone els…

SD was basically P4 with syntactic sugar. You likely didn't have permissions to create branches.

Windows sources 20 years ago used to have a ridiculously complicated branching strategy, driven by middle managers and made worse by having actual devs sneak around the edges to do "buddy builds" of changes with some godawful batch file that I heard may have originated with RaymondC (who was exactly the kind of person to make ridiculous MSFT somehow bearable for the rest of us). It was Conway's Law, somehow twisted and applied to version control. With permissions SNAFUs.

I still see companies today trying to map their org chart into their branching strategy and just shake my head . . . and run away.

Re: Windows: A software engineering odyssey (2000)

#25

Post by zczc »

yakubin wrote: post #11

Slide 19 doesn’t load for me.

Slide 19 content (from .ppt):

  Serialized Development

    The model from NT 3.1 -> Windows 2000
    All developers on team check-in to a single main line branch
    Master build lab synchs to main branch and builds and releases from that branch
    Checked in defect affects everyone waiting for results
Diagram:

  Developer
  Developer
  Developer
  Developer
    -> Single MainBranch -> Product Build Machine -> Product Release Server

Re: Windows: A software engineering odyssey (2000)

#26

Post by lozenge »

blkhawk wrote: post #23
lozenge wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The kernel is better than ever. As for the shell, it's always had junk on it for commercial reasons - remember MSN and baking IE into the OS, or how the system requirements were ridiculously low for the reasons of marketing and to placate OEM manufacturers? And how OEMs were allowed to add loads of junk software on computers wearing their "Designed for Windows" stickers? I'm pretty sure XP came with a digital app sto…

Well they got slapped for including IE forcible by the EU and there was never an App Store like that over XPs lifetime to my knowledge? Also you could quite easily replace the whole Shell. Sadly not anymore if you do that now stuff you need access to will just stop working because everything "metro" will need the explorer shell actively running in the background.

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/j_helmig/winxpnew.htm "MSN Explorer"/"Windows Catalog"

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/windows-xp-professional... "Windows Catalog"

Re: Windows: A software engineering odyssey (2000)

#27

Post by pjmlp »

lozenge wrote: post #22
LispSporks22 wrote: post #5

Can’t imagine how these Windows engineers feel about the enshitification of their baby. So much time invested into it - must be hard to see it taking this current trajectory.

The kernel is better than ever. As for the shell, it's always had junk on it for commercial reasons - remember MSN and baking IE into the OS, or how the system requirements were ridiculously low for the reasons of marketing and to placate OEM manufacturers? And how OEMs were allowed to add loads of junk software on computers wearing their "Designed for Windows" stickers? I'm pretty sure XP came with a digital app sto…

> Remember MSN and baking IE into the OS

Yeat another thing where Microsoft was ahead of the curve, nowadays we get Electron (aka Chrome) all over the place.

People even buy laptops where the browser turned into the OS!

Re: Windows: A software engineering odyssey (2000)

#28

Post by toast0 »

lozenge wrote: post #26
blkhawk wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they got slapped for including IE forcible by the EU and there was never an App Store like that over XPs lifetime to my knowledge? Also you could quite easily replace the whole Shell. Sadly not anymore if you do that now stuff you need access to will just stop working because everything "metro" will need the explorer shell actively running in the background.

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/j_helmig/winxpnew.htm "MSN Explorer"/"Windows Catalog" https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/windows-xp-professional... "Windows Catalog"

Windows Catalog (which I totally don't rememeber at all... was it in all the builds or only some regions??) was apparently "the showcase for products that are designed to make optimum use of Windows XP. Go digital, and discover a great new computing experience!" [1][2] More of a catalog listing software and hardware that got the designed for XP logo, rather than a place to buy those things, let alone an app store experience. At that time, it was much more common to purchase applications inside an actual store.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20011113052730/http://www.micros...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20020409123842/http://www.micros...

Re: Windows: A software engineering odyssey (2000)

#29

Post by junon »

muricula wrote: post #8
LispSporks22 wrote: post #5

Can’t imagine how these Windows engineers feel about the enshitification of their baby. So much time invested into it - must be hard to see it taking this current trajectory.

A few years ago when I was there, there were still remnants of that same Dave Cutler NT culture, especially around the folks who worked on minkernel/. I agree there are definitely shitty chunks Windows, but there are still some very solid foundations there to this day.

A lot of the original designs of Windows were elegant in theory but never simplified and unified. COM objects are a good example, they were just a pain to deal with from languages at the time (and arguably still are).

Re: Windows: A software engineering odyssey (2000)

#30

Post by distcs »

LispSporks22 wrote: post #5

Can’t imagine how these Windows engineers feel about the enshitification of their baby. So much time invested into it - must be hard to see it taking this current trajectory.

> Can’t imagine how these Windows engineers feel about the enshitification of their baby.

I think people are forgetting how unreliable Windows was in its early days. If you were doing anything complex (programming, editing pictures, ...) Windows couldn't run for 2 hours without crashing every so often.

If anything, the core of the Windows operating system has only gotten better with time. Yes, they keep adding fluff to the desktop environment but that doesn't take away the progress they have made in stablizing their core operating system.

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