if you upgrade to version n.0 of a Microsoft operating system it's likely to break _all_ your applications. Aside from Visual C v.4.0, through twenty years of peecee abuse I've never seen any version n.0 of any Microsoft product that worked well enough that anybody would be well-advised to switch away from version (n-1).(>0).
(I'm not a full-time hardcore programmer either, so I could be wrong about VC4.0; I just remember that it never gave me any problems and the help file was the best I'd ever seen. John Walker, the founder of Autodesk, had a web page comparing hardcore Windows development with eternal damnation in Hell, unfavorably; it described Visual C as "Monkey C, monkey doo." Walker has an attitude; another quote from his e-z tutorial on using MS command-line ftp: "Naturally, Microsoft's slime-dwelling pre-Cambrian FTP client does not implement this refinement (client-side passive FTP), which would improve the fault tolerance of the system and the experience of the user; it seems that in Microsoft's estimation the customer experience must be uniformly brutalising and depressing, with certainty of shoddiness replacing that of entitlement to excellence which would create expectations of the vendor which Microsoft prefers to avoid.")
Anyway, who cares about bad press? End users read reviews, but end users have zero choice in the matter. Chuck is right; Microsoft won't sell any upgrades to Vista anyway since, as it requires the speed and memory of a brand-new computer just to run the OS shell, it can't run on any older computers currently running earlier versions of Windows. But pretty soon, when you buy a new peecee, you'll buy Vista, period. Peecee hardware vendors do what Microsoft demands, or else. Let us hope, for the continued functioning of American businesses, that by then they've got up to Vista Service Pack 2 at least.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at ij.net