Windows 7 Reflections…

re: Windows 7 Reflections…

Chris Oldwood — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 23:21:28 GMT

"RAII is actually things like CComPtr, tr1::shared_ptr, std::auto_ptr etc - it's not just classes which destroy their state on destruction but templates which ensure that arbitrary objects get destroyed when they're no longer in use."

Oh it's much more than that! Chapter 3, "Resource Encapsulation", of Matthew Wilson's book Imperfect C++ covers RAII as a memory managment mechanism in detail. But it is also the cleanest (and more importantly the safest) way to manage thread locks, database transactions, ad-hoc handles, reverting impersonation, the list is endless. It is IMHO *the* most important idiom in C++.

re: Windows 7 Reflections…

Larry Osterman [MSFT] — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 02:25:23 GMT

Padu: dising your competitors is something you do when you have lower market share than them. Otherwise it makes you look like a bully.

My personal favorite part of the Apple ads is that they keep on talking about people moving their stuff from Windows to the Mac. But they don't ever talk about HOW they're going to move their stuff from Windows to the Mac. At least when moving from XP to Win7 we have the migration wizard which lets you save your stuff and restore it on the new OS. OSX doesn't have anything like that so if you're going to move from XP to OSX you're on your own.

re: Windows 7 Reflections…

Padu — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 23:10:23 GMT

One detail I've been observing in the commercial battles between Apple and Microsoft. The only thing I can remember about the apple commercials is the dorky vs. the cool slacky guy. In contrast, the only thing I remember about Windows commercials is someone telling about one feature that changed in windows 7 and really made a difference for them. In fact, I don't believe I've ever saw a tv ad from microsoft with any direct reference to apple or mac/os, but I might be wrong.

Just like in politics, at least for me, bashing your adversary just makes you look bad. It's like a statement "I'm not as good as the other guy and he's a bad guy because of that".

I'm not defending windows, I develop for both platforms and I think both have it's individual strong and weak points, but I seriously think apply should re-think its advertising campaign.

re: Windows 7 Reflections…

ckitching — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 17:05:29 GMT

>In fact I don’t think I worked late or came in on weekends once during the entire 3 years that Win7 was under development – this was a HUGE change. Every other product I’ve ever worked on has required late nights and weekends (sometime it required all-nighters).

I wonder how much of Windows 7's quality is directly related to you guys not feeling "required" to put in excessive numbers of extra hours. Not only would you be thinking more clearly because you're not sleep deprived, but you also feel like you have the time to make sure you're doing things correctly.

re: Windows 7 Reflections…

mh — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:42:25 GMT

The "don't check in until it's done" approach certainly explains why I felt that even the beta was just so rock solid and ready for real-world use. It's truly a beautiful OS, and a success worth celebrating. Congrats on shipping!

re: Windows 7 Reflections…

CmraLvr222 — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:53:58 GMT

Win 7 = great.

re: Windows 7 Reflections…

FrankSchwab — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:56:25 GMT

Larry -

You wrote:

"The second was that we hadn't yet learned (or had forgotten) what should have been our highest priority: A computer needs to be fast. Customers always will choose performance over than new features. Many teams in Vista forgot that lesson and chose new features over performance."

This is the best summary of my experience with Vista that I've seen. 18 months of clicking and waiting ... clicking and waiting..., made me think back to the days of NT 3.51 on underpowered hardware. Sure, it worked, but it was far more painful to use than the snappy Windows 95 of the day.

An hour after upgrading Vista to Windows 7 on my 4 year old laptop, I realized that you and the rest of the team had nailed it. The operation was crisp - a click got an immediate response, things happened WHEN I asked them to rather than some random amount of time later.

I don't care if it takes an extra 10 seconds to rip a DVD, or if I lose 1 fps on the latest FPS. These numbers are easily measured, and so reported heavily on the benchmarking sites, but they don't measure user experience.

I still dislike a number of changes made (where is my classic start menu? What the hell do you mean "Access Denied", it's my damned computer!), but I can live with those.

Congratulations for shipping an excellent product.

re: Windows 7 Reflections…

Mack Heustess — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:49:52 GMT

Could the sound bugs be the reason why short wma soundbytes were clipped at the end when played in Windows Media player in Vista? The same wma soundbytes are not clipped in Windows XP or Windows 7.

re: Windows 7 Reflections…

Larry Osterman [MSFT] — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:55:11 GMT

Tony: Actually I haven't. And I've been using C++ for a very long time.

RAII is actually things like CComPtr, tr1::shared_ptr, std::auto_ptr etc - it's not just classes which destroy their state on destruction but templates which ensure that arbitrary objects get destroyed when they're no longer in use.

re: Windows 7 Reflections…

Tony — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 08:49:16 GMT

Thank you for interesting post, Larry. But i can believe you haven't used RAII before. Am i right? RAII is the next code:

class A

{

A()

{

p = new BYTE[10];

}

~A()

{

delete[] p;

}

BYTE* p;

};

// and then

A a;

If you haven't used RAII - then you haven't used C++ at all :-) Is it true and you've been using only pure C?