Is your job easier or harder with 10,000 components?

re: Is your job easier or harder with 10,000 components?

David Betz — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 02:02:57 GMT

I'm definately the first one... I may do C# and .NET, but I don't know the difference between a binary tree and an apple tree (though I'm thinking I could probably spot the apple tree.) I just like now .NET works...keep your single components. You can have millions if they are in a lovely heirarchy... if not, it's just scary.

re: Is your job easier or harder with 10,000 components?

Embedded — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 02:46:47 GMT

Thanks for the feedback David. If you have more details on how to make the situation easier or more intuitive feel free to send comments to the team alias: wecrt at microsoft.com , or comment here as well.

Andy

re: Is your job easier or harder with 10,000 components?

TAG — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 03:17:40 GMT

What's a problem?

Create 100000 components and group them into 250 groups.

Let people select groups they need, but to satisfy dependencies - automatically add components at component level.

It's not rocket science! ;-)

It will be hard only for your developers to manage dependencies.

Microsoft does very bad with managing dependencies in their software. For example it's almost impossible to use Windows computer as TCP/IP Workstation !! in case if you have deleted/disable file sharing (Server service).
No way to add/remove users group memberships using MMC snap-in or it was impossible to use Microsoft Baseline Security Analyser :-((

re: Is your job easier or harder with 10,000 components?

William Sullivan — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 15:26:08 GMT

The problem I've had with the number of components is 1) the lack of descriptions as to what a particular component does (Shell registry legacy data? Do I need that?) and the endless dependencies that aren't truly dependent (DIE IPV6!! GET OUT OF MY CONFIGURATION)

re: Is your job easier or harder with 10,000 components?

John Bates — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 10:08:17 GMT

I really like the 10000 components when you know what you're doing, which I do most of the time :-). But it would also be better to have a number of group/macro components that have a set of required dependencies (e.g. kernel32) and zero or more groups of optional dependencies (e.g. IPv6).

Requiring a dependency like Volume Shadow Copy for Explorer/IE is just nuts. If you don't want it you get a warning that you can't suppress either.

The MS product teams need to be more aware of their core and non-core dependencies and be able to cope nicely if any piece is missing.

In my case our product is using IE for HTML dialogs, but our own shell so no Explorer application is required. But adding IE brings in Common Dialogs, blah, blah, blah ad nauseum.

re: Is your job easier or harder with 10,000 components?

Andy — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 15:27:16 GMT

Cool, thanks for the feedback. Understanding the common dependencies among most device categories will help us to create better "foundations". Also, I'm working on a list of 'battleship features' that are attractive to most of our customers for us to target for better factoring.

When you have issues with specific dependencies or any that you feel are completely unreasonable, send me the information at WECRT at Microsoft.com, we'll file a bug on it and add it to the list for investigation.

thanks