Do These Guys Ever Do Code Reviews?
- 4
- Add a Comment
At this point in the life of the operating system known as Windows (whatever flavor), you might think that all the basics would be worked out.
Not at Microsoft. Code review must be something that these people think that they are somehow above. After 25 years of writing the code for a GUI operating system, most of the major tasks should be worked out, with small things, like ‘look and feel’ the only things needing polish. It appears that Microsoft has forgotten that ‘first you make it work without problems, then you spit shine it’.
from Betanews today -
Although PDC 2008 attendees won’t receive Windows 7 Milestone 3 build 6801 until Tuesday, Microsoft has already issued a security patch for the pre-beta version of Vista’s successor. This early version of Windows 7 is quite similar to Vista, and will likely require the same security fixes.
“A security issue has been identified that could allow an authenticated remote attacker to compromise your Microsoft Windows-based system and gain control over it,” Microsoft says on the download page. x86, x64 and Itanium versions of the patch are available.
Certainly there must be someone left who remembers how to do this at Microsoft. Perhaps they are just waiting in the wings, ready to help, as some sort of a training effort – but surely you don’t let bad code get out the door for public scrutiny after a disaster like Vista.
Or do you?
Perhaps this is like the politician’s trick of lowering expectations.
-
Technorati Tags: Windows 7 - code review - making the same mistakes - Windows Vista
4 Comments
Loren Heiny
October 27th, 2008
at 3:19pm
A couple things: No large software project is as static as you describe over a 25 year period. Things change, features are added, left behind, people leave, all the time. It all adds complexity and yes opportunities for bugs. Also, some things that weren’t a big deal a long time ago are now huge issues such as those surrounding connectivity. Microsoft looks to be fixing them as problems appear. That seems like a good thing to me. Now imagine if Microsoft knew of all these critical bugs and didn’t fix them. Now THAT would be unfortunate.
Lastly I can’t think of one OS I use that’s bug free. Not on my Windows machines, not on my Macs, not on my iPhone. Yep, it can be frustrating. Is Microsoft worse at addressing bugs? It may seem like it, but I think in part it’s because there are so many people using their software and FINDING the bugs.
Rick Hogan
October 27th, 2008
at 3:19pm
It sounds like you have no clue how many millions of lines of code make up Windows and what a monumental task it is to “review” all that code.
I know you just like to whine and complain and bash Microsoft, but seriously, I’d love to see you try to manage something even 1/100 the size of Windows. See how fast you fall flat on your face!
Rick
the oracle
October 27th, 2008
at 4:58pm
Loren, perhaps I wasn’t clear enough about this. I have done a little bit of programming, and of course I know about the bugs that get by one or two pairs of eyes - but Microsoft has literally thousands of pairs of eyes to check code. Also, since it is supposed to be close to the Vista codebase, should 5 + years of coding before release, and 2 years after release, have gotten 99.5% of the bugs out already?
If you’ve done any programming, you should recognize that very few things in Windows are really done that differently than they were/are in Windows 2000 - so with that many man-years to squash bugs, they SHOULD all be gone by now.
the oracle
October 31st, 2008
at 12:30pm
Rick Hogan - it sounds like you have never given thought to just how many people there are who are involved in programming at Microsoft - they number in the thousands.