August 20th, 2008

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Windows Development - does size matter?

There has been a lot of discussion this week stemming from the article over at the E7 blog about the size of the Windows 7 development team. Persons are saying, Windows 7's human resources are just too big and hard to manage. Microsoft (Steven Sinofsky) response to that is, its the scope of the project that determines how many persons are allocated to developing the product. The Windows Team is divided into 23 + Development Teams.

Some of the main feature teams for Windows 7 include (alphabetically):

Applets and Gadgets
Assistance and Support Technologies
Core User Experience
Customer Engineering and Telemetry
Deployment and Component Platform
Desktop Graphics
Devices and Media
Devices and Storage
Documents and Printing
Engineering System and Tools
File System
Find and Organize
Fundamentals
Internet Explorer (including IE 8 down-level)
International
Kernel & VM
Media Center
Networking - Core
Networking - Enterprise
Networking - Wireless
Security
User Interface Platform
Windows App Platform

Looking back in the past, the size of the Windows Development Team, seems to have varied, if you take a look back at Windows Server 2003, the size of the Windows Team was 5,000 Developers. Here is a quote from Paul Thurrotts, Windows Server 2003: Road to Gold Part 2: Developing Windows:

Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and Windows Server Architect Mark Lucovsky told me. "Now there are 5000 member of the Windows team, plus an additional 5000 contributing partners, generating over 50 million lines of code for Windows Server 2003. It's the biggest software engineering task ever attempted. There are no other software projects like this."

Thats 10,000 developers depending on how you look at it. Considering that Windows 7 consist of both client and server and the approximation of Developers is around 2,500 it doesn't spectacularly amazing about the size of the Development Team in this release.

For Windows 2000, Microsoft noted a higher amount of developers worked on the project than is now allocated to Windows 7, if todays estimates are correct:

"Microsoft has invested more than $1 billion in the development of Windows 2000, and more than 5,000 employees worked on the new platform, Gates said".

Microsoft Presspass: Windows 2000 Now Broadly Available

So, the enthusiast communities astonishment is a bit strange in my opinion, a project like Windows as Mark Lucovsky said is huge, taking into account the audience and segments of the market. Windows is not the Windows of 90's or early 2000's, this project that has changed dramatically over the years and continues to grow in features and yes, size.

Written by Teching It Easy: Windows Vista & 7 on August 20th, 2008 with no comments.
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E7 Blog: Maginitude of the Windows 7 Release

From Engineering Windows 7

Steven Sinofsky blogger and head honcho of the Windows 7 Project took the time out today to discuss Windows 7's significance in terms of being a major upgrade or minor release, a huge topic in the blogs this week. Here is a snippet of what he had to say:

Quote:

When we started planning the release, the first thing some might think we have to decide is if Windows 7 (client) would be a “major release” or not. I put that in quotes because it turns out this isn’t really something you decide nor is it something with a single answer. The magnitude of a release is as much about your perspective on the features as it is about the features themselves. One could even ask if being declared a major release is a compliment or not. As engineers planning a product we decide up front the percentage of our development team will that work on the release and the extent of our schedule—with the result in hand customers each decide for themselves if the release is “major”, though of course we like to have an opinion. On the server blog we talked about the schedule and we shared our opinion of the scale of the releases of Windows 7 client and server.

Our goal is about building an awesome release of Windows 7.

Across all customers, there is always a view that a major release is one that has features that are really the ones for me. A minor release is one that doesn’t have anything for me. It should then be pretty easy to plan a major release—just make sure it exactly the right features for everyone (and given the focus on performance, it can’t have any extra features, even if other people want them)! As engineers we all know such a design process is really impossible, especially because more often than not any two customers can be found to want exactly opposite features. In fact as I type this I received sequential emails one saying “[N]obody cares about touch screen nonsense” and the other saying “[Win7 needs] more advanced/robust ‘touch’ features”. When you just get unstructured and unsolicited input you see these opposites quite a bit. I’m sure folks are noticing this on the blog comments as well.

Read the entire article here

Steve went on to discuss the different categories of users the release of a product tends to target, Consumers, IT Professionals and Developers. My understanding and interpretation about this release of Windows is that major or minor is really in the eye of the beholder. But I wish the E7 Blog could have given a clearer understanding of the significance of this release. For instance, is it an upgrade that all Windows Vista users upgrade to or just Windows XP users? Right now, the only major feature we have become aware of in Windows 7 is Multi-Touch and to be honest, its cool, but not a must have for me in particular I will save final thoughts until I have experienced it. Lets stay tuned in.

Written by Teching It Easy: Windows Vista & 7 on August 20th, 2008 with no comments.
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All About Microsoft: You say major; I say minor - Windows 7

From All About Microsoft

Mary Jo has been investing Microsoft's recent decision to call Windows Server 7, Windows Server 2008 R2. This to many is indicating it as a minor release and is also reflecting on the client version of Windows 7 as a minor release. Here is a quote:

Over the past couple of years, both the Windows client and Windows server teams have been structuring their releases to alternate between major and minor ones.

(On the server side, the Softies have been rolling out a major release followed by a minor update (known as Release 2, or R2) every two years. On the client side, the timing has been off, but the major/minor cadence has been pretty similar.)Starting with Windows 7, however, that logic and naming structure that Microsoft has worked to establish for Windows seems to breaking down.

Read the entire article here

My Thoughts:
I hate to say it, but Windows 7 client is beginning to sound like a minor release indeed. With both the Server and Client expected to RTM the same time, it pretty much adds up that Windows 7 will actually be version 6.1. The reason I am hearing for the code name is because Steve Sinofsky likes whole numbers, but at the same time, it just does not add up why you would call the codename 'Windows 7', unless the Windows Team is considering it a 7th release of the Windows product, not technically a 7th 'version' of the NT kernel itself. We must take into account, Microsoft stop using the NT version in its branding with the release of Windows 2000 which was 5.0, XP 5.1, Server 2003 5.2.

Here is the problem I just discovered after writing the above, Microsoft could not use that logic, since it would mean that XP was the 6th release of Windows, Vista the 7th and 7 being the 8th.

Microsoft needs to explain themselves. If it continues with the 6.1 version by Beta 1, its definitely a Vista R2 and Windows Server 2008 R2 releases.

Another thing about versions

During the early parts of the Longhorn development, when the OS was at Alpha, Microsoft christened it version 6.0, I am talking builds 4xxx. The leaked Windows 7 builds we have been seeing earlier this year have been using the version 6.1 for the kernel. Some said that was because not all of the product had matured enough to become a part of what at Microsoft is called the 'winmain' build. Persons in the enthusiast community assumed that by PDC 2008 Windows 7's kernel would reflect version 7, but with PDC only a couple months away, its looking unlikely at this stage.

Previously:

Is Windows 7 really just version 6.1?

Its Official - Windows Server 7 to be a Minor Release

Written by Teching It Easy: Windows Vista & 7 on August 20th, 2008 with no comments.
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PC World: Microsoft Sends Up Trial Balloons for Windows 7

From PC World

Quote:

"Windows Vista hasn't fared so well since its debut. Its generally low reputation among customers has led one Forrester analyst to dub Microsoft's latest OS "the New Coke of tech," while some studies have suggested that nearly a third of customers who buy a PC with Vista pre-installed may actually be downgrading those machines to XP. Still other customers seem to wish the whole thing will just go away. They don't want to hear about Vista at all -- they'd rather hear about Windows 7, the upcoming OS from Microsoft that will be Vista's successor. And given the dismal consumer reaction to its latest attempts to market Vista, Microsoft seems willing to oblige."

Read the entire article here

This conclusion that Vista is not great or better comes from a lack in understanding and not using the OS enough to really see the obvious benefits out of the box. My brother upgraded to Windows XP in summer of 2002, loved it, you could say he is an earlier adopter and continued using the OS on various machines, including a Dell Inspiron he purchased in June of 2006 (XP Home).

My brother jumped on the early Windows Vista adopter bandwagon in January of 2007. He loved it! Yes, the things that 'wowed' him was Vista's visual appeal, it looks darn great. And PC World would be surprised, a lot of people love the richness, the transparency and realness of the OS. AERO is a bold, serious yet inviting look and many people I ask, new to Vista, previous XP or 2000 users, novices, lab techs, love Vista.

A lot of negativity about Vista has been intensified by a number of things. Things that we have been acquainted with from previous versions of Windows or any other platform...device drivers and application compatibility. It just was not there for many in early 2007, but it has improved tremendously and has reached the same level as XP or better. You would be hard pressed to find most modern hardware released in the last 2 to 3 years incompatible with the OS, not to mention applications that are probably in their second to third generation of full compatibility with Vista.

XP's reception faced many compatibility and hardware issues, I remember some clearly, like Roxio and printer and scanner hardware not being supported. But they eventually were, Roxio did update version 5 to support XP and the problems died. But because XP was released in a time where the Internet, blogging and the spotlight was not on Microsoft and Windows in a scrutinizing way like it is today. In addition to Microsoft's transparency and openness during the Longhorn project, it set a tone and perception in addition to things that happened during the project like reset and drop of features. Those are the irrelevant things that are still etched in the minds of many who covered the OS during its development.

Vista in its current form is well accepted, but some lingerings still remained and being revived and utilized by people who have never used Vista, don't use Windows and is being articulated in a way to make Windows out into a platform that is not desirable, these include the voice of Open Source, small resurgence of Apple, Justin Long vs PC and many other insignificant events in the past few years.

But it still does not hide the fact that people are accepting of Vista's improvements, whether its developer wise, business or consumer wise. Search, collaboration, ease of setup, security, Backup, organization, true hardware and application support, clean interface and just the plain likability of the OS, people see it and are proving it everyday with the millions of licenses that come pre-installed on new PC's or deployed.

Written by Teching It Easy: Windows Vista & 7 on August 20th, 2008 with no comments.
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Windows Vista SP1 RTM or hotfix resolves DHCP IP address loss issues from “sleep or from hibernation” - KB956119

After you resume a Windows Vista-based DHCP client computer from sleep or from hibernation, the computer may lose its IP address. This problem may occur if there is more than one network interface on the computer, such as a real network interface and a virtual private network (VPN) interface.

Microsoft described the scenario reported by end users, revealing that it involves bridging a Vista-based DHCP machine with a remote VPN server via a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) VPN connection. According to the software company, cutting off the connection, and then placing in and subsequently resuming the PC from sleep or hibernation modes, will result in Vista losing the DHPC IP.

“In this scenario, the computer loses the IP address that was assigned to it by the DHCP server. Instead, an Automatic Private IP Addressing (APIPA) address, such as 169.254.0.1, is assigned to the client computer. Therefore, you cannot access some network resources,” Microsoft added.

To resolve this problem, obtain the latest SP1 for Windows Vista, or download supported hotfix from Microsoft.

Source : Ditii

Written by ShaDow on August 20th, 2008 with no comments.
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Talking about “Windows 7″ appears in WSUS

From Living in Athens via All About Microsoft

Just saw this interesting screenshot of Windows 7 support in the WSUS list on Living in Athens. Is this a sign that the first Developer Previews or BETA's of Windows 7 are imminent?

Quote

"Windows 7" appears in WSUS
Here is a screenshot from my WSUS server today morning.
Notice the "Windows 7 Client" category in the Windows family of products.
Mary Jo notes, 'The actual Windows 7 client code was not distributed via WSUS. But the appearance of Windows 7 on the list of products that will be serviced over WSUS paves the way for Microsoft to start pushing something Windows-7-related to customers in the coming months.'