RE: New FAQ page

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sat Oct 13 2007 - 10:23:33 CDT

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    Raymond Mercier wrote:
    > Philippe Verdy writes
    > <<For online information about the Windows SDK API, you need now to look
    > into
    > the .Net documentation, where it is now documented in the
    > "Microsoft.Win32"
    > namespace (plus many references to the "System" namespace for basic
    > datatypes and structures, and many of its sub-namespace for non-core
    > services). This makes the Windows API difficult to use if you don't want
    > .Net (for example when you just want to program in C or C++)
    > >>
    >
    > These and his other remarks about Net are on the way to becoming rather
    > out
    > of date, since Net 2003 is not supported in Vista.
    >
    > See http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/vstudio/aa948853.aspx : "The changes
    > impact Visual Studio and thus we're unable to support Visual Studio .NET
    > 2002 or Visual Studio .NET 2003 on Windows Vista."
    >
    > It is not clear to me how much this impacts on the problems discussed by
    > Philippe.

    Look at the links provided: the page contains other links for similar API in
    .Net 2005 and .Net 2008 Beta2 (at the top of each article, but
    unfortunately, only for versions of VisualStudio supporting .Net 1.1 or
    later, i.e. VS2003, VS2005 and VS2008beta.)

    I've not seen for now anything where Microsoft states that .Net would not be
    available in Vista (in fact it is there since the release, and the
    System.Encoding namespace API is supported, as well as its native Win32 API
    counterpart, and its 64-bit versions for AMD64 and x64...)

    [out-of-topic]
    But it's true that navigating in the online MSDN library is really becoming
    increasingly difficult, as its structure constantly changes, and having
    stable links to it is never guaranteed over time and after each new version
    of Visual Studio, even if there's been no change in the OS itself... (this
    is one of the reason why many organizations have chosen not to use
    VisualStudio for long term projects that span several years: you can't start
    the project without having to support several changes in the supported
    technologies, and including porting all your existing code despite it is
    still unfinished and part of a project that will be used for even longer,
    including when you develop for .Net, which was supposed to be portable and
    upward compatible and hiding those details to the programmers).

    If only Microsoft accepted to follow the advice strongly recommended by the
    W3C and the IETF, for keeping contents online with stable URLs... OK you can
    have stable references by subscribing to MSDN library to get the CDROMS or
    DVD, but they are not as convenient to use (and take really too much space
    to install them in many environments) as a stable online library.
    [/out-of-topic]



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