5 ms·

Windows CE is an unbelievable pile of crap under the hood, easily some of the worst code I've ever seen. It should never have been shipped; it was certainly nev

by kabdib 12y ago

Windows CE is an unbelievable pile of crap under the hood, easily some of the worst code I've ever seen. It should never have been shipped; it was certainly never made better, at least at a level that mattered. Instead, Microsoft kept adding features. CE speaks volumes about the lack of caring about quality and good design from Microsoft's upper management. Yes, it was killed a few years ago. But it lasted way too long, and did untold amounts of damage to Microsoft's ability to execute in mobile. They spent a lot of time recovering from many bad decisions, mostly politically driven nonsense having nothing to do with making CE any good.

drzaiusapelord 12y ago
Considering every sysadmin spent yesterday uninstalling rollup 8 for Exchange 2010 and KB3004394, I'm very worried that MS, as an organization, has fallen from grace on a level never before seen. On top of a million other issues like the failure of Office 2013 and Windows 8 in general. I imagine the politics at Microsoft still remain at, "Catch up to Apple, make our own iPad, iPhone, etc" instead of delivering a good product in the dozen other realms they compete in. Of course the automakers were going to ditch the MS product. Its substandard. I really wish MS would find a way to up their game. Nadella's tenure isn't looking so bright 8 months in. Not sure if MS is salvageable, to be honest. I sometimes think how much better the products would be if Clinton actually tried to split up the enterprise stuff from the home stuff during the anti-trust settlement, instead of allowing MS to continue as-is and continue to force IE6 on the web for 4 or 5 more years than it deserved to.
- freehunter 12y ago
  >Nadella's tenure isn't looking so bright 8 months in. I think many here would disagree with that, as shown by the last... 8 months of news about open source this, Linux that, iOS/Android apps, web standards, and GitHub. I've never heard any complaints about Office 2013, and I haven't heard any complaints about Windows 8 that haven't been solved by Windows 8.1 or Windows 10.
  - RyJones 12y ago
    Office 2013 apps are incredibly slow to start and run. Outlook, in particular, will lock up for minutes at a time with no network or CPU activity. Some people in my office use OWA instead of Outlook to get around the lockups.
    - sz4kerto 12y ago
      Really? On my >3 yo hardware Word 2013 starts well below half a second (actually in like 300 msec, I've made many measurements).
    - freehunter 12y ago
      I don't use Outlook, but all the other Office 2013 apps run fine on my Windows tablet, with a dual core Atom and 1GB of RAM. I've had a 20-slide Powerpoint open and being edited at the same time as a several hundred row Excel document. It wasn't fast, but it wasn't painful.
  - gtk40 12y ago
    I have heard complaints that it was not a major enough upgrade from 2010, but I certainly appreciate it. The new interface is great, and there are a handful of features that have really made a difference for me. Having decent ODF support, having used OO.o since 2.0 betas made the switch to Office much easier. Editing PDFs has also come in handy quite a few times.
- sumedh 12y ago
  > Nadella's tenure isn't looking so bright 8 months in You cannot judge a new CEO in just 8 months.
  - hga 12y ago
    Given the massive transformation of the QA system he instituted, current bugs are the sort of thing you can judge him on.
- rewqfdsa 12y ago
  > I'm very worried that MS, as an organization, has fallen from grace on a level never before seen That's what happens when a company refuses to pay market rate to its top people. Other Seattle-area tech companies have been poaching from Microsoft for years, and Microsoft hasn't bothered to even try to stop it.
mrpippy 12y ago
Unfortunately it's still not dead: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsembedded/en-us/windows-embedded-compact-2013.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/windowsembedded/en-us/windows-embed... The target markets are pretty limited: obviously not smartphones, not automotive infotainment, really just vertical devices (industrial control panels, portable inventory/barcode scanners) WinCE 6 is still used widely for car radios, especially by the cost-sensitive Asian suppliers (but not as much by OEs/tier-1s who are all going QNX/Linux). Unfortunately MS hasn't kept supporting it with new toolchains, VS2008 is the newest version that can target CE5/CE6. Microsoft was once dominant in high-end infotainment, now they're not even trying to compete.
com2kid 12y ago
IMHO WinCE 6.0+ were pretty nice to work with. It could scale down to a system image that was just a couple of MB in size, and scale up to a full blown miniature version of Windows. Prior versions of CE were a bit janky sure, but remember the sort of hardware it was meant to run on. Having a limited number of process slots isn't the worst idea in the world if you are targeting just a couple MB of RAM! I'd say that just like any other large legacy code base, CE had some good parts and some bad parts. Everyone on the (6.0+ at least) kernel team knew their stuff, as did the media codec team. I know the C Run Time for 6.0+ was good (I was on the test team for it ;) ). The lack of a concept of a current working directory was interesting though, of course no smart phone today has such a thing (and we'd think people to be crazy if they requested it!) but the idea was so baked into parts of the Win32 API that it was a fair bit of a porting pain for developers. Drivers were always a problem for Windows Mobile devices. I actually owned some rock solid high performing WinMo phones, but they were few and far in-between. My Motorola Q9h is still the best smartphone experience I have ever had, it felt /natural/ for me to use, I cannot say that of any other phone I've used since. Also it was lightening fast on just 96MB of RAM. WinMo crawled at 64MB, but it flew at 96MB! As an example of what it was like from the inside trying to make everything work, when working on WinMo6.5, we couldn't get our OEM partners to give us source access to their keyboard driver for us to make fixes for them to our test devices! (You ever try testing software when you cannot get hardware that it runs on? Ugh) They considered their keyboard driver to be "secret". These types of problems were a large part of the reason behind the decisions for MS to write the majority of drivers for Windows Phone. When they wiped all the code, and started out with a brand new kernel, the decision was made to limit SoC support to ensure platform stability. And that there is the kicker about mobile development. Every single new platform is a whole new adventure when it comes to software stability. Because so much changes when platforms iterate, you have a lot of drivers that need to be written. Traditionally on PC we've only had a handful of chipset manufacturers, and the field has shrunk considerably. But in the late 90s I remember certain VIA AMD chipsets having known stability issues (a large part of the reason why AMD went to making all their own chipsets and not relying on 3rd parties anymore), and more recently even Intel has not been immune to bugs in their chipset drivers. Now that the mobile field has consolidated to just a few chipset vendors (although this is changing with a flood of Chinese chipsets finally reaching awareness amongst western companies) that iterate on a good schedule, well at least phones don't just randomly reboot. GPU drivers are still crap though, I'm not sure if the Windows Phone team still writes their own, but they sure as heck did for WinPhone7, there've been multiple posts on HN about Smartphone GPU driver bugs, I wish someone would test out WinPhone for those same issues! :) tl;dr Aging embedded OS kernels don't behave well when scaled to 15x what they were intended to do. Just when WinCE started to get really good (involving a complete kernel rewrite) it was de-emphasized by the company.

by kabdib 12y ago

drzaiusapelord 12y ago

Considering every sysadmin spent yesterday uninstalling rollup 8 for Exchange 2010 and KB3004394, I'm very worried that MS, as an organization, has fallen from grace on a level never before seen. On top of a million other issues like the failure of Office 2013 and Windows 8 in general. I imagine the politics at Microsoft still remain at, "Catch up to Apple, make our own iPad, iPhone, etc" instead of delivering a good product in the dozen other realms they compete in. Of course the automakers were going to ditch the MS product. Its substandard. I really wish MS would find a way to up their game. Nadella's tenure isn't looking so bright 8 months in. Not sure if MS is salvageable, to be honest. I sometimes think how much better the products would be if Clinton actually tried to split up the enterprise stuff from the home stuff during the anti-trust settlement, instead of allowing MS to continue as-is and continue to force IE6 on the web for 4 or 5 more years than it deserved to.

freehunter 12y ago
>Nadella's tenure isn't looking so bright 8 months in. I think many here would disagree with that, as shown by the last... 8 months of news about open source this, Linux that, iOS/Android apps, web standards, and GitHub. I've never heard any complaints about Office 2013, and I haven't heard any complaints about Windows 8 that haven't been solved by Windows 8.1 or Windows 10.
- RyJones 12y ago
  Office 2013 apps are incredibly slow to start and run. Outlook, in particular, will lock up for minutes at a time with no network or CPU activity. Some people in my office use OWA instead of Outlook to get around the lockups.
  - sz4kerto 12y ago
    Really? On my >3 yo hardware Word 2013 starts well below half a second (actually in like 300 msec, I've made many measurements).
  - freehunter 12y ago
    I don't use Outlook, but all the other Office 2013 apps run fine on my Windows tablet, with a dual core Atom and 1GB of RAM. I've had a 20-slide Powerpoint open and being edited at the same time as a several hundred row Excel document. It wasn't fast, but it wasn't painful.
- gtk40 12y ago
  I have heard complaints that it was not a major enough upgrade from 2010, but I certainly appreciate it. The new interface is great, and there are a handful of features that have really made a difference for me. Having decent ODF support, having used OO.o since 2.0 betas made the switch to Office much easier. Editing PDFs has also come in handy quite a few times.
sumedh 12y ago
> Nadella's tenure isn't looking so bright 8 months in You cannot judge a new CEO in just 8 months.
- hga 12y ago
  Given the massive transformation of the QA system he instituted, current bugs are the sort of thing you can judge him on.
rewqfdsa 12y ago
> I'm very worried that MS, as an organization, has fallen from grace on a level never before seen That's what happens when a company refuses to pay market rate to its top people. Other Seattle-area tech companies have been poaching from Microsoft for years, and Microsoft hasn't bothered to even try to stop it.

mrpippy 12y ago

Unfortunately it's still not dead: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsembedded/en-us/windows-embedded-compact-2013.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/windowsembedded/en-us/windows-embed... The target markets are pretty limited: obviously not smartphones, not automotive infotainment, really just vertical devices (industrial control panels, portable inventory/barcode scanners) WinCE 6 is still used widely for car radios, especially by the cost-sensitive Asian suppliers (but not as much by OEs/tier-1s who are all going QNX/Linux). Unfortunately MS hasn't kept supporting it with new toolchains, VS2008 is the newest version that can target CE5/CE6. Microsoft was once dominant in high-end infotainment, now they're not even trying to compete.

com2kid 12y ago

IMHO WinCE 6.0+ were pretty nice to work with. It could scale down to a system image that was just a couple of MB in size, and scale up to a full blown miniature version of Windows. Prior versions of CE were a bit janky sure, but remember the sort of hardware it was meant to run on. Having a limited number of process slots isn't the worst idea in the world if you are targeting just a couple MB of RAM! I'd say that just like any other large legacy code base, CE had some good parts and some bad parts. Everyone on the (6.0+ at least) kernel team knew their stuff, as did the media codec team. I know the C Run Time for 6.0+ was good (I was on the test team for it ;) ). The lack of a concept of a current working directory was interesting though, of course no smart phone today has such a thing (and we'd think people to be crazy if they requested it!) but the idea was so baked into parts of the Win32 API that it was a fair bit of a porting pain for developers. Drivers were always a problem for Windows Mobile devices. I actually owned some rock solid high performing WinMo phones, but they were few and far in-between. My Motorola Q9h is still the best smartphone experience I have ever had, it felt /natural/ for me to use, I cannot say that of any other phone I've used since. Also it was lightening fast on just 96MB of RAM. WinMo crawled at 64MB, but it flew at 96MB! As an example of what it was like from the inside trying to make everything work, when working on WinMo6.5, we couldn't get our OEM partners to give us source access to their keyboard driver for us to make fixes for them to our test devices! (You ever try testing software when you cannot get hardware that it runs on? Ugh) They considered their keyboard driver to be "secret". These types of problems were a large part of the reason behind the decisions for MS to write the majority of drivers for Windows Phone. When they wiped all the code, and started out with a brand new kernel, the decision was made to limit SoC support to ensure platform stability. And that there is the kicker about mobile development. Every single new platform is a whole new adventure when it comes to software stability. Because so much changes when platforms iterate, you have a lot of drivers that need to be written. Traditionally on PC we've only had a handful of chipset manufacturers, and the field has shrunk considerably. But in the late 90s I remember certain VIA AMD chipsets having known stability issues (a large part of the reason why AMD went to making all their own chipsets and not relying on 3rd parties anymore), and more recently even Intel has not been immune to bugs in their chipset drivers. Now that the mobile field has consolidated to just a few chipset vendors (although this is changing with a flood of Chinese chipsets finally reaching awareness amongst western companies) that iterate on a good schedule, well at least phones don't just randomly reboot. GPU drivers are still crap though, I'm not sure if the Windows Phone team still writes their own, but they sure as heck did for WinPhone7, there've been multiple posts on HN about Smartphone GPU driver bugs, I wish someone would test out WinPhone for those same issues! :) tl;dr Aging embedded OS kernels don't behave well when scaled to 15x what they were intended to do. Just when WinCE started to get really good (involving a complete kernel rewrite) it was de-emphasized by the company.