On 28 Feb 2011 at 15:23, Robert Patterson wrote: > On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 3:11 PM, David W. Fenton > <lists.fin...@dfenton.com>wrote: > > > This may or may not happen, but if it does, I guarantee you it won't > > be in the Win8 timeframe, and it won't be implemented without full > > backward compatibility for at least 10 years following the change. > > You are probably right about Win8. (MS had to scale back their plans > considerably in the last couple of years.) But you are just pulling > that 10 years number our of your place where the sun don't shine. It > could be 2, or it could be 42.
We were talking about the elimination of support for the Win32/Win64 APIs. If past history is any guide, it would be longer than 10 years before MS pulled support for it. My example for that is the elimination of Win16/DOS support in Win7, 14 years after the introduction of the replacement for Win16 (i.e., Win95). Of course, emulation provides something of an out that allows them to continue to provide a form of support for the older APIs, so they might move more quickly than they did with dropping Win16/DOS support (and, of course, the Win32 API was introduced long before the introduction of Win95, and available as an optional component within Win3.x starting in 1993 or so, if I'm remembering correctly). If you calculate from the introduction of the new API to the dropping of its predecessor, that's 1993 to 2009, or 16 years. I just don't see it happening quicker than 10 years, particularly given how shaky the replacement is at this point in time. > The only real incentive MS has to keep > Win32 alive is Microsoft Office. Once that makes the conversion to > .Net, I'd say all bets are off. All of their other major accounts > already use .Net. (I'm sorry to say, Makemusic is probably not a major > account!) When you say that MS Office uses Win32, what do you mean by that? Really, what's involved is whether the application runs on top of the .NET runtime or is a native binary that doesn't need the .NET runtime (surely this would be the first step before replacing the runtime with a full .NET API?). I am skeptical that MS is going to switch to the runtime for its flagship non-OS product. The .NET runtime is way too unstable and breaks much too easily for MS to expose its main cash cow to such problems. The support costs would be phenomenally high. So, I can't see how all that could happen. Also, I'm not hearing anything about this from any of my cronies who are cutting-edge beta testers for Office apps. Certainly the next version of Office is not going to replace VBA with .NET (which would have to happen at some point), so I think the project of rewriting the whole of Office in .NET is not on the horizon for the next version of Office. That version is likely due in the 2012/13 time frame, and much about the version after that is already planned (if not finalized). I just don't see it. The clues to something like this being imminent would have to be in place long before it could be announced, and I'm not hearing anything about that from the people in the know when the discussion of legacy technologies like VBA comes up. Yes, they're under NDA, but they wouldn't be completely denying the possibility of the abandonment of VBA if they knew something else was up. But it's all speculation, of course, both on my part and on yours. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
