This attittude of “we know better than you do how you should work” is
pervasive, and the WDK appears to be only the latest victim of this
attitude.
For those of us who live in application space much of the time, no version
of VS > VS6 has actually been usable. Office 2007 is clearly designed to
minimize productivity, but look *really cool*.
Coolness seems to be the goal, no matter what its impact on productivity.
Has someone decided that the WDK has to be as cool as Office 2007?
Microsoft has an entire product line devoted to “workflow”, but when it
comes to developers or Office users, they completely ignore how actual
people work in the Real World, and instead deliver products based on some
“vision” of how some designer thinks we ought to work, and we are not given
any degrees of freedom to work in the most effective way possible. Their
user studies seem to concentrate on first-time users, and ignore how
highly-experienced users work. For example, Office 2007 is so cool that I
presumably no longer need to create custom menus that make all my favorite
editing actions instantly accessible. So instead, I have to keep searching
the crowded, clumsy ribbon bar to find the weird icon that represents what I
used to know how to do with a single mouse click, and then when I do it, the
ribbon bar reverts to some ribbon that I don’t want and can’t use, so I have
to repeat the action each time. This
we-will-switch-attention-to-where-we-think-it-ought-to-be is based on the
philosophy of VS, where, once I add a handler function for a GUI event, I
obviously intend to edit it, not add another handler function (never mind
that nobody actually works this way! It also ignores thirty+ years of
user-interface design philosophy and fundamental principles of cognitive
psychology of how human beings plan tasks)
The floating windows of WinDbg were one of the first driver-related failures
of this attitude (dialog boxes coming up under floating windows that
apparently hang WinDbg are the least of the numerous problems this
“improvement” created; the failure to have “tile horizontally” was a
grotesque oversight, probably caused by someone who never actually used a
debugger deciding what the design should be). The failure to maintain
separate object and target directories for release and debug versions is
another (they kept flip-flopping until they succeeded in getting it
completely wrong Yet Again, with no option for the developer to correct
this).
One suggestion: as soon as someone at Microsoft has a “great idea” on how to
“improve” something by completely changing how it works, they should
immediately be fired with a very positive job recommendation, which will
gain them a job at one of Microsoft’s competitors, which will guarantee that
the competitor will be destroyed. Oh. They have no competitors…I *knew*
that plan sounded too good… [Then again, maybe they had been doing this
for years, which is why they no longer have competitors, and now they’re
stuck with all these people who have “visions” of how we work…one wonders
what strange substances are ingested to achieve these visions…]
So, welcome to Club We Know Better. The WDK is now officially a member.
joe
-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Don Burn
Sent: Saturday, January 17, 2009 8:37 AM
To: Windows File Systems Devs Interest List
Subject: Re:[ntfsd] Windows 7 Beta WDK and OACR - feedback and impressions
“Bercea Gabriel” wrote in message news:xxxxx@ntfsd…
> First of all I found the OACR to be pretty cool tool. I found 2 errors
> in my code with it that I would normally probably stay weeks to find,
> errors like ( if (list->Next = NULL), = instead of == ), good thing
> the
>
> function was not yet used in the code :D, but doesn’t matter, pretty
> nice tool. Nice to know you can fine tune any small deadly errors like
this.
>
>
>
> Of course it threw me warnings like, you cannot access the NextDevice
> from DEVICE_OBJECT and any of the fast IO routines, but this could be
> useful for members that are not documented in structures like IRP or
> IO_STACK_LOCATION, maybe after this there won’t be any question about
> BSOD’s after initializing undocumented IRP fields (especially in
> WINDOWS 7).
>
First OACR is not the one finding these PreFast is and it can do it just
fine without OACR. The changes to the WDK which I presume are for OACR are
driving me nuts to the point that I am using the new WDK beta less than
previous betas. Since you praised OACR I have to throw in my two cents:
1. I have never liked the PreFast GUI error display, and in fact for
most projects use Mark Roddy’s DDKbuild modified so that it does prefast
list, and never use the GUI. But OACR wants to independantly pop the GUI
up in my face covering the editor.
2. There is no easy way to turn off OACR. I normally set the WDK
directories to read-only and never touch what Microsoft delievers, but
OACR’s recommended mechanisms for shutting things off require I change files
in the WDK diretory or the shortcuts to the WDK. This is a real problem
with customers who have a strict policy of never change the WDK. I also
have customers who want builds done on terminal server systems shared
between developers so a change impacts multiple people. I know I can use
setenv in a script myself and apply /noacr or create a custom shortcut, but
the bottom line is that after 15 years of doing things the same way,
Microsoft is making me customize the environment for what I percieve is no
benefit.
3. Also related to the above, is the fun of the global location for
PreFast files with Win7 WDK. This certainly was not announced but imagine
my surprise when I ran an over night PreFast run on a huge directory and was
reviewing the results when a client called. The client asked me to check
something which I did and discovered I should make a quick change, which in
my case includes running PreFast. An hour later I was back to the original
work and imagine my horror to discover I had lost the overnight runs data,
because I used Prefast. This will discourage the use of the tool not
increase it. I have not tried it yet on
I got early access to the Win7 WDK, and all I can say is that the changes
that were done (as I stated earlier I believe for OACR) have made this the
hardest to use WDK/DDK I have encountered in 15 years of Windows driver
development. Hopefully, Microsoft will find fixes for these “improvements”
that make it possible for those of us who do not work exactly as Redmond
does can do their work without the pain the current beta has caused.
–
Don Burn (MVP, Windows DDK)
Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting
Website: http://www.windrvr.com
Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr
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