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”rather, the most certain way to judge the effectiveness of security features in software is to let a bunch of software engineers poke through the code.”

I would have thought that after the Heartbleed fiasco in open source software that people would stop peddling this argument.

One of the biggest problems with the article is that software written by Microsoft tools for XP (ie Visual Studio 6) quite often don’t work, compile or, if they’re large enough, load on Windows 7 and upwards.

Visual Studio 6 must have billions of lines of live code out there and the only way that a lot of these projects are going to run or even be developed for Windows 7+ machines is to rewrite the whole lot in the latest language, i.e. .Net.

The problem is that Microsoft produce these development environments and the operating systems and I completely fail to understand why there can’t be any backward compatibility between their newer operating systems and their older development environments. Yes, we have the XP Mode which would be great if it worked all of the time and didn’t fall over with large projects.

The answer isn’t to rewrite everything when there’s a new operating system coming out. If a new operating system comes out ever three or four years then who is going to rewrite the code each time?

The reason why I have a number of XP machines is purely because of the maths; I can’t afford to spend the years rewriting all my code (and I am looking at projects of at least hundreds of thousands of lines of code here) to make it work with the new shiny operating system. And then what happens five years down the line? Do I need to do it all again?

All this talk of having to upgrade to the latest version is nothing short of short sightedness because all of the implications haven’t been considered. Oh, yes, Microsoft did promise to fix this backward compatibility, but as expected they haven’t. The Official Line is that we should rewrite all our code.

I tell you, the next time I rewrite the code it will be away from the Windows platform.