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Comment by jmnicolas | Hacker News Reader

Where I work we still have business specific apps that run only on XP and our suppliers have no plan on upgrading them (unless we fund the entire project, which they will happily resell full price to over companies).

This is a clear example of what the lack of competition does

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What you should do is to encapsulate these apps to virtual machines with reduced-credential users, tight firewall settings, non-essential services disabled, etc. If possible, create a separate virtual storage medium for the application data and snapshot the operating system & app virtual disk so that any changes to it will not persist.

This is what I have been doing. The users have a hard time understanding what a VM is. It's a bit magical for them.

And I can't make Vm-Ware Player work with a scanner ...

There is USB passthrough in VirtualBox at least, though it's a bit shaky especially with Windows hosts.

As in, your supplier lacks any competition in their line of business sector? Or is this a claim that MS are to be found wanting because you're locked into your app supplier?

I was speaking about the suppliers : they almost have a monopoly and can do as they want with their customers.

This is so bad that one of them shipped us a software upgrade with a hard-coded ip address. Next time the ip change they will have to recompile ...

/barf

That reminded me of a company I worked at. We were moving to a new datacenter, and the job of auditing and moving all of the scheduled tasks fell to me. A good 75% of the scheduled tasks were .exes for which we did not have the source code; and they all had connection strings hardcoded.

Thankfully, they were built in .NET, so I was able to decompile them, move the hardcoded stuff to .config files, and get it moved. But boy did that make me mad at the institutionalized laziness and sloppiness.

What did you use to decompile them into a project that was actually good enough to read through, change the needed things and compile it again?

I just used Reflector, which, at the time was free. There were a few issues that I had to tweak since reflector didn't do well with things like switch statements ... but for the most part it wasn't too bad. I was able to discern most of the munged variable names just by looking at the code and being familiar with the domain of the company.

Even if there was competition, it would only apply when buying new software - once you're belted in for the ride, people are loath to change.

The specialist software market seems so crappy, and so prone to throwing good money after bad, that I can understand that.

If you'll state what apps these are, I bet someone here would throw together a web based SaaS replacement in an afternoon. If there's no competition for a business app it's often because no one is aware of the need.

Well it's not as easy as you think : it's business specific software.

I work in public transportation : one company provides us with a way to bill customers, from the time they use their card in a bus (you would have to build the card reader too) to sending a monthly bill.

The other company provides us with a way to track our buses (specific hardware too), and there's even a supposed way to optimize their flow.

But if someone wants to tackle the challenge they'll need a "bit" more than an afternoon ;-)

What makes them specific to XP instead of just Windows?

Probably code that relies on implementation details and only works by coincidence.

We had a bug in our application that only manifested on Windows 8 and later.

The problem was that we were passing NULL instead of some other sentinel value (MSDN said to use a specific sentinel value). XP/Vista/7 took NULL anyway and the effect was the same as the sentinel value but in Windows 8 it did something different.

I remember Microsoft had "strict" builds of libraries (and Windows itself, IIRC) that did parameter checks. You would boot the machine with that software and run your program (more slowly) and some functions that would work on a consumer OS would generate errors on it.

Do they still do it?

Yes, you can download the checked build from the MSDN Subscriber Downloads.

But last time I checked the .NET Framework abused some Win32 API calls [1] so if you had some WinForms application you'd end up with loads of errors in code that wasn't yours.

Might be fixed, it's been a while since I looked.

[1] http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/3...

That's exactly something that an app compatibility shim should fix.

I'm not sure, but on one app we have errors at install and on the other certain functionalities don't work as they should.

Now I wouldn't be able to tell you what are the incriminated part of Windows.

There's even an app that is written in dotnet and that is not Win 7 compatible. Can you believe it ???

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