Freigeben über

Is your job easier or harder with 10,000 components?

  • Artikel

Is your life as an Embedded developer truly better off with a thousand windows feature components and 9,000 driver components?

In NT4 Embedded there were about 250 components. With XP Embedded we gave you 10,000. Immediately after shipping the product we heard two common points of view:

1.   “10,000 components!? You’re kidding me, I’m not a developer. I don’t know the difference between Winsock and the Print Spooler, how can you expect me to pick and choose the components I need for my device? You need to make this more intuitive for me, give me some more macro components to act as a ‘primer’, give me more documentation, make finding the feature easier for me.”
2. “10,000 component!? This is awesome, since I’m a developer and know exactly the APIs I require, I’ll leverage MSDN and my intimate knowledge of Windows Internals to pick and choose only the components I need. But your componentization sucks, I add the Primitive:Winsock component and it brings in some other stuff I know I don’t want.”

Would fewer components help both the scenarios above? Fewer components decreases the time to market, but can potentially bloat the footprint. Of course, further componentization would make #2 happier but #1 very unhappy.

In my opinion, the average system builder for ISV/IHV/OEMs of XPe devices don’t have an deep technical level of knowledge of Windows or any operating system in general. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it makes my team’s job more difficult in that we’re trying to build a product that is everything to everyone. A product that is usable by the independent contractor working out of her garage that has just a rudimentary understanding of the OS but is technically savvy in hardware. And usable by a senior developer for Windows solutions that is just as comfortable grepping through Linux source.

Is there a happy medium?

- Andy Allred

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 03, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    April 03, 2005
    Thanks for the feedback David. If you have more details on how to make the situation easier or more intuitive feel free to send comments to the team alias: wecrt at microsoft.com , or comment here as well.

    Andy
  • Anonymous
    April 03, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    April 04, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    April 22, 2005
    Cool, thanks for the feedback. Understanding the common dependencies among most device categories will help us to create better "foundations". Also, I'm working on a list of 'battleship features' that are attractive to most of our customers for us to target for better factoring.

    When you have issues with specific dependencies or any that you feel are completely unreasonable, send me the information at WECRT at Microsoft.com, we'll file a bug on it and add it to the list for investigation.

    thanks