Microsoft formally launched Windows 7. I can’t say how proud I am of the work we did in Windows 7 – it’s been an amazing journey. This is the 4th version of Windows I’ve worked on and I have never felt this way about a release of Windows. I have to admit that I get a bit weepy with pride whenever I see a Win7 commercial (Kylie is simply too cute :)).
I thought I’d write a bit about the WIn7 experience from my point of view. I’ve written a bit of this stuff in my post on the Engineering 7 blog but that was more about the changes in engineering processes as opposed to my personal experiences in the process.
For me, the Windows 7 work basically started just after we shipped Vista. While the PMs and leads on the sound team were busy working on planning for Win7, I spent most of the time between Vista RTM and the start of the Win7 feature design cleaning up some of the Vista code I was responsible for. During the final Vista testing, I realized that there were some architectural deficiencies in some of the sound code that caused some really subtle bugs (that I don’t believe anyone outside of the sound team has ever found) so I took the opportunity to clean up those deficiencies.
I also fixed an issue that occurred when someone called the wave APIs from their DLL entry point. Yes I know that apps aren’t supposed to call any APIs from DllMain but anyone who’s read either my blog or Raymond Chen’s blog will realize that a lot of apps do stuff like that and get away with it. This fix was actually first deployed in Vista SP1 – we had identified the DllMain problem before we shipped Vista and included a workaround for the problem but we also added some telemetry so we could determine the number of customers that were affected by the bug. Based on that telemetry we decided that we had to include the fix in Vista SP1 of the number of users affected by the issue. This is a perfect example of some of the ways that the customer experience improvement program directly leads to product improvements. Before we had the CEIP, we would have had no way of knowing how much impact the bug had on customers, the CEIP gave us visibility into the severity of the problem that we wouldn’t have had before.
Continue Larry Osterman's WebLog Windows 7 Reflections…
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