Vista = Y2K?

Miklos_Hollender

So basically a month before releasing Vista essential applications that NAV 4.0 SP3, Avaya Phone Manager and a good number of others I don't know of don't work properly with the latest Vista.

On the other hand, the hardware vendors are quite decided to ship ONLY Vista from the very moment it's been released, without waiting for any updates or a Service Pack. I think the reason might be behind it that Moore's Law - processor speed doublign each 18 months - basically stopped. Not that processorss didn't develop but that nobody was interested in upgrading. I bought a 3Ghz hyperthreading desktop PC in Feb 2004, because I never wanted to see the bloody hourglass anymore. 20 months later I bought a notebook with not 6Ghz, but with 1.5Ghz, half of the one of the desktop PC - and I'm not seeing that hourglass too much. Actually I have no reason to upgrade, as of yet. (OK, the 1G RAM helps - but 1G RAM wasn't considered too big 18-20 months before either). So the hardware vendors are jumping on Vista as if it would be a blessing from heaven - finally something that gonna drive up hardware requirements.

I've even heard that DELL actually threatened to sue Microsoft if Vista isn't out for the Christmas market. Things like this clearly give a higher priority to living up to the end of November deadline than to releasing a well-tested, backwards-compatible Vista.

Now, to understand it correctly: this is something that never happened with Microsoft. One of the most important reasons of their success is that they've ALWAYS taken a lot of care to ensure backwards compatibility, which their competitors, IBM, Apple usually didn't do. MS-DOS users could switch to Win95 without the fear of losing important applications. And now please right-click on any shortcut on your XPSP2 desktop and go to the rightmost tab. What do you see there? "Run in Windows 95 compatibility mode" . Nuff said.

So this is something that never happened that BOTH

1) Microsoft releases a backwards-incompatible OS
2) Hardware vendors refuse to sell the previous version from the very moment it's released - without waiting for the essential repairs.

Well, it could turn out to be a more serious problem than Y2K. Y2K meant bugs in some mission-critical, for example, banking applications. But what if the whole bloody terminal emulator that connects to that stone age banking application refuses to start on the newly purchased PC?

We'll see... interesting times.

ara3n

What I see happening in 6 months is that all most all the customers that will buy new hardware, will upgrade the Nav executable to 5.0.
Unless there is a workaround for Nav sp3, but then why bother.

Alex_Chow

This is just speculation. You don't know if the release version of Vista has backwards compatibility.

Probably not a good idea to start a panic before the actual product comes out.

(Unless you're trying to profit from the panic )

Miklos_Hollender

It's not only about NAV but a number of applications - for us, Avaya Phone Manager is also a serious issue etc.

Profit from it? Actually I didn't think about it but maybe I should - if only I could figure out how to make NAV work on Ubuntu or Mac with Wine or Cedega...

(Not as hopeless as it might seem - some folks got Office 2000 running with Wine... http://caia.swin.edu.au/reports/041129A/#install_ie6 )

Phenno

Miklos Hollender wrote:

Profit from it? Actually I didn't think about it but maybe I should - if only I could figure out how to make NAV work on Ubuntu or Mac with Wine or Cedega...

(Not as hopeless as it might seem - some folks got Office 2000 running with Wine... http://caia.swin.edu.au/reports/041129A/#install_ie6 )

3tier structure with SharePortal web services in the middle.
as a client, thin web browser.

then, you'll need only few machines on a win and other on whatever that has browser

kine

The testers in MS are now testing the update for version 4.0 SP3 for Vista compatibility.

Alex_Chow

:-k

4.0 SP3 was working fine when they were demoing it at Directions. Did I miss something? :?:

kine

May be they used some internall update, but released SP3 is not working (missing text in .stx file)...

Miklos_Hollender

Phenno,

I'm not sure I understand it. In this case the executable is run on the server and only keyboard/screen etc. communicates with the client, just like with Citrix?

Phenno

Miklos Hollender wrote:

Phenno,

I'm not sure I understand it. In this case the executable is run on the server and only keyboard/screen etc. communicates with the client, just like with Citrix?

Trend of IT is SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and what's more important, browsers are getting very good.

If you setup SOA-like system (which 3tier NAV is heading to) it will be availible to do a job from browsers which are OS independent

Miklos_Hollender

I guess yes... but I don't like the SOA trend at all. It has some useful aspects for integration, that's sure, but using a thin (browser) client...

I think the very reason that made Navision (and earlier: the CA-Clipper) so rapid to develop with is not separating model-controller-view aspects, not separating the logic and the presentation, so a given routing can jump right into the database, massage records to and fro and still can run a form right from that routine to get some decisions from the user or throw a visible error message and stuff like that. Sure, all the theoreticans say it's wrong and everybody needs strong Model-View-Controller approach because of reusability etc. blah blah blah but I think it's more important to get things work properly in the short amount of time we usually have than reusing things that we never had enough time to write correctly in the first time... A typical ugly example is the duplicate checking example in MSCRM SDK. Write both a web service that checks for duplicates and a JavaScript function that reads that service and throws a warning if there are any. Sure it's nice reusable as an external application can also use the service etc. but on the other hand, might take too much time to write from a business viewpoint - i.e. what if the client wants to pay only half an hour for it etc.