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by JoeAltmaier 775 days ago
We had the ODM. Had to rewrite critical pieces of it to make it work at all. The timer service had races - we fixed it and offered the fixes back, but arrogant Microsoft wouldn't take them, they were smarter than us and didn't need our help. So we had to repatch every release as they shipped the same broken code again and again.

Had to rewrite the DHCP code, theirs was one run-on procedure written by some intern. Didn't handle half the cases, took forever to conclude if it ever did at all. We needed to roam across subnets on the order of 100's of ms. Theirs took seconds to maybe complete. Junk. They of course rejected that too.

Best if WinCE were buried and forgotten?
2 comments
sumtechguy 775 days ago
I think MS didnt really 'own' the code. There was another company (b squared?) that owned large portions of it. We had the same DHCP issue. Also fixed many bugs in the ATL code taking up precious flash space for our bespoke version as we were 2 vendors removed from getting to talk directly to MS.

> Best if WinCE were buried and forgotten?

I am going to say yes. If someone ever finds one of the ones I worked on, my advice is to set it on fire then once it is done smoldering bin the thing and just get something better.

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garaetjjte 775 days ago
From my experience (though it was with CE 7) I got the impression that core kernel code is decent, but the rest of stack is haphazard collection of barely working hacks. APIs look like their NT equivalents, but not really, often missing crucial functionality. Documentation is often wrong or outdated, especially in BSP area, where it frequently mixes up how OAL interacts with the kernel with details of the optional PQOAL library. Same thing with driver documentation, where it confuses driver interface with describing MDD libraries. Finer semantics of the interfaces are mostly guesswork. Multiple barely documented touch device stacked on top of each other, with various ways of loading the driver and sending events to GWES. And the build system... that thing is just hideous.
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JoeAltmaier 775 days ago
If I remember right, Bill set several teams to writing an os for devices. The one that finished first, shipped. The 'winners' weren't even OS programmers. Thus, the naïve implementations of so many critical OS functions (drivers, timers, interrupt handling, flash)
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qingcharles 774 days ago
I hate that attitude. I found a bug, fixed it, offered back to the company and they said "Don't worry, we'll find it ourselves eventually." Er, OK?
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