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Radu
New Member
5 Posts |
 Posted - Jul 15 2009 : 03:33:01 AM
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quote:
Originally posted by muttbaha
I'm not sure if this is caused by Windows 7's bug or 'feature (i.e., behavior change)', but if you study it now, you may have the chance to notify Microsoft and let them fix it (or let you know how to workaround it). But if you don't do it now, after RTM being signed off you'll be all on your own because MSFT won't change it.
Objectively speaking, it's unlikely for the Windows 7 development team to make any more (significant) changes to the Windows 7 codebase for the RTM. I would expect it's already pretty much sealed, except maybe for a few Ts and Is that may still need crossing/dotting.
Although I agree that this issue renders VAX unusable for VS6 under Windows 7 (and I would obviously wish it was fixed ASAP), I do agree with the proposed course of action - i.e. wait for the Windows 7 RTM and then diagnose/investigate the problem.
Regards,
Radu
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muttbaha
New Member
8 Posts |
Posted - Jul 15 2009 : 10:00:16 AM
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If it's unlikely that Microsoft will change/fix it, then I think there's also no need to wait for RTM because the situation is unlikely to change in RTM...
Anyway it's up to VA developers' decision. I'm just murmuring. |
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feline
Whole Tomato Software
United Kingdom
19014 Posts |
Posted - Jul 15 2009 : 10:29:16 AM
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How do you compare two bugs, and say which one is more important? This is a hard question to answer.
Hopefully we can all agree that "The IDE crashes and I loose work" or "The machine has a blue screen of death" are in the most important class of bugs.
VC6 under Win7, you are looking at an IDE that Microsoft does not support on an OS that is still a moving target. It is not straight forward to compare this to other important bugs. |
zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness |
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mwb1100
Ketchup Master
82 Posts |
Posted - Jul 15 2009 : 2:54:36 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by muttbaha
I'm not sure if this is caused by Windows 7's bug or 'feature (i.e., behavior change)', but if you study it now, you may have the chance to notify Microsoft and let them fix it (or let you know how to workaround it). But if you don't do it now, after RTM being signed off you'll be all on your own because MSFT won't change it.
I can't imagine that Microsoft would even look at the problem if it could only be demonstrated with VC6. VC6 is not supported by Microsoft on Vista or later - they aren't going to fix problems with it (especially this late in the Win7 cycle). I wouldn't be surprised if any help that the VAX devs get from MS is strictly by the kindness of someone at MS working 'off the clock' on it.
I support Whole Tomato's stance on this (even though I use VC6 for some projects). If it's reasonably easy to diagnose and fix, I'm sure that WT will make the fix. Until then, I'll run VC6 on a machine that's still running XP, or I'll set up a VM to host it.
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Edited by - mwb1100 on Jul 15 2009 3:07:53 PM |
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SvenC
Tomato Guru
Germany
339 Posts |
Posted - Jul 16 2009 : 03:38:08 AM
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@feline: VC6 as an IDE is not supported by Microsoft anymore on *any* Windows version. So that argument sounds a bit weak to me when on the other side wholetomato says VAX is working with VC6. I would go for that argument if I had *any* other problems with running VC6 on Windows 7, but I haven't. Come on, at the end of the day Vista and Windows 7 are grand children of Windows NT with tighter security. There might be big changes for kernel/driver developers - but VC6 is just a user mode application!
@sean: I am a bit surprised to read how easily you point a well argumenting customer to your refund services *first* and only later try to give a small bit of hope for at least looking at the problem. The only reason I can think of for this kind of reaction is way too much pressure. I am sorry for that. But please try to stay positive with us, your customers.
I loved the wholetomato support for years because of great efforts and time of reaction. I was quite active in the first years I started using VAX and quieted a bit because I just do not find any issues any more - cool  But this is really the first time that I stumble over a case where I do not feel treated well  . Please try to understand us, who work with VC6 projects and VS200x as well, that it would be a very hard cut if VAX would not run with VC6 on Win7 any more.
And "Just run VC6 on a WinXP virtual machine" is not a really good answer as well: would you really like to work at the reduced VM speed yourself? |
Edited by - SvenC on Jul 16 2009 03:50:35 AM |
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Radu
New Member
5 Posts |
Posted - Jul 16 2009 : 05:12:09 AM
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quote:
Originally posted by SvenC
Please try to understand us, who work with VC6 projects and VS200x as well, that it would be a very hard cut if VAX would not run with VC6 on Win7 any more.
And "Just run VC6 on a WinXP virtual machine" is not a really good answer as well: would you really like to work at the reduced VM speed yourself?
Not that I expect it matters to anyone from Whole Tomato, but there are two (additional) problems with running VS6 under an XP virtual machine in order to use VAX:
1. Testing/debugging (under Windows 7) applications built with VS6. Yes, we could use an XP VM to develop the application, and a separate W7 installation of VS6 to test the result; but it would make the whole experience quite painful (i.e. using VS6 without VAX once you've gotten used to it). See below why remote debug wouldn't work all that well, either.
2. Some of your customers (myself included) already run Windows in a virtual machine (in my case using VMware Fusion under Mac OS). This means we would have to maintain two separate Windows VMs - one specifically for VS6 + VAX and the other for the rest of the productive work we need to do under Windows. Plus, running two virtual machines concurrently on a laptop/notebook isn't something I would recommend to anyone (even with a 2.6 GHz dual-core CPU and 6 GB of RAM).
Radu
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Edited by - Radu on Jul 16 2009 05:36:07 AM |
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feline
Whole Tomato Software
United Kingdom
19014 Posts |
Posted - Jul 16 2009 : 12:08:29 PM
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SvenC, the point I am working towards is that one day, in the far future, VA is going to stop supporting VC6. This is probably many years away, but at some point continuing to support an IDE that Microsoft no longer support, and don't even let you download is going to become more trouble than it is worth. At the same time stopping supporting an IDE that Microsoft themselves still support is clearly a bad idea. So Microsoft's level of support for an IDE is one of many factors to consider.
Running inside a VM, I do 98% of my work inside VM's, so I know all about the benefits and the problems of this approach. That is a different discussion though
Win7 contains a "transparent" form of VM for running older programs under winXP. I have not tested this myself, but it might be worth looking into, at least for some people, but SvenC you have already said this won't work for you.
Lets be fair, this was Sean's first reply to a long thread. If there was a magic bullet fix hopefully we would have found it by now. He stepped in and pointed out an alternate solution. We are all trying to help here.
Win7 may be built on top of older OS's, but something has clearly changed. Remember VA does not work in an "official" manor, instead we run around behind the scenes, hooking in at a low level. This makes us vulnerable to changes. The number of IDE, OS, or service pack specific bugs that I have seen, reproduced and reported is ample proof of this. There is a reason I have most Microsoft OS's running inside virtual machines, and am always jumping between them...
Now I know this is not a "good" answer, but remember, you are saying "VA does not work on an unfinished OS". Any work we do at this point *might* be wasted, since a fix might break again in the final release of win7. This is one of the known risks of working with and on an OS or IDE that is still a work in progress.
Remember when VS2008 came out? We provided support for VS2008 beta 2, and then VA stopped working in the official release of VS2008. Supporting the Beta does not mean you have successfully supported the final release *sigh* |
zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness |
Edited by - feline on Jul 16 2009 12:10:02 PM |
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SvenC
Tomato Guru
Germany
339 Posts |
Posted - Jul 16 2009 : 12:34:04 PM
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Hi feline,
thanks for answering so detailed. Both sides have valid arguments.
I am tempted to say that I think that Win7 will not change in this implementation detail as Microsoft is already in a dev mode where almost nothing changes any more. But there is "I think" and not "I know"... So I don't say it 
The hooking stuff is of course difficult and fragile - there is just this feeling that it should not be too hard for a dev to add some debugging output at that point in code where your combo box is opened/closed to get a clue what is going on and how hard a fix might be. But again: fixing other peoples bugs in a thought might be easier than doing it physically...
So another few weeks to wait, until we can check this issue with Win7 RTM. Fingers crossed...
quote:
Originally posted by feline
Win7 contains a "transparent" form of VM for running older programs under winXP. I have not tested this myself, but it might be worth looking into, at least for some people, but SvenC you have already said this won't work for you.
It is just the next version of Virtual PC shipped with a preconfigured WinXP and a feature available in VMWare workstation as well, were you can visualize a single application window of a guest system directly in your host desktop. So it looks like that app is running directly on the host, but it is really executed in the guest VM. So performance of those apps is of course reduced compared to directly running it on your host.
I do the same when it comes to testing my installed apps on different systems. But the dev IDE is always on my host and I remote debug into the guest VM. |
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sean
Whole Tomato Software
USA
2817 Posts |
Posted - Jul 16 2009 : 5:30:37 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by SvenC
@sean: I am a bit surprised to read how easily you point a well argumenting customer to your refund services *first* and only later try to give a small bit of hope for at least looking at the problem. The only reason I can think of for this kind of reaction is way too much pressure. I am sorry for that. But please try to stay positive with us, your customers.
I'm hopeful we'll be able to take care of it.
We aren't ready to shut the door on VC6. I suspect that when the time comes, part of the decision will be driven by whether or not Microsoft achieves its "10 is the new 6" vision.
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SvenC
Tomato Guru
Germany
339 Posts |
Posted - Jul 23 2009 : 1:11:21 PM
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| Just two more weeks and us MSDN/Technet subscribers will know how Windows 7 RTM, VC6 and VAX do work together - can't wait to check it out |
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SvenC
Tomato Guru
Germany
339 Posts |
Posted - Jul 28 2009 : 04:58:26 AM
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As Microsoft released the RTM hashes I could not wait any longer 
And here is the result: VAX 1727 in VC6 SP6 on Windows 7 RTM *does not* work!
The problem is: when the intellisense combo boxes pop up and you try to navigate with cursor keys up/down the combobox is closed and the cursor is moved in the source code instead.
Please, do look at your code running in VC6 as soon as possible. No matter if running Win7 RC or Win7 RTM, there is no change in the Windows 7 code change (from beta to rc and rtm) that caused VAX to stop working properly in VC6.
Lots of devs will switch to Win7 on or shortly after August 6th and VAX is so popular that lots of those devs who still (have to) use VC6 for old stuff will see that VAX stopps working for them. Would be nice if that VAX-is-not-working-period is as short as possible. |
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sean
Whole Tomato Software
USA
2817 Posts |
Posted - Aug 05 2009 : 4:27:16 PM
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| We have identified the problem. It will be fixed in the current release cycle. |
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SvenC
Tomato Guru
Germany
339 Posts |
Posted - Aug 05 2009 : 4:58:34 PM
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| Sean, that is great news! Thanks a lot!!! |
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SvenC
Tomato Guru
Germany
339 Posts |
Posted - Aug 20 2009 : 07:56:13 AM
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VAX 1731 works in VC6 on Win7. Did I mention: wholetomato, you never let me down so far!!!
Great work, for years! |
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support
Whole Tomato Software
5566 Posts |
Posted - Aug 22 2009 : 7:10:57 PM
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| As SvenC pointed out, case=26657 is fixed in build 1731 |
Whole Tomato Software, Inc. |
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1724 intellisense not working with VS6 on Win7
