ed@odi.com (Ed Schwalenberg) (10/03/90)
I have it; it's reasonable as far as it goes. If you're trying to write a reasonably straightforward driver, it should be all you need. It contains complete source code for the common drivers; if you're just adding support for a new variety of mouse, keyboard, display, etc. and you're familiar with writing real operating system code for 80x86 family machines, you're golden. you're trying to do something complex, you have to do a lot of deduction and reading between the lines and just plain assembly-language debugging to succeed. One or more pages is missing from the Device Driver manual (page 1-6 begins in the middle of a sentence.) Some functions are misdocumented. For example, BuildDescDWORDs is really BuildDescriptorDWORDs. This continues the tradition of the SDK, which documents ChangeSelector, which is actually available under the name PrestoChangoSelector (I kid you not!) The real kicker is support. Having shelled out for the Windows retail package, MASM, C 6.0, and the SDK, plus another $20 for the Developer's Notes they haven't shipped yet, you're now eligible to pay $795/year plus phone charges for Microsoft OnLine support. (There is no other support; the telephone machine just tells you to call your OnLine saleperson. The CompuServe MSSYS forum section leaders ignore most questions. Comp.windows.ms.programmer, when it comes along, will be somewhat helpful but probably not a definitive source.) If you spend another $500 for the DDK, the price for OnLine jumps to $4500. That's right, four thousand five hundred dollars per year. I personally am of the opinion that Microsoft would be better off providing reasonable support at reasonable prices to developers. ($4500 is not unreasonable for some situations. However, the two questions I have so far aren't worth $2250 each.) They'd encourage many more programmers to write for Windows, which would make Windows much more successful as a retail product, which in turn would increase the market for Microsoft's own Windows products.
tom@mims-iris.waterloo.edu (Tom Haapanen) (10/04/90)
Ed Schwalenberg <ed@odi.com> writes: > The real kicker is support. [...] (There is no other support; the tele- > phone machine just tells you to call your OnLine saleperson. The > CompuServe MSSYS forum section leaders ignore most questions. [...] ) Is there an address on CompuServe for Microsoft? I have a bug I'd like to report, and I don't relish the thought of spending 30 minutes' worth of long-distance dollars (from Ontario) to report a bug in their product. Or maybe a person at microsoft.uucp that I could mail such a thing to? [ \tom haapanen --- university of waterloo --- tom@mims-iris.waterloo.edu ] [ "i don't even know what street canada is on" -- al capone ]