Are there any plans to DROP support for W2k?

Did microsoft drop support for Win2K?


I think we'll officially drop support then, just as we did Windows98.


At the same time, remember that just because we drop support, doesn't mean we intentionally break it to make it not work. It will work as long as the technology in Decal doesn't change to the point that it doesn't operate on the old OS.


That was only a major issue for Windows98, since there were large changes to Win2K and WinXP beyond Win98 that we had to do a lot of crappy hacks in Decal to get it to work on Win98.. we didn't do that with Decal this time, so that is why it currently doesn't work in Win98.


In the case of Win2K, we don't have anything "special" for it in Decal, and everything is pretty much geared to work on XP right now, which follows very closely to Win2K.


I don't personally picture seeing much in the way of not working on Win2K for a while... at least until the release of Vista.

Mainstream Win2k support was dropped June 30th 2005. Microsoft OS's have a mainstream lifecycle of 5 years.


You can find more information about lifecycles here:


http://support.microsoft.com/?LN=en-us&x=21&y=7&scid=fh%3Ben-us%3Blifecycle


Specific dates for Win2k:


http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=3071

the same reasons you cannot use decal with Windows ME, I guess.

 

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Microsoft dropping support for OSes generally leads to feature disparities between supported and unsupported operating systems. For example, Windows Installer. If we have a reason to use a later feature that is not supported by an unsupported operating system, we will do it without worrying about it. But at the moment, 2K and XP don't really have any feature disparities for application development.


So, no, we do not plan to drop 2K support. I think there's a total of one bug related to 2K (mainly, it doesn't seem to support VT_I8 variants with the _variant_t wrapper). But if say .NET 2.1 pops up with no 2K version and we require it for some reason, then the 2K users will be out of luck.

 

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