On 11 Mar 2005 at 14:04, Robert Patterson wrote: > David W. Fenton wrote: > > > Yes, you may have to recompile your runtime under the most recent > > .NET version, > > Recompiling is not an option in this context. What I am saying is that > my old DOS utilities continue to run *without* recompile since the > last time I build them in the mid-1980s. Meantime, I think there is > every chance that my ASP.NET apps of today will require being > recompiled to run under some not-very-distant OS version only a few > years hence.
Well, ASP.NET is server-side, not client-side, so it's a very different situation. The upgrade from PHP 3.x to PHP 4.x on one of my clients' web hosts caused an application to break (it wouldn't have corrupted the data as well if MySQL were not a toy database, though, lacking referential integrity enforcement at the engine-level with its native table format). Server applications are simply a completely different kettle of fish, especially when you're running your application on top of another application (ASP is run on top of IIS, which is a component shipped with the server OS, but not part of the OS kernel). I would guess that if the future version of Windows can run the version of IIS for which your ASP.NET application was written, your app will run fine (assuming no depencies outside ASP.NET), but I doubt that will be allowed (just as with IE, I believe you can't downgrade IIS below the version that shipped with the OS). But overall, my bet is that Microsoft has a much poorer backward compatibility track record on server software than they do on desktop software. And in all the cases described where something broke (including my own), each example was an application written in an interpreted language running on top of various layers of support between the application and the OS. That kind of thing is wholly irrelevant to the discussion at hand, which is about Finale, which is a desktop application compiled in native code, not interpreted code. So, I would say your examples of apps that break are very ill-chosen for the topic of discussion. > I also disagree that the Windows backwards-compatibility picture is as > rosy as you suggest, but ymmv. It certainly has a better track record > over 25 years than does MacOS. I don't have a single client who has been forced to upgrade a piece of software only because the older version would not run on a new version of Windows. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
