A new article in InfoWorld highlights the issue of breaking changes FOR DEVELOPERS in the SP2 release of WinXP. According to Pat Hynds (New England RD and CTO at Critical Sites) if we a) are paying attention to the security messages for developers such as at DevDays and b) take note of the information that is on this MSDN page that is for developers to prepare, things shouldn’t be so terrible.

Apparently Microsoft has been getting the word out to developers. I actually hadn’t noticed that yet. I know we are getting lots of info on how to write secure apps (and I am sharing that as well). I just hadn’t heard yet that this is a breaking change.

I think what it means for me is 2 3 things:

1) I have to test ALL of the apps I have in production against SP2 before any of my clients start upgrading (ugggh…)

and

2) I need to be aware of what I will need to do differently in my development environment. Hopefully, this is akin to dealing with the change from IIS5 – ASPNET account to IIS6 – Network Service account. That wasn’t so horrible.

3) (added) Oh yeah, and I don’t have a spare computer that I dare install the SP2 on to do all of this testing. This is a big problem. I have whidbey on my laptop and need it to work for learning and for upcoming presentations. I already have the Lonestar beta on my tablet and have to assure that I can use that to do my DevDays demos at Boston, plus I don’t feel like installing all of my apps and dev tools on there anyway. My husband uses his computer for doing paperwork for his business. So I’m kind of up a creek right now anyway.

From that page (link is above):

To developers these technologies will have impacts on the applications that they create and the tools they use. This page contains resources to assist developers in dealing with these impacts.  

From the article (quoting someone from MS)

Large vendors of software are getting help from Microsoft to make sure their applications are compatible with SP2, Goodhew said. Smaller vendors and others, such as enterprise software developers, need to do their own testing. “It is really up to developers to do the due diligence,” he said.

If developers do find that SP2 breaks their applications, it most likely means that they were not following best practices in terms of security when writing their applications, according to Goodhew.

Definitely pay attention to this!!!

In the long run it is a good thing of course. I just wish someone from Microsoft would come to *my* home office and make sure everything is still working! Pancakes and maple syrup anyone?? 🙂

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