Well, it finally happened. After years of patching and tweaking the Windows runtime to preserve backward compatibility (and placate its perpetually cranky customer base), Microsoft has finally said enough is enough. With Windows 7, it's putting the legacy Win32 API genie back in the bottle -- or more precisely, tucking it inside a custom-integrated virtual machine where it, and its notoriously hard-to-kill XP underpinnings, can coexist peacefully alongside newer, hipper versions of Windows.
It's a great idea, on paper.
[ Find out why Microsoft's own App-V would be a better solution to support the XP legacy. ]
Keeping the proverbial east (legacy) and west (managed) sides of Windows separate while allowing users to seamlessly access both environments is a feature that has been on IT wish lists forever. Unfortunately, by taking the VM route -- Microsoft is bundling a tweaked version of Windows XP with SP3 inside an improved Virtual PC image with a kind of coherence-mode rip-off -- Microsoft is ignoring other technologies that might have proven a better fit for the role.
I'm speaking, naturally, of application virtualization. The capability to isolate legacy applications into their own separate, virtualized runtime environments has long been one of the major selling points for this product category. And few vendors have as much experience and technical competence in this segment as Microsoft. The company's App-V platform is one of the pioneering application virtualization products, with thousands of successful installations.
With App-V, there's no need for a clumsy VM with its myriad integration and configuration management headaches. App-V virtualized programs run at or near native speed, with full fidelity, yet their impact on the system is negligible: All registry and file system modifications are sandboxed, keeping the local environment clean and immune from DLL hell and other legacy Windows baggage.
It's an elegant solution, and it begs the question: Why isn't Microsoft using App-V as opposed to shoehorning a copy of a XP into a slow, bloated VM that uses a bunch of screen-scraping smoke and mirrors to make it look like a program has been "integrated" with the local desktop?
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Download now »I don't disagree about the sequencer interface. I'm talking about the act of sequencing when apps are written in such a way that they don't lend themselves to sequencing. Perhaps we're from different environments. I work at a college, and we see app after app that doesn't lend itself to sequencing or sequencing easily. Apps that require some local SQL-type server (MSDE, Pervasive, whatever) to store user data, apps that don't like being on anything but C:, etc. Some of the apps we have are in house apps written by people who are now retired and/or deceased. I doubt Microsoft has shims for everything.
Again, I'm not talking about the UI. It just seems easier to me, having used App-V and MED-V, to get something to work in a VM than to work in App-V. You're basically just installing it in a regular Windows environment in MED-V's case, and App-V requires a little IT trickery at times.
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