Microsoft Appears to Have Lost the Source Code of an Office Component | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Appears to Have Lost the Source Code of an Office Component

bleepingcomputer.com

Ha. Years ago I filed a bug report on Excel (geometric growth in updates as DDM messages arrived). We had a paid bug-report-and-repair contract. Their response? "Nobody here knows how Excel works any more. This is never gonna get fixed."

Also, I routinely used the debugger to launch Excel so I could debug my plugins. It faulted (null-pointer) several times during startup. Caught the faults and kept on plugging away. In my opinion, symptomatic of patch upon patch applied to old issues.

We used to blame this on, at Microsoft only new code got you a good review and promotion. So only interns ever worked on existing products .And then they began hiring Juniors in college over the summer for a 90-day summer job to replace internships. After that absolutely nobody would work on old products.

To top it all off, they a couple years ago folded their test groups into their Engineering groups. So now no testing gets done, or if it does the bugs can't stop the schedule. Because the testers are beholden to an Engineering manager instead of an independent organization. So now all Microsoft updates are tested simply by shipping them and sampling the bug reports.

Sounds like maybe how Skype got completely wrecked

Equation Editor was a MathType [1] product, not a Microsoft creation. It wouldn't surprise me at all that Microsoft didn't have the source to it.

[1]: https://www.wiris.com/en/mathtype/

So their website says the offer a copy of MathType for Office 2021... Why does Microsoft ship such an old version? Did the licensing deal fall through? I'm surprised they still have this in Office if they're not going to use the latest version.

> Why does Microsoft ship such an old version?

If I had to guess, it's probably because they got really good licensing terms for that version back in the day (e.g. flat fee for unlimited copies), and MathType is smart enough to not offer them a similar deal for a newer version.

Here is a nice white paper about a previous Excel 2007 bug, where a calculation that should result in 65535 is displayed as 100,000. The author concludes that since the patch only alters a few lines of assembly, that it was hand-coded.

http://lomont.org/papers/2007/excel-2007-bug/Excel2007Bug.pd...

They may have the code but lack a tool chain to compile it.

I think this is more likely. Tooling changes a lot, and if they had a developer that was capable of patching the binary, it was probably faster and less risk

That's my guess too.

Anyway, we failed at computing if we can't edit code a couple of decades old.

Then we failed, given how common it happens to be.

Yes, we did

What kind of strange toolchain would be unavailable to Microsoft, who makes the sdks?

Less seriously, The Magical Excel 97 Far East Language Build Screwdriver™ (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20191119-00/?p=10...)

More seriously, as the article states, it is the configuration etc. of those build computers. The code is pre-cloud computing (where VMs to build stuff can be archived for pennies), and the build computers are likely gone given how old the component is.

This was in 2017

Reply on news.ycombinator.com