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Comment by DigitalSea | Hacker News Reader

In before the hate train starts rolling full steam ahead right over Microsoft. This is a fantastic decision, they obviously really had no choice otherwise a lot of people would have abandoned Windows 8 development and Microsoft would have looked bad launching an OS that didn't have many supported applications.

As for Windows XP support, why would Microsoft add in support for an OS they don't really support any more? It has been 11 years, well almost 12 since XP came out and the fact people want to support the outdated OS is like asking Google to start supporting Internet Explorer 6 again.

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     As for Windows XP support, why would Microsoft
     add in support for an OS they don't really support 
     any more?

Because Windows XP is stable, it works and a lot of companies and people are still using it.

If anything, Microsoft is to be blamed for not providing a compelling reason to upgrade. Windows Vista was awful, while Windows 7 is just a re-branded Vista with a little more polish applied. Which is why at home I still have Windows XP on my desktop.

     It has been 11 years, well almost 12

Windows 7 was released at the end of 2009, while XP was released in Aug 2001. That's 8 years in which people had no real upgrade option. Can you really blame them if they are a little conservative?

     the fact people want to support the outdated OS is like asking 
     Google to start supporting Internet Explorer 6 again

That's not a fair comparison, as downloading Firefox/Chrome is painless, is free, doesn't require a hardware upgrade, normal people can do it by themselves and they don't risk losing their data ... saying that upgrading Windows is painful would be an understatement.

Show me the person that's still running 2001 hardware with XP

yo. (of course, it did take two days to post...)

That's wrong. 7 is really good. Comparing it to vista or xp shows you don't know what you are talking about.

Name 3 differences between Vista and XP that don't involve minor UI tweaks.

I understand that Microsoft does not want to perpetuate Windows XP support but, for this single reason, I will not be able to upgrade to VS 2012. This means missing on the latest c++ features and also means maintaining two developement trees if I decide to develop a WinRt version.

Latest C++ features are in MinGW and clang! And latest C features (C99) are there too.

Yes but my main project is all on VS' toolchain and I would guess there are many others like me. Good to know that here are alternatives though.

To be fair, you'd need two development trees for WinRT anyway - the namespaces are different, for one thing, and the UIs are of course radically different and incompatible.

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