takeos

Would something like $29.95 (individual developer license) be too much in your opinion? Some corporate developers might not even take it seriously at that price, while for others anything more than free would be too expensive. I exchanged ideas about the possible pricing. A small price would still give customers technical support and updates, i.e. if new functions emerge, they would likely be added to the library, etc. Legacy Extender is not as vast as KernelEx. It focuses on what Visual Studio adds or breaks that the developer did not want in the first place. If the developer used some other XP-only functions on purpose, Legacy Extender will not help much. On the other hand, Legacy Extender is great if you already have a "legacy" project, and simply want to update the compiler, and you thought the only way was to run two different versions of Visual Studio. I doubt that Microsoft would be interested (as a customer), because they have demonstrated that they do not care about legacy compatibility. To the contrary, it seemed to me that they introduced or at least supported incompatibility on purpose. Do you remember how Visual Studio 2005 became incompatible with Windows 95? At the time it did not really break much. It would not have taken more than a few hours of work for Microsoft to retain compatibility by just not using certain functions. Lots of programmers had proposed solutions, patches, etc. I proposed one to Microsoft myself after I filed a bug report (I thought it was a bug!), they filed the "bug" as something like "by design" and closed the case! As for whether it works or not, it's currently being tested in public. Anyone can access it. You are free to decide for yourself, provide feedback, etc. Just my two cents!

There are actually some patches, but here is what I think may be a better approach: Legacy Extender for Visual Studio 2005/2008 (www.legacyextender.com) Visual Studio references not only functions which do not exist in old Windows, but also some functions which exist, but which do not work (like Unicode functions in Windows 95). Legacy Extender includes a linkable library which takes care about all of these. The library approach also has the benefit of being compatible with code optimization. Post-build patches are not. The second thing that Legacy Extender does is like EditVersion.exe (once provided by Microsoft): it has a command line tool to edit the subsystem version (Visual Studio writes 5.0, but you want it to be 4.0 to run on systems older than Windows 2000). Unlike some patches it also recalculates the checksum. It's not true that the checksum is not checked by Windows, it is necessary to be correct for some drivers and boot DLLs, and you never know if Microsoft or some antivirus software decide to be more strict against binaries with bad checksums in the future.