🚀 go-pugleaf

malch@malch.com (Malcolm Hoar) wrote:

>Yikes, try developing a Windows application. It's a constant
>battle dealing with inadequate and inaccurate documentation
>and MS bugs.

I spent 5 years developing critical medical software to assist in organ 
transplants.  The software has been in use worldwide, with the beta test site 
at UCSF.  The software was built for Windows.  

It consisted of numerous workstations serving as data entry points, a separate 
computer that polled test results from multiple labs, interactive voice 
response software designed to phone patients and remind them of appointments, 
a printer module to print out the results of the telephoning, and other 
logging events.  The database was originally Access (!), but we moved to SQL 
Server as needs grew.  The database had to be up 24/7 due to the lab results 
coming in at all hours and the various other functions that might take place 
at any hour, such as a doctor or nurse looking for lab results for a 
particular patient.  

The software performed and it performed well for the 5 years I was at the 
company.  

It was our policy to use only system calls specifically documented by 
Microsoft, and to do as much as possible to allow for oddities such an offline 
printer or a telephone card that was calling into a dead line, etc.  

I had no problem developing the software suite for Windows.  Not having been 
involved with the company in a number of years I can't say what they're doing 
now, but when I was there the software performed well and appeared to be as 
stable as anything designed for Linux.  

Another:  There are numerous radio stations that run automation 24/7 based on 
Windows 2000 or XP, and I don't recall hearing many complaints about those, 
either.  

Another:  At this moment I'm testing music play software I'm writing for the 
retail industry.  The software has been up and running for 3 days now.  It 
survived my unplugging the external hard drive where 80% of the songs are 
stored, running defrag on the OS, downloading podcasts and other CPU intensive 
processes, and even unplugging various USB connections on the computer, and 
it's still playing without a glitch.  

I think it gets down to proper programming.  Don't use undocumented calls and 
be sure to test for hardware failures to be able to work around them.