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The same with other MS products.
Office, Visual studio, etc are intentionally not backward compatible to force a user to upgrade.
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For some reason when I use Word in Office 2003 it has options to save my document for an older version and it even opens up documents from previous Word versions... How odd...
Dont know about Visual Studio though. Sometimes if you want to add new features you have to break compatibility for saved files. MS is NOT the only company to do this by the way...
Seems i used a wrong word.
Actually i mean what if you open a VS7.0 file in VS7.1 and save it, you can't open it in VS7.0 without any reasons. And they have changed the project format again in VS8.0(2005). As in any VS versions i worked with.
The project format is xml. It is like
[NewSuperTag]title=be cool[/NewSuperTag]
[File]source/main.cpp[/File]
[File]source/main.h[/File]
The good feature of xml file is two-way compatibility (at least on paper).
If you can't read the tag, ignore it. What is the reason to change the tag names, tag layout, etc?
I agree what sometimes breaking compatibility is required, but not with the every version and even revision of the software.
For example if viewing a pdf file from Acrobat7 on my Acrobat5 viewer it just give me a popup what some of the new features will not be displayed.
I don't use MS Office, but i see others have a lot of troubles with it. Too much for me.
So does MS has a technically-blind engineers or they just want you to upgrade.
Guess youself...
Edited 2006-03-08 15:11




Member since:
2005-08-09
People, and companies like Microsoft, have this really bizarre idea that everybody rips everything out as soon as a new version of Windows pops up
The same with other MS products.
Office, Visual studio, etc are intentionally not backward compatible to force a user to upgrade.
They just want to rip out YOUR money.
Edited 2006-03-07 10:02