XP's last leg being kicked out from under it?

[dilettante]

While composing the start of a new CodeBank thread I stumbled across something interesting.


The code I posted uses the WIA 2.0 Automation Library, something included since Vista but an add-on for XP SP1 and later. While trying to grab the current download page link from Microsoft I found out there isn't one anymore.

Bing, DuckDuckGo, and other search engines turned up nothing, but I quickly shfted to Google. There WIA 2.0 download gets a hit sure enough but it seems to be stale cached data, and the link eventually (after a long pause) took me to a Microsoft dead letter office of sorts.

The DLL isn't needed for development on modern versions of Windows, but if you need to deploy to XP you need the redist from the downloaded SDK.


While the reason for this download disappearing isn't clear, and it might just be a mistake soon to be rectified... I'm not entirely sure of that. Even the MSDN articles on WIA 2.0 Automation don't mention XP anymore!

In this case the confluence of both XP's and VB6's status might be at play. The library is meant to be used from VB6 and Windows Script and little else. .Net probably has its own WIA wrapper classes and doesn't need to use Interop to reach down the software stack to this ActiveX library, it probably just bypasses this and goes to the COM API directly instead in recent Framework versions.


What I'm wondering is what else has begun to disappear. We've come to expect VB6 support to diminish over time - the VSI 1.1 downloads have been gone for some time now. Is this really a VB6 issue or have we moved on to XP support issues now?

Is the loss of this and other downloads a sign of things to come for XP?

[Nightwalker83]

I doubt it! They probably have an online archive that has all the old stuff available.

[dilettante]

The only accessible archive I know of is the old FTP site, and I haven't seen much new there since the Win9x era.

If you find it I'm sure people would appreciate it though.

[dilettante]

http://support.microsoft.com/ph/1173

Important notice for users of Windows XP with Service Pack 3 (SP3): The support for this product ends April 8, 2014. To ensure that you will receive all important security updates for Windows you need to upgrade to a later version such as Windows 7.

So we're close enough that removing downloads and MSDN information shouldn't surprise us anymore.

[Niya]

Wow, that's sad. XP is so awesome.

I've never been willing to go back to a previous Windows version when I've moved to a new one, hell even with other software like programming IDEs. However, XP is the lone exception. Although I'm thoroughly satisfied with Win7, I really wouldn't mind using XP again. That's how good a product it is.

[Jenner]

Yea, but look at Win98. There's very little out there to find of it anymore. Of course I expect WinXP to follow the same depreciation path. I admit, I sure loved XP back in the day. Heck, I think everyone did, look at how long of a run it had. Like all dead software, there will always be abandonware archivists who will keep it available for posterity sake; patched to the last version available.

I don't expect many people to bat much of an eye when Vista goes the same route.

[dilettante]

The big problem is that as thoses old OSs go away it gets hard to upgrade too since the manufacturers stop making new drivers available for the hardware.