Starkers is right, except in one minor point, but I'll get to that later.
A program like WindowBlinds hooks into the OS in such a complex way (why do you think WB's ONLY competition in all these years have been patched versions of Microsoft's own skinning engine?) that a minor change to Windows can break it, and, as Starkers said, cause BSODs and crashes. The taskbar alone in Windows 7 has gone through major changes, and you can't expect the current WB version to 'magically' work with it.
It's also not fair to ask developers to support an OS which is not final and therefore still subject to changes. The developer risks spending a long time fixing a particular nasty compatibility issue only to find out that Microsoft changed the code yet again for the final release and that all that time has been wasted.
This said, Starkers is not quite right in what relates to NextSTART. Yes, NextSTART does not 'hook' into the OS, but it does replace the systray with its 'own' version. Unfortunately (for me, of course
) Microsoft has made changes to the systray in nearly every Windows version, which NextSTART must adapt to. And the systray is a notoriously difficult 'beast' to tame (as all those running ObjectDock with an empty systray dock/tabbed dock can testify to).
In the case of Windows 7, I was already sick of 'hacking' the real Windows systray to make it appear in the NextSTART startbar or wherever I wanted, with the consequent occasional visual glitches (particularly with animated systray icons).
There were also some other minor issues, not systray related, with Winstep Xtreme and 64 bit versions of Windows that I wanted to fix.
So, what I did for WSX 9.5 was install both the 32 bit and the 64 bit versions of the RC release of Windows 7 into different hard disks, together with my development environment, and dual boot between them.
Not only did I fix all the 64 bit issues that I am aware of, as I completely re-wrote the systray management code. The new systray is no longer the actual Windows systray simply 'placed elsewhere', but an actual COPY of the real thing. It was not easy accomplishing this, as it involved implementing some complex techniques of inter-process communication plus a lot of detective work figuring out the internal data structures of the systray (which are different between 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows, by the way).
With the new systray code I put an end to all the occasional visual glitches, and I am now able to place simultaneous copies of the systray - with icons of any size - in docks, shelves, menus, etc... Unfortunately I did not have the time to implement the later for the WSX 9.5 release, but I will eventually.
So, as you can see, developing Winstep Xtreme for a new version of Windows is not exactly as easy as you thought either.
Of course, the real challenge was getting Winstep Xtreme to be 100% Vista compatible back when Vista was still in beta. Vista made so many core changes to the way things worked that I had to rewrite great chunks of code, and was even forced to write a Windows Service in VB (some people said it could not be done, hehe) to take care of all the work requiring administrative rights. Now THAT was a challenge. Windows 7, by comparison, was easy as pie (then again, Windows 7 is not much more than Vista with a new face, with the difference that people seem to 'dig' it a lot).
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