Dogfood Doesn’t Always Taste Good

One of the developers on the Windows Mobile team is Mike Calligaro, he writes on the team blog at length about some of the interesting technical challenges around trying to dogfood a new version of an OS when the hardware manufacturers either can’t keep up to get them devices to experiment on or when they simply won’t provide reference boards period.

Pretty interesting read, I always like Mike’s articles, he’s not afraid to speak his mind, likes to make you feel like an insider and usually doesn’t pull any punches.

Here’s 3 snippets:

One of the huge challenges we face in Windows Mobile is finding acceptable devices to use for Dogfood. Because the device we need to use hasn’t been created yet, we almost always develop the next release on a device created for the previous one. This causes serious problems (that lead to clever solutions) when the previous hardware doesn’t have features we’re trying to develop. For example, it was hard to add QWERTY keyboard support because no device had a QWERTY keyboard. And no one was going to make a QWERTY device until we added QWERTY support.

…

We needed a way to do 240×240. We did that by taking a 320×240 iPaq and just making its display driver only draw the first 240 pixels. We needed a way to do 640×480. For that we used an XDA (which had a 320×240 screen), made its display driver tell the system it had a 640×480 screen, and then “pixel quartered” the output (average pixels together) to make it fit. It was ugly, but if you squinted, you could almost pretend it was the higher resolution. And it let us test to make sure that text fit on the screen correctly, etc.

…

The most funky thing we needed to do was 240×320 for Smartphone. We couldn’t use the pixel quarter trick there because the MPX200 was 176×220, which isn’t an even multiple. Instead we made the Smartphone version of our code run on the XDA. To simulate the number pad, we overlaid a number pad on the screen and let you tap it with your fingers.

Link to the blog.

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