We took a break at te wrong point, and I ended up missing the first few moments of Thomas Hawker's talk - he's covering the move from VW 5i with ENVY to VW 7 and Store. Lots of interesting stuff about Murphy's laws and how they impacted them - interestingly enough, the stuff Paul Baumann just talked about would have helped had it moved earlier, and they didn't get much help from the Envy/Store bridge (which honestly, is legacy at this point).

As I would have expected, they had a lot of trouble around the VW 7.1 move from a single "distinguished" UI process to the current multi-process UI. Old code tends to have lots and lots of baked in assumptions about that stuff.

Fascinating side point - his company has gard and fast rules about using OSS (they can't). That will be harder for them going forward, that's for sure.

They have issues with parts of Store as well - they decided to make blessing levels have more meaning, and line them up with the CMM model. Also added tags and labels to pundles (something we've been looking at, I might add). On the permissions side, they handle security issues at the DB level (which is kind of what I always envisioned being a good practice anyway).

Great line: No one follows their own development rules

No punches pulled where he has comments for Cincom and Gemstone. Heh - I love this one:

"Have Bigger class libraries than Jim Robertson"

I think the general thing is, it's really, really hard to migrate large code bases from old versions of a product. There's been a lot of change from VW 2.5.x (where they originally started) to VW 7, and through 5i, where they were, the only real change was in the addition of Namespaces.

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