I found this interesting to read. I'm no active programmer, but I know that without proper documentation it's about impossible to do a program to be included into a system. Makes sense. So I understand part of Patchou's post.
On the other side, and not that I am very well informed... but I visit a german news site on a regular base, and they use to post updates about Vista quite often. From there I could learn that since the public beta, a LOT has been changed on Vista and the actual build is far far far better than what most of us installed. Here's a list of changes btw, although I guess it's not complete:
http://blogs.technet.com/windowsvista/archive/2006/07/28/443839.aspx
Well, you can read it yourself, it seems the public beta helped Microsoft to improve Vista a lot. Also, it's reported to be far more stable and a lot faster now. As an example... the latest build takes only about 30 minutes to be fully installed and ready on a 2500MHz machine... feel the difference? As for the performance... on my machine even the beta goes faster than my well set up XP system. I assume as soon as more bugs are removed and better drivers released, it will be faster for more and more people.
This might sound as if I defend Vista... well, maybe I do, I don't know. It's just... I installed and tested it, and I found it to work quite well... apart of a few display driver hangups when playing Guild Wars...
... I'm going to buy it shortly after release, even if there are lots of patches afterwards... who cares, a lot of software is being released before completely done anyway.
As for the documentation... Patchou, let them know, probably more people complain, and the more complain... the faster they will release development kits and/or documentation... no ?
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