[James Pratt @ Oct 9th 2006 1:16PM]

JD. I work on the Windows Mobile team and one of the areas I focus on is backward compatibility. We spend a lot of time and effort trying to preserve backward compatibility, so today's application will work on tomorrow's OS.

There are occasions when we break back compat but we usually do so oniously to meet another strategic need, for example, moving to Windows Mobile 5.0 we moved the Outlook databases to a new data store which was better optimized to run from flash store. While the Outlook APIs were updadted to point to this new data store and provide app transparency, some apps had were accessing the database directly and hence needed to be updated. We contacted lots of ISVs about this prior to the 5.0 launch to let them know what had changed and how to fix it.

Sometimes our developers forget that ISVs have resource constraints and ship schedules as well. It's always useful for me to have real war stories from ISVs who have been affected by back compat issues to illustrate the pain we risk putting ISVs through when we make changes.

Feel free to mail me. My e-mail address is my full first name followed by the first two letters of my last name at microsoft.com.