Tuesday, January 04, 2005

AOL Install Hell

Are you frustration with one of the most famous offenders of software development?

You are not alone. AOL should not be in the business of software development. They just can not follow a few basic rules in Windows development.

At one point we banned any business computer that had AOL installed as was actively being used. In the old days they really had their head up something. They tried to redo Windows networking and changed in the registry key location of files and created their own version of the WINSOCK.DLL which handles most all the TCP/IP communications for Windows applications. AOL is the poster child of DLL Hell.

It wasn’t until Microsoft and AOL started working together did they finally get the networking thing straighten out. Now that they are divorced AOL is falling back into their old ways.

There are hundreds of case studies that I could write about AOL. One would be “This is how not to write code”. The fact they shot to the number one ISP baffles me.

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