On: Redis for win32 and the Microsoft patch

[va_coder]

I find little sympathy for the MS world.

How about a port of IE to Linux so I can test websites with it? How about the ability to install multiple versions of IE on Windows? I could go on....

[bad_user → va_coder]

Btw, you can run the freely provided virtual machines with multiple IExplorer versions on Linux with VirtualBox.

Here's the script that will install them for you (works on my Ubuntu): https://github.com/xdissent/ievms

[ken → bad_user]

Have you gotten this to work recently? It looks like this script fetches the images that are listed on http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=11575 which they say "will shutdown and become completely unusable on November 17, 2011".

Someone has reported this a couple days ago on their forum http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/forum/ie8-windows_xp/w... but there's been no response.

Other questions on that forum indicate that there was exactly the same issue in 2010 and in 2009, so it looks like in practice, you can test with old versions of IE for free, but only in the summer months. It's certainly better than nothing, but it's not something I would depend on.

[seabee → va_coder]

> How about the ability to install multiple versions of IE on Windows?

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/02/04/testing-multip...

As you might expect it's using virtualization, but nothing that isn't included in Windows 7 Professional and up.

[est → va_coder]

IE relies on mshtml which relies on COM which is basically, well, core Win32. IE is also the largest OLE container.

[MichaelGG → est]

But that was a decision they deliberately took. At one point, IE had versions for UNIX and Mac.

[nknight → est]

And Redis relies on POSIX semantics, which is... er... core POSIX?

Microsoft does have a third option, you know. One many of us would love to see happen: real, first-class POSIX support in Windows.