Okay, so we've got our sales tax stuff all squared away (or so I hope; I'll find out tomorrow during the audit). Now we're driving hard towards completing CrossOver 8.0. We've done a ton of work that is going into CrossOver 8; we've got Internet Explorer 7 running, and we're working on 8. We've got a huge number of fixes for Microsoft Office, notably Outlook. And most importantly, we've got Quicken 2009 working along nicely. That's critical, because Quicken 2006 goes out of support in 30 days here.

The challenge with Wine, though is that it seems like it's always two steps forward, one step back. In the process of fixing some issues with MS Office, we improved Wine's support for the MSI (Microsoft Installer) technology. Unfortunately, one of those 'improvements' also made it so that no Microsoft Office product would install. As you can imagine, that is putting a real damper on our ability to put together a test build.

Of course, this is not a unique challenge; Microsoft struggles with this compatibility themselves. The Windows API is a clear product of evolution, not intelligent design. It's origin in DOS and the many false starts and design changes it has had through the years pretty much guarantees that 'Windows compatibility' is very difficult to achieve. When I'm in my cups, I'm willing to make the faux mathematical argument that the Windows API is a logical impossibility; that it is by its nature self contradictory. I keep waiting for it to vanish in a puff of improbability .

So we've been working through the years to combat this; Wine now has a great suite of regression tests. CrossOver has an application level set of tests. We continue to work on these and we hope to add some further application level tests to Wine soon.

But as I've been blogging, Aric and Hans have been working, and I'm told we have the problem patch reverted, and test builds are looking promising. Time for me to make sure we get our Quicken users the joy they need...

Cheers,
Jeremy