According to the downloads page for Xojo requires SP3. Why is this? I believe that there is not service pack requirements for your Xojo compiled apps.
Thanks
http://documentation.xojo.com/index.php/System_requirements
Compiled apps should use SP3 as well. But seriously, this particular requirement is a complete non-issue. They couch it with a suggestion that developers upgrade to Win 7. To answer your question, “Because” should suffice.
[quote=55046:@Brad Hutchings]http://documentation.xojo.com/index.php/System_requirements
Compiled apps should use SP3 as well. But seriously, this particular requirement is a complete non-issue. They couch it with a suggestion that developers upgrade to Win 7. To answer your question, “Because” should suffice.[/quote]
Thanks. Why is it recommended you upgrade to 7? Better stability or performance? I use Windows 8 but XP is the best of all Windows operating systems, in my opinion.
Thanks
[quote=55052:@Oliver Scott-Brown]Thanks. Why is it recommended you upgrade to 7? Better stability or performance? I use Windows 8 but XP is the best of all Windows operating systems, in my opinion.
Thanks[/quote]
Oh sorry. The page sort of answers the question but why would it make any difference on which OS is running it?
Is this a fault in Windows XP or Xojo or a bit of both?
What would happen if you attempted to run compiled Xojo apps on XP without any service packs installed? Thanks
[quote=55054:@Oliver Scott-Brown]Is this a fault in Windows XP or Xojo or a bit of both?
[/quote]
“It’s my fault!” Harrison Ford as Jack Ryan in Clear and Present Danger. But seriously, it’s nobody’s fault and nobody is going to support any earlier combinations. The market has moved onward.
FWIW, the real reason that most software companies will put a “requirement” like that out there is to save the effort of having to support earlier configurations that don’t generate any revenue. If I release desktop software today, I won’t even claim to support XP, because those people aren’t spending money. The software might actually work well on XP. But I don’t want the costs of the support headaches unless they’re worth the effort, which I can decide on a case-by-case basis.
Simply Xojo app uses functions which don’t exist in previous versions.
This may be related to the using Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 which simply requires SP3.
This probably has nothing to do with today’s requirements, but if I recall correctly I upgraded to Windows 7 in 2009 because the newest release of RS was eating RAM in XP. I think compiled apps ran on XP just fine, but the IDE was almost unusable.
In 4 months, people depending on Microsoft Security on XP will have their systems compromised.
XP 64 bit is already compromised as it never received the “SP3 set of updates”.
Support for Windows XP SP2 already ended on July 13, 2010; That’s why SP3 is a requirement for MS now.
XP and any updates for it (like MS anti-virus Security Essentials) will be terminated on April 8, 2014 and that’s the reason I would advice you to move onward to 8.1.
This is the same kind of conversation we had for OSX10.6, there Apple decided that we need to update freely to 10.9 (after 2 years), here, Microsoft did it (after 11 years), but free is just for 8.0 users. They set the rules, sorry. 
On the other hand. If you stay long enough on Windows XP, there won’t be any virus for XP out there. LOL
On the other hand, there is something called surface of attack, that will be increased due to this fact, and people will be encouraged to write virus, trojans, etc to attack it, just because their chances of success will be increased. 
MS will retire their tools for deprecated platforms, and support for those, who write development tools, will cease too. Sometimes we wish to make a CPR to a dead body, but there is a point we just should understand and give up.
Let me give a guess on the original question of the OP, and this is just a guess:
Even with VB apps I make now with VB5 (so, so old), they don’t even run on XP earlier than SP3. But that’s not really because of SP3, it’s because the computers they ran on didn’t support some key new compiler/CPU commands.
In other words, people running versions of XP earlier than SP3 are probably using CPU’s that aren’t sufficient for the type of machine code and instruction sets the compiler puts out. It is pretty impossible and too confusing for a software developer to indicate “minimum CPU’s” especially on Windows.
And so, summarizing, I think the thought for SP3 is just a way to say “we support XP still [yeah!] but you have to run the latest XP because we do’t want to bother to check the earlier versions.”
And I think that’s legit, because I mean I’ve never heard any software that runs on SP2 but not SP3, not a computer that isn’t good enough to run SP3 but can run SP2.
BTW, I don’t agree about XP being the best or the most stable, and I still use it frequently. Win7 really does a good job. I think XP is a great security blanket and it sure held water for a real long time, it gets total credit. But it needed an update badly, and Win7 came through where, if Win8 dind’t have to intrude with the mobile types of needs, it would probably last longer than XP. In fact, Win8 isn’t anymore than a updated Win7 with a different default interface - though 8.1 IS a updated Win7 and the default interface is the Win7 one (Microsoft chastised yet again).
It’s not just hardware related, it’s an evolution of the tools, libraries and frameworks related. Until XP SP2 there were some crash-able developer triggered GDI+ situations, Crypto API problems, and a NTFS fault (you could potentially destroy data moving files) and more, inexistent on SP3. So, there were some specific programs that just run on SP3 depending on those characteristics, and not running on SP2 and prior. Windows 7 introduced new touch, speech and handwriting characteristics, Virtual Hard Disks, an entire Biometrics Framework and more. So, when a developer makes use of those new characteristics, or his C++ compiler + libraries demands so, those are just inexistent on old ones and will not run or crash on those. As evolution happens, deprecation is mandatory.
No, there’s a fundamental difference between deprecation and removed functions. Windows doesn’t remove functionality, whereas OSX does. Additionally there aren’t hardly any core functions added to Win32 API after XP SP1; Microsoft just added .NET. Xojo doesn’t use .NET.
I don’t think Xojo mandates SP3 just out of operating system suggestion/opinion.
If I recall correctly, there were APIs added to SP3 to that let us load PNGs directly from memory.
And really, it’s best just to just stay away from XP in general:
http://www.xojo.com/blog/en/2013/09/reminder-move-away-from-windows-xp-now.php