On the deployment side of software development, one of the trickiest aspects is deciding which versions of Microsoft Windows you plan to support.
From the logs of this and other websites I manage, it is obvious that there are a wide variety operating systems in use. But, how can I, as a software developer, support software running on an operating system that itself is not supported?
I’d argue that you cannot…but that won’t stop customers expecting it anyway 
When Windows 2000 support is finally dropped, then there is just going to be XP, 2003 Server & Vista to worry about. That doesn’t sound too bad until you realise that there are two XP versions (Home & Professional) and, oh, loads of Vista versions.
As soon as you remove Windows 2000 from your support list then that opens up some nice new Microsoft technologies for you to work with like .NET 3.
Of course, the Windows 2000 support issue is likely to be less important for home users. Most business users are likely to be more sensitive to support issues than home users, they are also less likely to be sensitive to upgrade issues because of price pressures. Many medium/large Windows users will have the right to OS upgrades as a part of their broad Microsoft licences. So, upgrading from Windows 2000 to XP or above won’t require them to give Microsoft any more money.
My suspicion is that there are an awful lot of homes still running Windows 98, so if that is a part of your market then you’d better support it. That will then feed back into the types of development tools you can use.
So, you need to start from the deployment platforms and then choose the development tools not the other way around. Unless you want seperate products for legacy platforms and Microsoft supported platforms?
