Memos From the Cube

As a (hobbyist) engineer, I routinely find myself mad at Microsoft. Not because of their products (I personally find the new Office and Vista to be quite good), but because of their crud-tastic approach to engineering.

Microsoft seem happy to define their own specifications (and try to force/coerce others into adopting them), but seem totally unable to follow others. Sometimes even their own specifications are poorly implemented – like the recent OOXML debacle.

Recently I’ve been bitten by their lack of engineering abilities four times. Once, from trying to assist someone into combining Mass Storage and CDC classes into a single device. It turns out Windows won’t allow that because of the way it is built; compound devices are enumerated an interface at a time, and there’s no way to bind more than one interface in a compound device to a single OS supplied driver. At least there’s a hacky way around it, at the expense of compatibility with every other OS on the planet.

Second, through the CDC Ethernet. Admittedly there are two standards regarding this (one newer that the other, after the original was found lacking in several areas), but Microsoft went and screwed everyone over by inventing their own psudo-standard called RNDIS. Want Ethernet over USB? You’ll be writing custom drivers to get it working cross-platform.

Thirdly, their %$#@$ING STUPID XBOX Wireless design. This is a total WTF on several accounts:

1) The dongle has four fixed endpoint pairs, one for each possible paired controller. Why do that, rather than having a single endpoint pair and using some sort of index to distingush the controller to interface with?

2) The entire device and each interface is marked as a proprietary class. One would think that it’s got some super-secret, amazing protocol running underneath it to account for the custom class. Nope – one pair of the endpoints at least are just the USB HID class obfuscated to require custom drivers.

3) Despite being partly a HID device (just obfuscated so that it requires a damn custom driver), it lacks an actual HID report. It appears the returned data is supposed to be interpreted via a known, fixed layout.

They could have circumvented the whole thing by making it a compound device containing:

1) A single USB HID interface, with report descriptors indicating the button layout for the controller. Use report IDs to distinguish between different controllers. That would make the dongle enumerate on any modern OS as a bunch of standard gamepad controllers, no driver required. All the buttons, joysticks and LEDs could then be controlled via the standard HID API.

2) A single USB PID interface, to manage the force feedback. That would allow modern OSes to expose the force feedback capabilities to any modern game, no driver required.

And that’s it. No proprietary drivers, no obfuscation layers, and it would be cross-platform. Of course, any other features which are XBOX proprietary (such as memory cards, etc.) could use a legitimately proprietary additional interface in the device, but the other standard features would still be usable.

Why do they spend *extra* time to re-implement an existing standard, so that it requires more work (for them and others) to use when it has no benefit? Seems like a waste of time and money to me.