Last Updated: 4/10/2004 11:42:50 AM
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Service Pack 2 will close lot of holes in Windows XP

Microsoft's eagerly anticipated Windows XP upgrade promises major security enhancements for customers but the company has already warned that Service Pack 2 (SP2) will break and disrupt existing applications.
In this interview with internetnews.com, product manager in the Microsoft Developer Group Tony Goodhew discusses the thinking behind the security enhancements, the code changes that need to be made and the tradeoff between security and functionality.
Q: You've already warned that XP SP2 will break and disrupt existing applications. What types of applications are going to be affected the most by the security-focused changes?
Some applications will be highly [impacted] but some others will have little or no problems. We launched an online course for developers to spell out all the changes to help them prepare. The peer-to-peer applications will be [impacted] the most. Those types of applications rely on a lot of network activity. They expect to be able to talk through a firewall that will now be turned on by default. So, the P2P guys will have to make major changes or their applications will break.
If you are writing code for applications that listen on a network, you are going to be impacted by these changes. It won't affect the entire applications market but we're mostly letting people know that it affects certain categories.
Source: Internetnews