[cw-discuss] Ufile tax program (Canada)

[Jeremy White]

Hey Chuck,

> Crossover office's support of Windows 2000 and up is nonexistent.

I'm afraid that is a common misconception that we are having a hard
time rooting out.

Wine (the core technology behind CrossOver) provides a full Windows environment,
including support for Windows Vista, XP, 2000, and so on.

What confuses people is that applications generally perform
*better* if you report an *older* version; they behave
in a simpler fashion, hence our default to Windows 2000.  For a few
applications we report Windows 98, because again, that gets them
to work properly.

> 
> What say Crossover guys, will you help me to turn on the application
> layer debug messages so I can figure out why TaxCut 2007 cannot contact
> the internet in a Windows 2000 bottle?

I'm afraid that it is an extremely hard problem.  I'd be absolutely thrilled
to have you solve it, but we've had teams of seasoned programmers spend
a great deal of time on it without solving it.

And the core of it is that Internet Explorer does not function
unless you install it into a Windows 98 environment.  So it is absolutely
true that Wine does not run Internet Explorer in anything but Windows 98 mode.
The reason for that is that, in Windows 98, you can install Microsoft's
OLE/COM implementation.

In Windows 2000 mode, you have to rely on Wine's implementation.  While
Wine's implementation is complete, it clearly does not have all of the
exact undocumented behaviors that Internet Explorer demands.  Further, Internet
Explorer is very much a worst case application; it uses the Windows API
as few other applications can, and clearly relies on intimate knowledge
of undocumented APIs.  It's also rather hard to debug, as Microsoft isn't
very interested in anyone else understanding how it behaves.

So, it'd be great if you resolved that.  Your best bet to try that would
be to switch to doing direct Wine programming; see www.winehq.org for
all kinds of developer resources.

Cheers,

Jeremy