A blog post on Microsoft's developer network reveals (the blog post has been removed -but you can see a mirrored copy here) some interesting insight into the delays that have plagued Windows Vista over the past few years. With irreverent prose and a liberal use of bold tags, Microsoft Tablet PC developer Philip Su explains how serious management problems and an overly complicated code base have made Vista development slow and difficult to control.  To illustrate the slowness of Vista development, Su points to Vista's estimated gain of 10 million lines of code over Windows XP. Divide up 10 million lines across the five-year development time and 2,000-strong developer team, and the average Vista developer is only estimated to be producing around 1,000 lines of code every year-significantly below the average for software developers in the United States, which Su says is 6,200 lines a year.

In other news, TheInquirer got the official word that Direct X 10 won't find its way to Windows XP. So anyone who plans to buy Direct X 10 hardware and plans to use its full potential will have to buy Vista as well. The current driver model on the Windows XP is the limitation. One of the key points of Direct X 10 is to be the ability to have more independent objects and the current driver model on Windows XP simply won't be able to deal with it. Direct X 10 hardware will of course run Direct X 9 games and it is also supposed to do so fast.

They also report that the first DirectX 10 titles will be ready at the same time s Vista and, if we are lucky, we might be able to buy both Vista and DX 10 titles in early 2007.