feature: Windows 7’s XP Mode: what it is, how it works, who it’s for

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The bespoke line-of-business application is a common feature of the corporate world, and a thing that has been instrumental in cementing Windows as the corporate desktop OS standard. These applications—I’ve worked on a few myself—are typically crummy affairs. The foundation of such applications is typically some combination of Visual Basic 6 and obsolete versions of Access and Excel. On top of this mound of [redacted], these apps usually contain one or more third-party components to draw graphs or something, from vendors that have long since gone out of business.