My private opinion.
I'm really happy that mIRC is developing. However, I'm quiteirritated with the added DLL files' service. I think that since it has been added, it shouldn't damage the way the DLL files work.
mIRC's DLL API ("service") is basically just a mechanism that allows communication/function calling between scripts and DLLs. mIRC 7.x is fully backwards-compatible with mIRC 6.x in this regard, which is where mIRC's responsibilities end.
The DLLs that have broken have done so because they rely on mIRC to behave in specific ways in areas other than the documented APIs, sometimes down to very fine details (such as the format and memory locations of internal data structures) and often because they're trying to alter the behaviour of mIRC itself (as in the case of MDX). For this reason it would be impossible for mIRC to retain backwards compatability with every DLL without bringing development to a standstill.
MDX has not been updated since 2002, it is abandonware and the source (as far as I know) was never released. In all likelihood it will never be updated again. Expecting mIRC to maintain backwards compatability with unmaintained and obsolete addons is unreasonable and unrealistic. What's more, new versions breaking old addons is not a phenomenon unique to mIRC; if you search the Firefox extensions site you will find hundreds of addons that were never updated for Firefox 3.
Changing from MDX.dll to DCX.dll is paranoia. One cannot even be sure whether the DCX.dll will be working correctly in a month or so.
Correct, but unavoidable. The source for DCX is available though, so there's a far better chance it will be updated as new mIRC versions are released.
