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Comment by sambeau | Hacker News Reader

"Microsoft hasn't had good products or good intentions in a very long time."

Apart from:

  XBox
  XBox 360
  Numerous XBox Games
  XBox Live
  Kinect

(and controversially, perhaps

  Expression Design

now, sadly, no longer developed)

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Also... Windows 7, .NET, Visual Studio, Office 2007 (Ribbon overhaul), WP7 (though a way to come yet, but tends to get good reviews, particularly for the UI).

Just because they are not your personal preference doesn't mean that they aren't good products.

Visual Studio is an awful product. It's bloated, performs badly, expensive and extremely unreliable.

Although I do mainly Ruby these days, I still use VisualStudio from times to times and find it quite enjoyable personally.

Which reliability issues did you meet on which version?

VS2010. Mainly the fact that the user interface is painfully slow[1] (either that or I'm unreasonably fast which is rediculous as Vim can keep up with me) and it just dies about 5 times a day on a good day. It might be the solution size though - it's got about 0.5 million lines of C# in it. Still it should work.

[1] On a quad core Xeon with 12Gb RAM, SAS disks and ATI FirePro card.

That size of codebase is definitely an issue :) Last time I had 500k of C#+C++ (5 years ago roughly), I split the solution into around 20 solutions, and used binary dependencies (with CruiseControl.Net on top of that [1]).

I remember reading similar advices in other places as well (and for other languages/platforms, too).

[1] http://mikebroberts.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/enterprise-c...

That looks painful. I'd rather like to move it to an SOA and split it into logical feature partitions and use service composition and windows workflow to integrate it all. Typically, I don't think anyone wants to pay for that though.

Okay, fine, one good product in 10 years and bad intentions...

Sun had good intentions

Their products were "bad" (overpriced and mostly technically inferior.)

I'm not even sure their intentions were very good except in the very early days. Hard to imagine Google charging $900 for a $90 memory stick like Sun did.

Charging for their R&D, maybe? Sun did give out a LOT for free. Those sorts of free come with a cost to someone

I should have made it clearer that I wasn't trying to disprove your greater point, only clarify that one division of Microsoft does make good, very popular stuff.

Although they bought the program, I have always found Visio to be a great program. Expression Design really had some potential.

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