Hacker News Reader

Comment by ohgr | Hacker News Reader

Yep. Was a Microsoft dev from 1992 until 2017. Won’t touch them now because I spent my entire career rewriting rug pulls. It paid off a mortgage and fed me well but it was a bad outcome for my orgs and customers.

If anyone remembers WCF/AppFabric/WWF and Silverlight, that was the last stack I rewrote someone out of the shit on.

View on HN

There was a lot of hype and momentum around Silverlight back in the day, until their wasn't. You got a cross-platform (Mac/Windows) WPF-like UI and C# programming environment, which was powerful.

I had the fortune to be involved developing the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 programming software. Under the hood, it was a small web browser shell (using Mono on Mac and WPF on Windows) around a Silverlight Out-of-Browser app. Anything beyond the permissions of the Silverlight app (e.g. bluetooth/USB comms) was an RPC from Silverlight to the shell.

After completing the Mac/Windows app, LEGO wanted to deliver a similar experience on iPad. There was no Silverlight there, and it was clear there never would be. But we were able to leverage Xamarin stuff to reuse most of the same codebase, just with an iOS UI on top.

By chance, do you happen to know if the Mindstorms NXT (the old one, before EV3) software was based on the same toolkit? I always wondered what UI framework it used, it had an unusual look.

It was not... it actually was, IIRC, a LabVIEW program with some tweaks here and there. The UI was basically a LabVIEW VI front panel with a LabVIEW 2D Picture Control. Most of the program logic and the compiler to the NXT was LabVIEW G code.

There was a hot minute (and it was about a minute!) where Silverlight was absolutely phenomenal.

Too bad “every app is just a website” took over because of the cross-platform issues.

oof, :%s/their/there

I started my career rewriting a product using Microsoft's DNA business server with Java and never looked back. I'm shocked this keeps happening, honestly. I guess I'm a "never again" sort but surprised there's not more companies refusing to deal with Microsoft.

Due to experiences like that I refused to buy volume licenses from them, too. Sometime later I got an audit demand for which I had a reply ready.

"lol, no."

Sorry if I'm being dense, but what is an "audit demand?" (Looked it up and couldn't find anything obviously relevant.)

I think he refers to Microsoft auditing a business' licence compliance. Have you aquired the correct amount of licenses for all the instances you are running and accessing. Microsoft licensing is so insanely complex that even if you ask 2 MS sales reps what licenses you need to cover a certain scenario, you will get a different answer each time. This is also why an audit almost 100% results in finding non-compliance.

https://www.npifinancial.com/smartspend-bulletins/the-anatom...

An Enterprise customer of Microsoft agrees to be audited by MS. In exchange they pay a certain amount for effectively “unlimited use” of the appropriate software. In the past this meant volume license keys that would always activate; wouldn’t count how many devices, etc.

And MS audit would check that what you reported was what you had. And could result in big increases in contract pricing.

Now that everything is cloud this and 365 that I don’t know how much it applies anymore - everything is dynamic and traceable.

Famously in the early 2000s it was a huge issue for “medium” businesses who had used enterprise-style licensing. Tiny and small businesses just bought normal computers and software and would often escape notice.

That was one aspect of the auditing, but they also sent audit notices to random small and medium businesses who were not volume license customers. Basically fishing for license violations, which obviously were very common (and usually unintentional) back in the 90s and early 2000s. Things like installing windows XP or Office on multiple machines without buying extra licenses.

AFAIK it was mainly a scare tactic to pressure companies into compliance and mostly just involved scary looking letters from a Microsoft-hired law firm.

It was a scare tactic, and it only really worked because there were a large percentage of illicit installs going around.

Business would have an "IT guy" who "saved money" - and they'd get a letter saying "let us audit you or we're taking you to court for copyright violations" and they'd scramble and agree to the audit.

Of course, the proper response was the legal version of "bite me" but since many of them were in violation, they acquiesced.

I never had it happen to anyone I was involved with or knew, but the stories were certainly flying around Slashdot (it was going to be the proximate trigger of the Year of Linux on the Desktop, don't you know).

I was working for a law firm when they did that to us. The letter they got sent back was hilarious.

This was what happened to us, we were a small company and were just buying Dells with Windows already installed. We had valid license keys from the factory on everything, so it didn't make sense to me that we needed some volume key for more Windows. So we didn't buy a volume license but still got the audit demand.

Microsoft was double-dipping for a long time, selling volume licensing deals to companies that were often buying preinstalled Windows anyhow, just out of fear of non-compliance. Then once you have the volume deal, Microsoft products become easier to use and dominate the company's tech and reaching new deals with Microsoft becomes a nice-business-you-got-there-shame-if-something-happened-to-it kind of conversation.

Microsoft hasn't changed a bit, just smarter about tactics.

Funnily enough, those ancient WPF, WinForms, and even MFC apps still compile and work fine. The rug pull only became the standard operating procedure at a certain point.

I’m still dealing with the long goodbye of a silverlight app which now must be somehow ported.

if there's an escape hatch you should probably use it. In my experience companies never support you during rewrites "well why don't you just convert the code to X language" almost never works on a huge project, it takes a ground up approach, and relying on the old stuff as "more like guidelines than the actual law"

The escape hatch is OpenSilver basically.

A clean rewrite isnt possible for a variety of business reasons.

> WCF/AppFabric/WWF

SharePoint Server Subscription Edition still uses those techs today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com