I work in the Azure/AD group and we are dependent on the Windows preview releases too. If the community knew just how fast the Windows team was iterating on this new release cycle, I think they might be a lot more sympathetic to this situation.
And I just downloaded VS 2013 Beta last Friday. At least I haven't have a chance to install it yet. :-)
So they haven't shipped it to zillions of customers yet, and the incompatibility did get caught in time, it's just that you'd have much preferred to fix it before your big privileged vendor customer found it. Do I have this right?
I hope things will go smoother for you next time.
Company I work for has oversight over supported 5million workstations.
We just finished qualifying windows 7sp1 and ie9. As soon as ie10 rolled in came the calls why doesn't this work in ie10.
Well our answer was its not supported yet. We didn't approve this update and its not in the qualified release notes that were distributed.
Unfortunately with a complete system app that requires dedicated workstations, you can't keep up with the latest and greatest right away.
We skipped windows 8 and are evaluating windows 8.1
If you are making a massive system app, customers shouldn't have expectation it would work on versions/updates not specified as per a contractual obligation.
If you are simply making addons, you should be in constant communication with the vendor so you support X if they are going to support X. Otherwise you gonna lose business... We have 3rd party vendors that are being dropped in our new release because they don't support it yet. For the big players we are working with them so we are going live with them
I'm not sure I could complain, but we are a super vendor with all the privileges, we are still about 6-12months behind MS releases at least.
Its all about setting expectations. And you can't officially support something that hasn't been GA'd yet.
The software you specified has business in first to market/support. Their whole business is keeping up with the latest threats/releases to keep customers protected... BUT its not the best counterexample because not every version of their software supports anything. Eventually their software would become incompatible with ZZZ releases and you would have to purchase their new software to stay compatible.
Sometimes stuff you make just works out of the box or with minor adjustments and workarounds that are or aren't supported officially. Sometimes you will have to reinvent the wheel which could take awhile.
You need to set a clear expectation of what is. And appropriately communicate what wasn't but now is... Lol
That's the whole point - to have your software compatible with it the moment it's released. The only way to check is to have access to earlier versions sooner and be able to work around the incompatibilities. By favoring some vendors Microsoft makes it easier/cheaper for them to have better 8.1 support than it is for you.
firstly the fuck up that is Microsoft Connect where critical defects which cripple teams for years are ignored (VS HRESULT errors, hanging, crashes) even if reproducible.
Secondly, partner support is a piece of shit. It took 6 months to get a damn registry workaround out for the fact that download prompting in IE9 basically fucked up ClickOnce for 2000 clients for us.
then you fuck us with two license audits which cost us a fortune as it's impossible to decipher your shit crock licensing.
then you pulled windows 8 on everyone, ignored the entire industry saying "no, you fucked up".
then you pulled free visual studio for desktop and did a 180.
then you pulled windows 8.1 (which didn't fix windows. 8) and told everyone that you're not getting it before GA then did another 180.
No, you're not delivering what people want. You're fucking us over again and again and we're fed up with it. The only reason we're still drinking the milk is that we're stuck with it until we do a major product cycle.
That time is right now.
My biggest beef is tying Visual Studio releases to the .NET framework and other components. Why should I need Visual Studio 2013/2012 to use Entity Framework 6 or ASP.NET MVC 5, etc. I can't even figure out what's supported and what's not with older Studio releases (such as 2010) without spending time on Google.
I don't really see any reason why Visual Studio 2010 shouldn't support .NET framework 4.5.1, MVC5, Entity Framework 6.0 etc.. I used to believe there was some validity to tying a .NET framework version to Visual Studio but I've come to realize its just a money grab and a way to keep pushing out new Studio releases. I understand there is some point where you need to move forward.
Anyway, at some point you realize enough is enough. I'm not there yet but I am definitely tempted to start heavily investing in other development stacks.
Not sure about EF, but if you don't need the designer (e.g. using code first), I think it should work in previous versions of VS too.
Eclipse is free and it is as good as or even better than VS.NET. Updating Eclipse is hassle free. Using Maven is a good choice for IDE-independent (any Java IDE with Maven supports/plugins will be able to open any project based on Maven consistently and easily).
I'm a long time Java/Eclipse guy that's been doing C# for a few years now. Whilst Eclipse is FAR from perfect, it really does beat VS hands down. Like - Resharper is basically a must. And running unit tests in Eclipse feels pretty much instant compared to the VS "I'm going to rebuild everything really slowly before I run the tests" biz.
Email's in my profile.
At some level, you can't avoid having to upgrade to the latest and greatest Visual Studio but in some ways I am trying to move away from all Microsoft offerings. The biggest is on the database side. I think PostgreSQL running on a linux machine as a database is a very good solution. I would say at this point, this would be the biggest change. I also prefer to use http://www.llblgen.com/ for an ORM instead of Entity Framework.
I will tend to pick an open source equivalent for certain functionality instead of relying on Microsoft's version. For example, nunit for unit testing, log4net for logging, Quartz.NET for job scheduling, etc.
Hmmm?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/vstudio/hh487282.aspx
When you go from having a Visual Studio release every two years to every year or year and a half, and each version brings an increment to the .NET runtime, the issue of not supporting older run times directly (without any hacks) in older versions becomes much more important.
I understand and appreciate that to some extent it may be a technical issue and support needs to stop at a certain point but a lot of it seems to be business driven.
All I'd ask is that you try not to take it personally. Our squeaky wheels have to get in the priority queue for grease like everybody else.
(Also Herb Sutter and the 2 other MS people in /r/cpp)
http://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1h9uq7/c1114_stl_featur...
That said, I'm taking notes so I can give an earful to someone who deserves it the next time I run into them in the elevator. :-)
And yeah, Sutter and the language folks are pretty great.
I've abandoned Microsoft platforms a long time ago, but several dear friends of mine work there. We started playing jokes calling each other (me with free and open-source and them with Microsoft-centric stuff) the "dark side of the force" but we settled down on "the other side of the force".
Most folks I've met are really nice and hard working, but a couple of times I've been in meetings and thought to myself "I bet I'm the only person in the room here who's ever actually worked in an office supply store." :-)
Look at connect and the forums. Oh and stackoverflow.
Then look at how many people get screwed by the lack of proxy support (to get around this we actually rewrote a chunk of clickonce!)
You could open source it, so the community could help.