Comment by harrytuttle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by harrytuttle | Hacker News Reader

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The problem is that devdiv have been doing this for a few years so some of us (previously heavy investors in Microsoft's products) are now pissed off.

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.

I can feel your frustration and you've expressed more vocally than I would have but I definitely share some of the sentiments.

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.

If you don't care about the tooling, you should be able to use most any version of VS with most any version of MVC by deleting the MVC-specific project type GUID in your .csproj/.vbproj file.

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.

Come to Java first if you're concerned jumping directly to (dynamic languages) Python/Ruby/PHP/NodeJS :).

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).

Check out NetBeans too. Also free, and has always felt "lighter" than Eclipse to me.

What other kinds of dev stacks are you looking at? I use C# in VS with Add-In-Express for creating Office plugins. It's a total pain in the ass most of the time and I would love to try something else.

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.

If you'd like to jot down some of the things in Eclipse that you wish were in VS, I'd love to hear it.

Email's in my profile.

I still believe for enterprise development Microsoft is very viable so I don't see myself necessarily moving away from the platform.

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.

I don't really see any reason why Visual Studio 2010 shouldn't support .NET framework 4.5.1

Hmmm?

I don't know why the question mark. Here is Microsoft's own guidance on what is supported:

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.

I was asking what you mean by "support." What functionality would you like in VS 2010 which is not present?

I'm sorry man. I was a developer outside before I was a developer inside and I can relate to a lot of that. I'm not gonna say your complaints are invalid.

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.

I have no horses in this race, but I really respect that you're willing to take Q&A and say "Yes, there are issues"

(Also Herb Sutter and the 2 other MS people in /r/cpp)

http://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1h9uq7/c1114_stl_featur...

Thanks. TBH I'm not in any super-special position to "take Q&A", the stuff I work on is downstream from Windows much like everyone else. I'm just a dev who likes to talk about work on HN.

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.

It's great to see there are Microsoft developers who care and who try to reach out.

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".

There have been times in the past where our family PCs were Linux-only. When I got here I started talking to someone in our building kitchen and she was like "Oh yeah I work on the second floor which is the open source compatibility lab where we make sure Linux runs well on Azure."

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." :-)

I still remember when they restored XP support in VC2012, but officially only using the Win7 SDK which don't include the Metro stuff, which of course Metro Firefox needs.

To be honest, I get mad when a collaborator compiles our project in VS2012 without enabling XP Compatibility...

Can the Makefile (or whatever VS currently uses in its place) make sure it doesn't build (and maybe blows up) when the option isn't set?

Not to mention the REMOVING of windows installer from VS 2012 and replacing it with a PoS limited InstallShield ;)

have any links to the Connect issues in question? I am not doubting their existence, just trying to understand how they fell through the cracks. There are multiple levels of filters before they get to the product teams, mostly because of volume. I have seen people file Connect bugs against non-MS products, even complaining their own product crashes and it is Microsoft's fault (that one turned out to be a ref-counting issue in their code). I don't necessarily like the filters, but having seen it unfiltered I appreciate it, since otherwise we would have time for little else.

Google for: "microsoft connect clickonce ie9"

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!)

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