d0

This perhaps 0.01% of the problems I've encountered for reference.

I work in other ecosystems as well and there's just not as much crap to deal with by several orders of magnitude.

It's always been bad. I'm the chief technical contact for a system with 50 developers and about 11,500 users. We've raised 20 cases which we couldn't work around and had one officially released solution (bug in IE11). We either have to work around or push a registry fix at great cost to thousands of users worldwide as an out of band patch that we package ourself.

For example there was a regression in ClickOnce with download prompting between IE8 and IE9 due ot the download bar throwing away some compatibility settings. Overnight, when IE9 became mandatory in Windows Update, we had 2000 users down. We got all the users to roll back to IE8. It took 6 months for a registry fix to be sent out to us from a 3rd line support executive after being on the phone daily about it. This is still not fixed in IE11. We've rewritten all our ClickOnce launch points to work around the regression. This took one developer 2 months of work. The regression appeared in the RTM IE9, not the previews.

As for that being the correct place, it's obviously not as the issue was raised there, marked private and closed as not reproducible despite test cases being issued. Not a single contact back from Microsoft bar "closing as can't reproduce". Our rep suggested contacting another support team. Even they aren't helpful.

I need a new job, writing C on Unix...

I know this is getting a lot of fanfare but let us apply four major costly problems I'm having with the CLR/Framework at the moment:

1. Microsoft.Build.Tasks (the bit that has been screwing with me all day) contains static sealed classes with nothing in them. I thought this was a reference source rather than a source of empty interfaces and empty implementations? Still having to resort to reflector to find out what is going on. Problem not solved.

2. So, ReaderWriterLockSlim has a bug in it with respect to low CPU allocation in virtual machines where 20 concurrent threads accessing a locked object at the point of write cause the spin lock in the implementation to thrash and up blows a race condition taking out the process. I can actually see where the bug is now. Where do I submit this bug, bear in mind I can actually recreate it? I phoned up our MSDN rep - they said raise it on Connect. There isn't a place for it on Connect. Phone up generic paid support, three levels of technical staff bounce me around for a week. as a PAID UP GOLD PARTNER, this sucks. If you open your source, track bugs openly too. Problem not solved.

3. This is only the core framework. We really need the entire lot including all dependencies and external tools. There aren't any symbols on symbol server or this for VSTO or Sharepoint for example? What we do get is another black box somewhere in the system that we can't inspect or poke inside even though it's a wrapper for a COM API or a product API. Problem not solved.

4. Does Rosyln/next MSBuild support parallel compilation? Being tied to a single compilation core on a VS2013 build means we have 8 core Xeons sitting there doing nothing. Our only hope of speeding this up is cranking up to high end i7 to get one core with crazy integer performance. 20 minute sit down compiles are too much these days. http://xkcd.com/303/

I understand this is progress and Roslyn is cool and all that, but what does it deliver for every day users of the CLR/Framework? It doesn't really make our day much easier. In fact stuff that really improves developers' lives has stopped appearing completely and instead we get tedious reengineering projects and new features designed only to lock us further into the system (VS online+sign in anyone?)

Also how does this compare to say LLVM/Clang?

I imagine this semantic compilation stuff will make some static analysis stuff easier and stamp on the toes of Coverity etc but that's about it.

Edit: sorry if this is purely a content-free rant and unpopular but after 12 years of this crap from Microsoft, I want to see new wheels, not the same ones reinvented and remarketed. Developers are lapping up this crap constantly as if it's as good as it gets. We need some REAL CHANGE towards openness and consistency and to ask the community and users what they want rather than telling us what we need.

Transport in London is cheap and easy. The problem is if you have to commute great distances. A shit bike can get you around most places and as someone who walked to and from work every day for a bit (10 mile round trip daily), it's actually pretty good.

That article is crazy:

1. I lived in a car in London for 6 months. It was pretty fine. McDonalds was my washroom.

2. These boats are rare. I mean really rare. This is not the norm. The boats and the moorings are damn expensive so this doesn't make sense even for the landlords. Even crappy moorings cost.

3. You can go to the council and get a bedsit if you're in this situation. Literally the next day. Might have to share with a crackhead for a week but that's life.

4. There are plenty of other places to go in the UK where the salary/housing cost ratio isn't crazy. I lived in Nottingham for a bit and had a 5 bedroom detached house in a nice bit for £500/month. £230/month will get you a 2 bed flat better than this.

This is a sob story - nothing more.

Microsoft (and their staff individually) actually contribute to the Linux kernel so this isn't that crazy.

You can already get office 365 for iOS. Not sure about android but it's logical.

This appears to be the budget/developing world side of things. I'd prefer to see WinPhone on low end devices to be honest - it's really good even on low spec handsets.

I see this as that much marketed "devices and services offering" they are always going on about. They're making a killing from Azure etc and Windows Live/outlook.com is the most mature and featureful cloud thing. They're actually shit hot these days.

I still prefer my old fashioned Unix way of life though as I don't want to become a paid up ecosystem slave.

I hope not. Ovi was a right pile of crap.

Is this non-Microsoft Nokia or Microsoft's handset division.

If it's the former, I will guffaw loudly in the direction of Microsoft!

Yes

I had CTS surgery on my left hand back in 1998. Pretty ok since but the thing that killed me to start with was a big old mechanical IBM Model M and Windows Alt-Tab. The only keyboards I've used since are Cherry value line, IBM ThinkPad and MacBook Pro. No problems so far. I've also gone uber-careful on posture and working environment. I still have problems holding smart phones and touch devices.

CTS surgery recovery is horrid though. You can't hold anything for a few days. Forget work for a month at least and this wasn't even my dominant hand. The most annoying thing is that it really takes 6 months to heal properly and occasionally your hand just stops working. Didn't hurt a bit though after surgery.

Agree with the author - make every keystroke count.

There will still be idiots. They won't respawn.

The immortals are only immortal from natural causes of death...

History tells us that people will quickly use that to their advantage.

I find this hard to believe. After using 10.8 and 10.9 over the last year, the sheer number of bugs is embarrassingly high. Every day, something was breaking for me. They have a serious QA problem i.e. they're either doing it wrong or not at all.

Thanks for posting this - your efforts are appreciated :)

Exactly. My MacBook is now for sale. Back to my Lenovo T400.

Trust = gone.

Apple's policy of silence and denial don't cut it any more. At least Microsoft use proper threat modelling, disclosure and mitigation processes, documented KB articles and have literally tonnes of QA and test capacity. Not joking but they have tens of thousands of machines in their test labs.

This. Canned my MacBook Pro over this. It's been a bumpy relationship anyway. Just on Thursday Apple Mail stopped sending mail to my SMTP server. Final straw for me.

It's mainly an SSH and RDP terminal anyway.

OSX quality and QA is extremely bad.

Snap!

However, as an ex-beeb user now with children who have a Raspberry Pi, the beeb was considerably more reliable, better documented, flexible and easier to get off the ground.

I'd argue it's still a better platform than the Pi today.

Pi with RISCOS is pretty nice though.

There goes 20 years of muscle memory...again.

It's probably like our dedicated UI team: cheap.

Our head UI designer sent SPAM for a living before working for us.

That's a pretty poor assumption then.

Looking at that screenshot, one question:

What do we drag stuff with now without setting off a menu?

There are other patents involved. That is just the poster-boy for it.

I know an ex-J++ team member. The objective was to produce a Java IDE that didn't suck (do you remember 1996 Java)? Sun wouldn't license them the runtime, name and class libraries so they cloned it much like GCJ and GNU classpath did. Absolutely no one moans about that..

Despite being an ex Solaris cert guy, Sun screwed up literally everything from 1995 on. This was another thing.

1. What negative impact? I assume you understand the purpose of patents. Also the patents licensed for the fee are not disclosed. I had a windows touch screen phone 5 years before the iPhone and way before Google even existed. Microsoft was first out of the door there so it's understandable they want patent revenue from prior inventions. I think that's perfectly fair. Just because it costs your favourite company some money doesn't mean it isn't right.

2. Still bollocks. Caldera/SCO owned patents. Microsoft had Xenix and SFU out in production and wanted to avoid litigation as well. This was a pay off. The whole capital arrangement was similar to how most corporations bet on capital funds for pay offs. Granted it looked bad on paper. I'd understand if you listed the "get the facts" campaign which was nasty. SCO and their litigators and the legal teams were the only bad actors here.

3. They can't pump out browsers as quick as the other vendors. They're the only browser vendor that can offer a support lifecycle and paid up support. Google don't give a shit about support. Mozilla close anything that isn't easy to fix. I can phone up MS and get a paid fix in under a week. Not only that, most of these browsers are pushing broken shit out half the time and trying to get one over on the competition.

The whole browser market is a complete mess.

4. Typing this on a Nokia handset (Lumia 820). They have market differentiation with Windows Phone. They have a reliable stable platform, no fragmentation and a backer with more cash than you can imagine. Its sensible. Shareholders and staff for screwed yes, but what do you expect from a corporation. Just because they're a brand you trust, doesn't mean they aren't populated by money grabbing assholes.

And Android is a royal mess. A fine example of fragmentation and a rave to the bottom. Google have really poorly managed the platform resulting in a rotting mess. We've shot 200 Android handsets from our company because they're constant trouble (various including Nexus, HTC, Samsung). Over to iPhones and WP8 devices.

I know the prevailing opinion amongst the tech culture is that Microsoft are a bag of shite, but you need to look deeper. The whole industry is horrible.

At the end of the day, all I get from people is childish tribalism rather than facts and a fair process. It's like Slashdot in 2001.

I'm sitting here with a Windows phone, a MacBook Pro, ssh'ed into a FreeBSD machine with VS2013 running in parallels.

Please everyone just grow the fuck up.

Yeah that sucks. I wish you luck with that and will keep my eyes peeled for issues here. We gave 50 seats so trouble like this would be nice to avoid.

My 2013 Pro from MSDN doesn't do anything like that.

Edit: I just span up a copy fo the virtual machine snapshot and it didn't say anything even though that had been technically not used and has no network connection.

Express or Pro?

You are 100% right. LLVM should fire a dead code warning here. However later code is used as a jump target for goto so it's quite hard for the compiler to infer this (or is it because its a different scope?).

Either way, definitely avoidable.

Looks typical of a merge cock up to me as the indentation is preserved suggesting it's a duplicate line or there was an if statement on the previous line that was removed.

Just eyeballs and a clue stick!

However I can't see a valid case for this pattern so static analyser rule to knock it on the head would be a good idea.

That's hilarious. Took me a while as I was looking for something more subtle. Thanks for the clues.

Another clue: indentation fail.

This is plainly rubbish.

1. Android patents is part of an all our war between all vendors. Everyone is shitting on everyone's lawn. Apple, Google, Samsung are all just as bad. The whole mobile market is lawyer driven.

2. SCO is gone, dead. They went after Microsoft as well for Xenix. They weren't involved other than to cheaply get them to go away.

3. Web standards. There were no web standards. There are barely web standards now and IE10/11 do a pretty good job with supporting them.

4. Nokia yadda yadda. Nokia was dying and knew what was going to happen. Nokia is a big company and handsets were a dead end for them so it made sense to lose them cheaply to Microsoft. The Nokia board made a killing.

All companies are assholes but facts are facts.