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