13 hours ago, evildictait​or wrote

*snip*

When it's an engineering decision. For heaven's sake, DBVS. Learn to read.

I'm reading just fine. You're just over-the-top assuming that the issues I've brought up here on C9  is the net sum of the feedback I've given to Microsoft. C9 isn't a bug reporting system. I'm not going to drag each and every Connect issue nor feedback tool post into C9.

Along the lines of what contextfree said I think in order to be more successful Microsoft as a whole needs to be less sensitive than you in constraining the conversation and more willing to listen and respond to its customers at every level -- whether it be a bug fix or a design issue.

Also bugfixes are never executive decisions. Think about it this way. An executive decision is one made by someone earning $2,000,000+ a year and who has a personal secretary who prints off their calandar appointments for the week which are mainly meetings with people who manage people who manage people who write code.

Except that in your own words you alluded they don't have complete control:

PMs have no shortage of people with opinions on how to make the product they own better. The shortage is always in amount of staff-time available to do all of the neat things you want to do with your product.

And where do those constraints come from? Executive decision.

But please, I'm pretty sure everyone in literally the entire world is bored of the discussion about start menus and Silverlight. Just, please, for heaven's sake. Just get over it. Yes. Microsoft is evil and kill puppies and are the reason Unicorns are extinct. Whatever. Just stop going on about it. The whole conversation is so far beyond tedious it's unreal. It's just you on your little soap box shouting at the top of your voice at the literally nobody that cares.

I don't know about you but when we're trying to figure out where Microsoft is going I think you have to look at what they've done in the past (especially now that they've curtailed sharing anything other than a curated vision of the future). That means we'll continue to talk about the death of SL in the same breath that we talk about what is to come. Maybe I'm just out of my mind to think this was a place to discuss the future of Microsoft's technologies...

Wow. Talk about a pointless rant. Nice circular argument. That's the best "you're holding it wrong" argument I've heard in a long time. 

So let's see how this feedback cycle works:

1. Report feedback on "how to make their product more useful to you"
2. Developers, PMs, and the like are powerless to implement (or fix in the case of bugs)
3. Changes require executive approval -> feedback goes in circular file
4. Users get the impression Microsoft is arrogant and unconcerned
5. Users stop providing feedback or reporting issues.
6. Profit!

When is it ever not an executive decision? Even bug fixes fall under executive approval to some degree as they decide the budget and time constraints.

Cap it off with your typical grandiose assumptions that we're providing the wrong kind of feedback or expressing feedback in the wrong way and you've got yourself a great defense. Do you really think our feedback starts and ends with these posts on C9?

22 minutes ago, evildictait​or wrote

*snip*

Wait. What? The reason things move slowly at big companies is because change is managed to make sure that products that consumers use is stable and safe. It's a big deal if you ship a version of Windows that kills all of the batch files that literally the entire US financial system run on top of, for instance, and so for every week you spend writing code to edit cmd.exe, you probably want to spend 3 weeks making sure you didn't just introduce a security vulnerability, a performance hit, an app-compat hit and that it works kinda like you said it would.

That's something startups just don't care about.

So why do you assume that when I say "things move slowly" that the source of the slowness and the basis of the complaint is from the diligence required to maintain a huge and critical code base? A lot of the slowness is from politics and the inability to turn criticism into improvements.

Also, I'm not sure that criticism is unwelcome at Microsoft. In fact all of the products used at Microsoft have big "feedback" buttons specifically inviting criticism (you can see it in some of the C9 videos. It's usually a button that's always visible in the top right or bottom right of every website and app that Microsoft builds).

Yeah and we know how well those feedback buttons worked for Office, W8, and the W8 Store Apps that Microsoft produced for the initial release. Again because of politics and the inability to turn criticism into improvements these "feedback" buttons are pretty worthless.

The difference is between giving useful, actionable feedback versus just being a douche-hat. Maintaining a dialogue with the product team to let them know your concerns and requirements about their product is in the former category. Publishing your beefs on the Internet, or stamping your feet and saying that they are wrong about everything from NTFS to the C++ compiler to Powershell not being in CMD.exe is quite firmly in the latter.

IMO some justify ignoring criticism no matter how its stated or on what manner it's proposed. The default reaction always seems to focus on the delivery rather than the content even when the delivery is wrapped in all kinds of sugary goodness. It gets to the point that rathet than providing feedback you are having to manipulate people accept your point of view as valid (not to be confused with "the only valid point of view"). Let's face it: nobody's $h1t stinks and we're all cowards.

5 minutes ago, blowdart wrote

*snip*

And don't fret, it's only a couple of weird edge case auth providers, generally I'm still doing threat models and code reviews for the asp.net platform and tools bits.

I wasn't fretting; I was actually trying to compliment you. Sorry if that came off as sarcasm.

It's good to know that guys like you are working on ASP.NET.

I'm not knocking the sites in general as they both look well done. I'm just puzzled at the apparent exclusion (or burrying thereof, or I'm just stupid). Is it because ASP.NET was open sourced?

1 hour ago, spivonious wrote

*snip*

I am getting the feeling that these are all changes that had been made but kept out of the main trunk by Sinofsky. I just hope that MS doesn't backtrack too much; Windows 8 is fantastic on tablets.

I wholeheartedly agree but I also hope that in keeping WinRT they also either:

1. Show how they are going to weave those APIs into the desktop (WinRT for Desktop) OR
2. Show how they will include everything that is great in the desktop today in the Windows 8 Store App environment. (Sorry being able to show two size constrained apps at a time doesn't cut it). This really needs to be a more desktop friendly (mouse, keyboard, large display/multiple monitors).

I'd take AND here but it seems redundant unless they backport WinRT for Desktop to W7.

Then they just have to get a good chunk of corporations to upgrade to Windows 8 so I can actually build apps that my customers can use.

8 minutes ago, spivonious wrote

*snip*

Wow, really? It's surprising that MS would make all of those under-the-hood moves in a minor version update.

It's not an update. It's an apology and a nice one at that.

Well if this is correct then there is some hope:

Microsoft's new deep-tech team includes anyone who writes a consumer, business or hybrid application. That means startups, enterprise customers and top consumer and business independent software vendors (ISVs).

As we know from recent discussions here on the relevence of C9 to a lot of LOB/enterprise programmers is ceratinly is a concern. It's be a shame if it was just another means to promote "New Windows".

Being that C9 runs along a similar vein I wonder will we be seeing new content here from this new group or will it be a new entity in and of iteself with it's own means of publication? 

For Android (and iOS?) Microsoft has a great start with:

• Xbox client
• OneNote
• Lync client
• Skype
• SkyDrive
• Azure's support for Android as part of its mobile offerings.

I'm sure I'm overlooking some but even with that short list it's promising. In addition to seeing more of Office on Android (and iOS) I really think it would be smart to extend its development toolset to both Android and iOS for the same reason: to embrace and extend these platforms to bring more people into Microsoft's ecosystem. Xamarin has this bit nailed so why not bring them into the Microsoft fold? (Aside from concerns that a certain division might make life hard for the Xamarin folks kind of like they did with DevDiv.) Then there's the IT side of the house where they should continue to provide and improve integration and management tools for all of these devices.

Get people to need your stuff because it makes their lives that much easier. That's the Microsoft I remember from long ago. I just wish they'd get back to that line of thinking again someday soon. Who knows maybe Windows Blue might just be the start of that effort...

Grow Android grow!

18 minutes ago, evildictait​or wrote

*snip*

Yeah. I bet they'll decide to ditch the desktop just about the same time that your local Walmart decides to ditch stocking bread and milk. And about the same time that Google decides "the web just isn't really a good place for us anymore". And when Cisco decides that "this Internet thing is a bit of a fad. We're moving into the cupcake business."

Seriously. You don't need a press release by Microsoft to tell you this. It's common sense. It's like demanding that Sony release a statement saying that they're not going to release an update to the PS3 that stops the PS3 playing PS3 games.

Windows is the desktop platform. There is not a cat in hells chance that the desktop is going anywhere any time soon.

FFS, Microsoft ploughs literally millions of dollars into making sure that your applications like SimCity still work on Windows8, literally decades after launch.

Microsoft dropping the desktop is like Apple discontinuing the iPhone. It may happen one day. But that day is a long way off into the future. Freaking out about it now, or demanding press-releases that Microsoft isn't planning a whole-sale ditching of it's multi-billion dollar platform is borderline delusional.

I'm not freaking out about it now. What's with all of the over-the-top hyperbole? Now if you'd calm down a minute you'd realize I'm just saying that IMO Microsoft isn't going to be investing much if any in the desktop and its development technologies anymore. That doesn't take away from the millions they pour into app compatibility testing (which does nothing for the growing the desktop & its development technologies). It does make one question what they should write their next what-used-to-be-a-desktop-app with.

And just to be clear -- yes this week's word is "hyperbole".

1 hour ago, kettch wrote

@DeathByVisualStudio: *yawn* There's no proof the desktop is going away. Also, I'd like to see where you've gotten this idea that they're going to force people onto a SaaS model.

Gotten this idea? From you of course! When you just keep repeating the same old hyperbole it just becomes real. Maybe if you'd stop repeating it you wouldn't be so tired.

54 minutes ago, evildictait​or wrote

*snip*

So what are you going to do about it?

Are you going to continue writing desktop apps (that you think are dead), write WinRT apps (that you think are a no-hope), or are you going to migrate to a different platform (that have <1% of the desktop market share)? Or are you just going to stew in your own misery?

We're moving over to web-based application development unfortunately. We also write clients for Android and probably iOS in the future if the market demands. I'm afraid we're going to be like Facebook and tell W8 users to "just use the web app".

Look. Either WinRT is a failure, or the desktop isn't going to die. You can't have it both ways.

Sure you can. The desktop slowly dies off as people move to devices OS's (Android & iOS) and web apps. WinRT fails to gain traction and Windows is now a utility and in relection of its past -- a failure. Tada! Both ways!

Microsoft hopes that WinRT is somewhere in the devices OS mix but the jury is still out on that. If WinRT goes no where fast then I sure hope they release Office for iOS and Android so it maintains its dominance independant of Windows.

Put it another way. 99.9999% of Windows 7 desktop apps work with no issue on Windows8. 0% of WinRT apps work on Windows7. 

That means, for the forseeable future, Microsoft doesn't have any choice but to keep the Desktop ecosystem strong. Microsoft owns 99% of the desktop market because of that ecosystem. Sure the WinRT ecosystem is new and shiny and obvious. But that doesn't mean the desktop subsystem is "abandoned" or that new stuff isn't being added all the time to the desktop APIs.

All that is required is that Microsoft keep some form of the desktop around for the foreseeable future. They don't have to invest anything in it. If they can satisfy 60% of their customers (they'd say 80%) with a SaaSy desktop service rather than native in the OS then I bet they'd go in that direction and drop the desktop on a least some SKUs.

IMO they don't see the desktop as a long-term market. It's all about booting the next generation of "Windows" on devices and other non-traditional PCs.

Apart from anything else, WinRT is built on top of the Windows desktop APIs. They're not going to go anywhere any time soon.

True but Microsoft doesn't seem to have a problem these days in removing things -- especially those thy feel aren't needed in this new era of devices .