Comment Feed for Channel 9 - TWC9: Lynn Langit, Azure + Social Games, Windows Phone Marketplace Updates

Re: TWC9: Lynn Langit, Azure + Social Games, Windows Phone Marketplace Updates

gduncan411 — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 01:23:12 GMT

Go SoCal! (DevGal)

posted by gduncan411

Re: TWC9: Lynn Langit, Azure + Social Games, Windows Phone Marketplace Updates

Richard.Hein — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 17:42:09 GMT

Good show. The SmallBasic project sounds great. I'm happy to hear that this kind of educational program is available and that Microsoft has seen this as a good investment. The Approval Tests library sounds interesting ... [later] ... now I've watched some of the videos demonstrating Approval Tests, and it looks very good. I have some things I'll definitely be trying to test using this method, next week.

posted by Richard.Hein

Re: TWC9: Lynn Langit, Azure + Social Games, Windows Phone Marketplace Updates

aL_ — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 19:16:46 GMT

Great show as always, but Brian is on the show and Dan isnt? up is down, left is right?! cats and dogs living together...

posted by aL_

Re: TWC9: Lynn Langit, Azure + Social Games, Windows Phone Marketplace Updates

hellokeith — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 01:05:14 GMT

Brian,

RE: Visual Studio x64

A great comment was made on Rico's original blog post. When a developer goes to get funding approval for a project or upgrade utilizing a Microsoft-evangilzed technology, such as .NET or x64, they have a difficult time selling the idea when Microsoft itself has not moved its own core development platform, Visual Studio, to .NET or x64. Microsoft needs to be a leader and show its customers & partners it will put its money where its mouth is.

posted by hellokeith

Re: TWC9: Lynn Langit, Azure + Social Games, Windows Phone Marketplace Updates

briankel — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 19:15:08 GMT

@aL_: Ha - we have to keep you on your toes!

posted by briankel

Re: TWC9: Lynn Langit, Azure + Social Games, Windows Phone Marketplace Updates

briankel — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 19:32:42 GMT

@hellokeith:I'm not sure that's an entirely accurate representation of Microsoft's position on x64. You seem to be implying that Microsoft is evangelizing that everybody should be writing new applications for x64, and upgrading existing applications to x64. I don't believe we are saying that (although with 90k employees one can never be sure of what everybody everywhere is saying - but if they are saying that, I would disagree with them). I would say that you should use x64 where it makes sense to do so, and if you choose to do so then Microsoft is committed to providing the platform and tooling to help you do that. Trust me when I say that we do put our money where our mouth is - while I don't have exact figures, I'd be surprised if the investment in x64 tooling and platform enablements isn't in the billions of dollars. If your application runs just fine in WOW64, then why "upgrade"? I can think of plenty of reasons not to - such as the cost of performing the upgrade, the risk of introducing bugs, and (if required) the ongoing costs of maintaining and testing on both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms.

It's not unlike IPv6. Sure, I think it's a great thing that Microsoft and other vendors provide first-class support for IPv6 and for use-cases where you need that extra head room I'm glad it's there. Will I use it on my home network? Not a chance. I don't need it. And Rico makes some compelling arguments for why Visual Studio doesn't need / won't benefit from being a native 64-bit application.

To put it another way... there's a huge list of features that customers have asked us to deliver in Visual Studio. Would you rather us spend our money delivering those features, or converting the application to native 64-bit for arguably no benefit?

Of course it's 2011. I reserve the right to change my answer by 2021 when Visual Studio becomes capable of sentient awareness, can code for me, and walks the dog, thus requiring more memory than the paltry 4GB I can allocate to it now.

posted by briankel