Dear Microsoft | The Coffeehouse

daytrip00

So, i need to preface this with a couple comments. First, I'm so angry right now, and need to vent, and this was the first place i thought to post to. Second, historically, i've been a pretty big Microsoft fan and have been using MS technologies almost exclusively for the better part of 10 years. Onto the rant:

Seriously guys, what going on at Microsoft. I've just spent the better part of a week trying to renew my god-forsaken MSDN subscription, the better part of 4 hours today and it still isnt working properly. It was a huge pain in the (I need to watch my language) last time (when i signed up for it), and now i'm bordering on the edge of sanity having to deal with the 20+ step process it takes to register my stupid subscription. In the meantime, I cant install VS2008 to work on the projects I need to work on. The people in charge of MSDN subscriptions and the eOpen website need to be fired and/or shot. They are so abominably bad that (1 out of every 3 page loads results in an error page on the site) I'm considering getting rid of our subscriptions and just trying to deal with less and less microsoft software and buying only VS off the shelf. But I'm at my wit's end.

Next off, product activation. At best, it's a horrible nuisance for us legitimate customers. The Activation 2.0 changes are more onerous than Activation 1.0 (which is saying quite a bit), and numerous times, i've had WGA complain that I'm using pirated software when I'm not. I wonder if this sort of BS is driving customers into Apple's open arms. I'm seriously considering it for all non-work tasks.

And then there's the .NET Framework. Seriously guyh... 200 megs... What idiot okayed that? MSFT wants adoption of it's new ui toolkit which is for building client apps. So what does it do? It packages a 200 meg redistributable that you need to send with your app. Sorry Microsoft, my app is 5 megs, I'm not about to ship a 205 meg installer. Seriously, I wonder what those product meetings were like! Was there broad agreement that this was the best course of action? Did you guys think that 200 megs was no-big-deal? Well... you've pretty much guaranteed that my apps will be 100% wpf-free. Now i'm even more irate that i spent so much time learning the platform. I even went to a 2-day class on expression blend. All useless knowlege.

Finally, and i know i'm not being original here, but Vista... ugh. I just got a new desktop and decided to install Windows Server 2003 on it instead of Vista, and boy am I glad i did. My machine now runs seemingly twice as fast. Gone are the 30 seconds it took to unlock the machine, the ridiculous slowdows when memory consumption reached 75%, inordinately long boot times, the black screens as the DWM spazzed out, the redesigned and ridiculously confusing network center, slow network performance, i could go on... I'm never going back.

Ok... so i realize that this rant isn't exactly coherent, but up to 2005 i would have called myself a Microsoft "Fan". That the beast has managed to irritate and alienate such a loyal customer is unfathomable to me. I wonder how bad this is going to get. At any rate, I'll be polishing my Mac development skills in case Windows users defect en masse, as I think that's actually possible now. I guess a small part of me hopes they do. That's significant for a developer that's staked a career on .NET. I also hope that you guys get your act together.

daytrip00

blehbleh wrote:

The year 2003 called, it wants its users back...

I don't believe you! All my PCs got much smoother when I put Vista on them.

But then again, I'm sure windows 95 will run EVEN FASTER on your PC than Windows Server 2003... I got the installation floppies if you want them!

I think Vista's performance issues have been well documented. From slow bootup/resume times, to slow network performance, it is extremely common for users to experience slowdowns. That's fine. I know the indexer is there to yield other benefits. The larger issue was that generally the DWM made windows more sluggish, not less. This might be fine if there were other benefits, but Flip3D, Flip and the taskbar previews don't seem worth the ghosting and sluggishness. Yes, I could turn them off, but then why use Vista? None of the other features feel like enhancements to me.

Sabot
My name is Dave Oliver. I'm a Technical Architect.

Day Tripp you have picked on many a sore-point there.

Having a look at what Microsoft is offering as a whole there is a great deal of good stuff. Agreed however there are some pretty big let downs, so when it is all weighed up the case for moving to the latest releases which makes it less compelling ... which has a knock-on effect in creating the justification case.

2003 was a good year for Microsoft, Visual Studio 2003, Office 2003 and Windows 2003 were the last best version in my opinion blehbleb! Why because they were polished products playing to their strengths.

Nowadays there is blood in the water, the competition is getting it's act together and very soon we are going to have very compelling choices. Take for example, IBM, they are getting their ducklings in a row and it's strong stories all the way with nice words such as 'standard based' and 'open' all they way through the complete stack. Oracle as well are working on the same and not to mention all the others plus much smallers players specialising in a niche. Suddenly it feels that Microsoft do not have all the answers are actually swimming out their all on their own not helping themselves.

Microsoft is worried that they are losing the attraction of thought-leadership, heck they are right.

andy_hanger18

daytrip00 wrote:
And then there's the .NET Framework. Seriously guyh... 200 megs... What idiot okayed that? MSFT wants adoption of it's new ui toolkit which is for building client apps. So what does it do? It packages a 200 meg redistributable that you need to send with your app. Sorry Microsoft, my app is 5 megs, I'm not about to ship a 205 meg installer. Seriously, I wonder what those product meetings were like!

Then why didn't you write your software in VC++, something that didn't need the .NET Framework then? You can't moan after the event. You must have known this before hand. You can't expect to use a new UI toolkit (as you called it) without installing anything.

daytrip00 wrote:
Finally, and i know i'm not being original here, but Vista... ugh. I just got a new desktop and decided to install Windows Server 2003 on it instead of Vista, and boy am I glad i did. My machine now runs seemingly twice as fast.

I can just never understand people who use a server OS for a desktop machine. Bizarre in my opinion.

daytrip00 wrote:
At any rate, I'll be polishing my Mac development skills in case Windows users defect en masse, as I think that's actually possible now. I guess a small part of me hopes they do. That's significant for a developer that's staked a career on .NET. I also hope that you guys get your act together.

Not the best career move in my opinion. Thats more of a rant statement I think.

I just hope you've chilled now Smiley

evildictaitor
if( !succeed( try() ) ) { while(true) try(); }

daytrip00 wrote:

And then there's the .NET Framework. Seriously guyh... 200 megs... What idiot okayed that? ...

I'm not about to ship a 205 meg installer.

The web-installer for .NET is significantly smaller, and MSIs can be instructed to install the .NET framework by downloading it from the Microsoft download site during installation.

The .NET framework is completely ubiquitous on the Windows platform for all but the most stubborn of customers. It is required for programs such as MSN and Yahoo Messenger (which are often installed even by very non-technical users) and comes as part of Windows Vista. For users who have installed no significant application since the turn of the centuary, you should ask why they would suddenly change their mind about your application and begin a new installation spree.

You should not be shipping the complete .NET redistributable as part of your application unless your application comes on fixed media (e.g. a CD or DVD), where size on disk is irrelevant and speed is a more significant hastle.

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

Indeed, the 200 meg installer contains everything for every possible configuration .Net 3.5 can be installed on. It contains the full .Net 2.0 SP1 and 3.0 SP1, the .Net 2.0 SP1 and 3.0 SP1 patches for users who already have .Net 2.0 and/or 3.0, the patches for Windows Vista (which are different because .Net is a system component there) and the new stuff from 3.5.

If you use the web installer it'll only install the needed pieces which is much less. On my own system the total download size for the web installer was about 25MB, because I was running Vista SP1 which already includes .Net 2.0 SP1 and 3.0 SP1, so all it had to download was the new 3.5 bits.

Even on a completely clean XPSP2 (which is the worst case scenario) the download size is about 70MB. Which I will admit is a lot but nowhere near as bad as 200, and chances that the user already has at least .Net 2.0 installed are quite good so that would bring it down further.

irascian
Irascible Ian

Hear! Hear!

I renewed my MSDN sub in November, not realising that they'd actually do something right for once and make available VS2008 in trial versions just a few days later. If I'd known that ahead of time I'd have just taken the trial version which would have lasted me until the 3 months later when the retail versions are due. All that money to jump through ridiculously complicated hoops on different web sites with passwords to get what? MSDN has become very poor value given the new world of "give it all away for free, most of it as new CTPs ever couple of days" mentality that Microsoft have gotten into.

I'm pretty much in agreement with everything else you say. Windows Home Server (based on Windows Server 2003) just works and does its stuff without fuss. If only I could say the same for the inconsistent and confusing mess that is Vista.

Then there's the whole "new web apps" nonsense. As I sit here struggling to get to grips with Swift 3D (for Silverlight), Zam 3D (for WPF), five different Microsoft Expression products, Silverlight, the ASP.NET AJAX framework, what's new in Visual Studio 2008 and get some kind of insight into the MVC framework just to write a "Web 2.0 app" I realise that it's official - the world really HAS gone mad.

sakisp
C/C++ and a cup of coffee...

Say that again, daytrip00 and irascian.

Sabot
My name is Dave Oliver. I'm a Technical Architect.

Is it actually a good time to be a developer?

If you believe Gartner the IT industry is heading for 'OS Agnostic' applications either delivered by virtualization or browser but the client OS becomes an irrelevance. According to Gartner the cross-over in trends between OS dependent and OS Agnostic will happen around 2011. So you could argue if Microsoft doesn't get itself firmly into the 'OS Agnostic' space its dominance will diminish.

So with this in mind, the trend is for developers to start picking up those rich-client side skills in Web 2.0 stuff, this with the added complexity of writing code at the entity level (like databases) and Business Logic level such as BPEL for example, Biztalk and all that good Web-services.

Anyway to get to the point, there are so many demanding skills in the development stack it's now impossible for a developer to be a true master of them all .... but we are expected to be! But we all do naturally gravitate to one of the three tiers in our thinking.

(this is a notional argument so don't go all literal and tell me 'I just write client-server' cos that will make me get in my car and drive round to give you a slap :o)

Here again it isn't good news for Microsoft because more and more if you pick a specialism like, client side, you aren't going to want to be married to technology from just one vender or this will further reduce the persective market for your skills.

wkempf

Sabot wrote:
Is it actually a good time to be a developer?

If you believe Gartner the IT industry is heading for 'OS Agnostic' applications either delivered by virtualization or browser but the client OS becomes an irrelevance. According to Gartner the cross-over in trends between OS dependent and OS Agnostic will happen around 2011. So you could argue if Microsoft doesn't get itself firmly into the 'OS Agnostic' space its dominance will diminish.

So with this in mind, the trend is for developers to start picking up those rich-client side skills in Web 2.0 stuff, this with the added complexity of writing code at the entity level (like databases) and Business Logic level such as BPEL for example, Biztalk and all that good Web-services.

Anyway to get to the point, there are so many demanding skills in the development stack it's now impossible for a developer to be a true master of them all .... but we are expected to be! But we all do naturally gravitate to one of the three tiers in our thinking.

(this is a notional argument so don't go all literal and tell me 'I just write client-server' cos that will make me get in my car and drive round to give you a slap :o)

Here again it isn't good news for Microsoft because more and more if you pick a specialism like, client side, you aren't going to want to be married to technology from just one vender or this will further reduce the persective market for your skills.

You've analyzed some of this correctly, and failed in other areas.

I strongly believe that "Web 2.0" is not the future, and I doubt a "Web 3.0" will be either. Web 2.0 is too constrained. AJAX is nice and all, but a major pain with significant technical issues when trying to be applied to full blown applications. Plugin architectures such as Flash/Flex/JavaFX/Silverlight would be "Web 3.0", I guess, and they do solve many of the technical problems with Web 2.0. However, the browser still turns out to be a lousy container for applications. Users expect the back/forward buttons and address bar to work in a certain way... which is not compatible with browser hosted applications. Web deployed applications, such as ClickOnce are much more likely to be the preferred application mechanism in the future.

There's absolutely no reason to think the future can't still be dominated by a limited number of technologies, and more importantly, vendors. Yes, we are certainly moving towards an "OS Agnostic" world. A portable runtime such as the Java VM or the CLR can address this. It's very possible that one such runtime could become dominant. It's likely that any such runtime would need to be either open, or preferably standardized, to become dominant, but that doesn't mean that a single vendor could not be the dominant provider of the runtime and tools.

I actually think that Microsoft has done a lot to position themselves very well for the future. .NET is a wonderful platform. They were smart enough to standardize it, which has lead to significant growth even on platforms that Microsoft themselves currently do not support. Silverlight is positioned to be a contender, if not a leader, in RIA in browsers. ClickOnce, WF, WCF, WPF, etc. are all nicely aligned with the notion of moving to a distributed and OS agnostic world.

They aren't a clear winner yet. I think they need to standardize some of those things I just mentioned that are currently proprietary, and they need to ensure these technologies make it to other platforms, whether they do that themselves or take the Moonlight approach again. They also have an image problem to continue to fight. However, I don't see anything here that indicates Microsoft is in any "trouble" or facing "bad news".

jamie

i was up at norms printing stuff out yesterday

(norms the guy with a print shop that has about 10 PC's - most with 3 monitors each

He got vista on a new laptop and "hates it"

He's going back to XP

This is the first guy I ever met with a 486. The first ever running 1024 x 768 (a 2 meg video card?wow!) . The first with Coreldraw 2. The first guy with a WFWG 3.11 network.

So it is telling - an MS fan, a windows user since 3.0 - HATES vista and will never load it.

sure - he's 50. Way to go alienate your user base.

Generational UI bla bla

Cybermagellan
Live for nothing, or die for everything

jamie wrote:
i was up at norms printing stuff out yesterday

(norms the guy with a print shop that has about 10 PC's - most with 3 monitors each

He got vista on a new laptop and "hates it"

He's going back to XP

This is the first guy I ever met with a 486. The first ever running 1024 x 768 (a 2 meg video card?wow!) . The first with Coreldraw 2. The first guy with a WFWG 3.11 network.

So it is telling - an MS fan, a windows user since 3.0 - HATES vista and will never load it.

sure - he's 50. Way to go alienate your user base.

Generational UI bla bla

Jamie,
WindowsXP was my first choice when running Windows on VMWare on my Mac....yeah sure I'm sure I'm going to have to install Vista but I'm dreading it...

I've been using Windows since 1.1 and DOS since *sigh* Apple DOS?

Honestly I think "extra-browser" environments like Silverlight, Adobe AIR, etc will be the next big thing, but Microsoft isn't going to be able to get people to download it, they're going to have to package *gasp* with an update or something....

wkempf

jamie wrote:
i was up at norms printing stuff out yesterday

(norms the guy with a print shop that has about 10 PC's - most with 3 monitors each

He got vista on a new laptop and "hates it"

He's going back to XP

This is the first guy I ever met with a 486. The first ever running 1024 x 768 (a 2 meg video card?wow!) . The first with Coreldraw 2. The first guy with a WFWG 3.11 network.

So it is telling - an MS fan, a windows user since 3.0 - HATES vista and will never load it.

sure - he's 50. Way to go alienate your user base.

Generational UI bla bla

Again, go back and look at archives of online forums back when XP debuted. The exact same things were said about XP then. If you listened to this echo chamber, everyone hated XP. Everyone said they'd stick with or go back to Win98. Magazines and other publications all put out articles talking about how badly Microsoft screwed up with XP, and it might actually be the end for the companies dominance.

Despite this, XP sold very well. Most users made the switch (complaining the whole time, if you believed the echo chamber) within a year or two. Now everyone seems to claim that XP is the best client OS Microsoft every put out.

Switch gears back to now. The echo chamber is flaming again. It's XP all over again. But you know what? It's XP all over again. Vista is selling strongly, despite the echo chamber giving you the impression that everyone reviles Vista.

I could care less what the echo chamber says. I don't have any performance issues with Vista. I don't run into bugs. I like the changes to the UI. I rarely see UAC prompts, and I'm very glad they pop up when they do. I like Vista. I prefer it over XP.

I firmly believe that the majority of nay sayers fit into one of two camps: FUDsters and folks who simply don't like change. Those folks are never going to be happy, and they'll always be very vocal within the echo chamber. So you can't trust the echo chamber.

jamie

disagree completely.

maybe programmers didnt like XP (who like to incorrectly call it fisher price instead of rubbermaid Wink

)- but after winME / win 2000 era - XP was almost as exciting as Win95 - and a godsend that MS finally combined the user friendliness of 98se - with the mean beast DHCP error spouting win 2k - into ONE perfect OS.

Im not going to list all the reasons why what we are expected to learn (re-learn) in Vista - is counter-productive to the "OLD" way of doing things.. (more prompts, more text to read, inconsistent app menus, colours .. film at 11

edit - Im glad you like vista. Many do, but there is just so much evidence (news, polls, blogs) of people who do not - so what should they do? just shutup?

edit2: this is why i keep harping on about my suggestion to fix this:(Generational User Interface)

Want the new - want the old? fine. Windows UX should allow this = happy customers both young and old

wkempf

jamie wrote:
disagree completely.

maybe programmers didnt like XP (who like to incorrectly call it fisher price instead of rubbermaid )- but after winME / win 2000 era - XP was almost as exciting as Win95 - and a godsend that MS finally combined the user friendliness of 98se - with the mean beast DHCP error spouting win 2k - into ONE perfect OS.

Go back and look. It was hardly a programmer sentiment. Heck, local TV news coverage talked about the "Fisher Price" look, which was just the tip of the iceberg of complaints leveled at XP.

jamie wrote:

Im not going to list all the reasons why what we are expected to learn (re-learn) in Vista - is counter-productive to the "OLD" way of doing things.. (more prompts, more text to read, inconsistent app menus, colours .. film at 11

I like you Jamie, so this is not definitely not meant to be an attack, but what you basically just said was "I'm not going to offer any evidence or proof, I'm just going to restate that Vista sucks". Not a good argument, to say the least.

jamie wrote:

edit - Im glad you like vista. Many do, but there is just so much evidence (news, polls, blogs) of people who do not - so what should they do? just shutup?

News, polls and blogs are not "evidence". News, polls and blogs all said Hillary Clinton was done for, yet she came out on top yesterday. More relevantly, as I've already stated, when XP came out news, polls and the equivalent of blogs were full of people who hated XP.

I'm not suggesting anyone should shut up. Everyone's welcome to their own opinion. What I'm suggesting is that we have an echo chamber, where what you hear is not a good indication of reality since it's just an amplification of the more vocal. Actual evidence (Vista sales) is telling us something very different from what you're hearing in the echo chamber.

wkempf

jamie wrote:
edit2: this is why i keep harping on about my suggestion to fix this:(Generational User Interface)

Want the new - want the old? fine. Windows UX should allow this = happy customers both young and old

Hard to respond to your points, when you keep editing.

What you're asking for is non-trivial, and has a lot of cons that have to be considered. How long do you continue supporting older UXes? I count 4 major UXes in the history of Windows, and there's more if you consider minor differences (for instance, 3.11 had a similar but different UX to NT 3.5). Maintaining all of those would likely mean that Vista would have had to ship on 3 DVDs. And some programs would fail to work under some UXes. The 3.11 UX didn't have a taskbar, and many applications today have a presence only in the taskbar, as just one example.

You're definitely in the "don't like change" camp, based on this.

Sabot
My name is Dave Oliver. I'm a Technical Architect.

wkempf wrote:

Sabot wrote: Is it actually a good time to be a developer?

If you believe Gartner the IT industry is heading for 'OS Agnostic' applications either delivered by virtualization or browser but the client OS becomes an irrelevance. According to Gartner the cross-over in trends between OS dependent and OS Agnostic will happen around 2011. So you could argue if Microsoft doesn't get itself firmly into the 'OS Agnostic' space its dominance will diminish.

So with this in mind, the trend is for developers to start picking up those rich-client side skills in Web 2.0 stuff, this with the added complexity of writing code at the entity level (like databases) and Business Logic level such as BPEL for example, Biztalk and all that good Web-services.

Anyway to get to the point, there are so many demanding skills in the development stack it's now impossible for a developer to be a true master of them all .... but we are expected to be! But we all do naturally gravitate to one of the three tiers in our thinking.

(this is a notional argument so don't go all literal and tell me 'I just write client-server' cos that will make me get in my car and drive round to give you a slap :o)

Here again it isn't good news for Microsoft because more and more if you pick a specialism like, client side, you aren't going to want to be married to technology from just one vender or this will further reduce the persective market for your skills.

You've analyzed some of this correctly, and failed in other areas.

I strongly believe that "Web 2.0" is not the future, and I doubt a "Web 3.0" will be either. Web 2.0 is too constrained. AJAX is nice and all, but a major pain with significant technical issues when trying to be applied to full blown applications. Plugin architectures such as Flash/Flex/JavaFX/Silverlight would be "Web 3.0", I guess, and they do solve many of the technical problems with Web 2.0. However, the browser still turns out to be a lousy container for applications. Users expect the back/forward buttons and address bar to work in a certain way... which is not compatible with browser hosted applications. Web deployed applications, such as ClickOnce are much more likely to be the preferred application mechanism in the future.

There's absolutely no reason to think the future can't still be dominated by a limited number of technologies, and more importantly, vendors. Yes, we are certainly moving towards an "OS Agnostic" world. A portable runtime such as the Java VM or the CLR can address this. It's very possible that one such runtime could become dominant. It's likely that any such runtime would need to be either open, or preferably standardized, to become dominant, but that doesn't mean that a single vendor could not be the dominant provider of the runtime and tools.

I actually think that Microsoft has done a lot to position themselves very well for the future. .NET is a wonderful platform. They were smart enough to standardize it, which has lead to significant growth even on platforms that Microsoft themselves currently do not support. Silverlight is positioned to be a contender, if not a leader, in RIA in browsers. ClickOnce, WF, WCF, WPF, etc. are all nicely aligned with the notion of moving to a distributed and OS agnostic world.

They aren't a clear winner yet. I think they need to standardize some of those things I just mentioned that are currently proprietary, and they need to ensure these technologies make it to other platforms, whether they do that themselves or take the Moonlight approach again. They also have an image problem to continue to fight. However, I don't see anything here that indicates Microsoft is in any "trouble" or facing "bad news".

But I'm not seeing the standardization! I'm seeing a bit here and there making it easy from a users perspective but behind the scenes it's business as usual.

Sure AJAX just needs a browser. The program that creates AJAX sits on an IIS box running Windows and .Net. Is .Net a standard? who looks after it? Who else does it? Can I discuss and get a change agreed?

Silverlight is an alternative to Adobe Flash, why did we need an alternative?

Why am I married to Windows when I'm using Microsoft kit?

You can see where I'm going with these questions!

The reason is that the mood in the market is that ultimately people don't want to be locked into a vendor and don't want it difficult to change when they do decide to shift.

They also don't want an all or nothing debate, they want to pick and choose different parts of the stack from any vendor, that is the 'BEST OF BREED'. Vendor compete with each other because their product is better and cheaper and not proprietary which can allow a vendor to become sloppy in areas ... and what can you do about it?

jamie

i never said vista sucks... Wink

Vista Damage Control:

- rename Aero theme to Aero Media Center Theme (black / winamp / cool)
- create new Office blue cheerful Vista theme = Aero Default
- Put back option to use common tasks and up
- put the icons back in start menu (lose the slow top hover icon)
- Add start menu and taskbar - to the Hue colour controller
- Have option to use classic file copy/move dialoges
- remove the black screen effect on UAC
- remove UAC Tongue Out
- add option to have "All Programs" use flyout
- make a hybrid of desktop / properties that is colourful and webpage styled (like vista) but that uses tabs at the top (like older windows) = one window - not going back and forth
- add a Luna theme option
- add option to remove the blue highlight's in explorer on files
- Lose the Network and Sharing and Cookies Center

if they did above - longer users of Windows might not complain so much

wkempf

jamie wrote:

i never said vista sucks...

Vista Damage Control:

- rename Aero theme to Aero Media Center Theme (black / winamp / cool)
- create new Office blue cheerful Vista theme = Aero Default
- Put back option to use common tasks and up
- put the icons back in start menu (lose the slow top hover icon)
- Add start menu and taskbar - to the Hue colour controller
- Have option to use classic file copy/move dialoges
- remove the black screen effect on UAC
- remove UAC
- add option to have "All Programs" use flyout
- make a hybrid of desktop / properties that is colourful and webpage styled (like vista) but that uses tabs at the top (like older windows) = one window - not going back and forth
- add a Luna theme option
- add option to remove the blue highlight's in explorer on files
- Lose the Network and Sharing and Cookies Center

if they did above - longer users of Windows might not complain so much

Doubtful. You have one item in your list that's not cosmetic, while the actual complaints you hear about in the echo chamber have to do with performance and bugs. We can go round and round about UAC. Some users are just going to have to get used to it, plain and simple. It's there for a reason, and every other OS has a form of this for that reason. We are suffering some here, because of conflicts between UAC and legacy applications, but that will go away with time.

I get why you don't like Vista. But it's all personal. It's not really indicative of whether or not Vista is a good product. More importantly, it doesn't address whether or not given time history will view Vista the same as it eventually viewed XP.

wkempf

Sabot wrote:
But I'm not seeing the standardization! I'm seeing a bit here and there making it easy from a users perspective but behind the scenes it's business as usual.

Sure AJAX just needs a browser. The program that creates AJAX sits on an IIS box running Windows and .Net. Is .Net a standard? who looks after it? Who else does it? Can I discuss and get a change agreed?

I'm confused. Do you think AJAX and .NET have anything to do with each other?

Yes, .NET is a standard. The ECMA and ISO have both standardized the CLR, the BCL and C#.

Sabot wrote:

Silverlight is an alternative to Adobe Flash, why did we need an alternative?

Need is a strong word. Silverlight is, IMHO, superior for many reasons. One of the biggest is the fact that you can use multiple programming languages to code against it. But we don't "need" it.

Sabot wrote:

Why am I married to Windows when I'm using Microsoft kit?

Not sure what you mean by "Microsoft kit", but if you mean something like Silverlight or .NET in general, you are hardly married to Windows when using them.

Sabot wrote:

You can see where I'm going with these questions!

The reason is that the mood in the market is that ultimately people don't want to be locked into a vendor and don't want it difficult to change when they do decide to shift.

They also don't want an all or nothing debate, they want to pick and choose different parts of the stack from any vendor, that is the 'BEST OF BREED'. Vendor compete with each other because their product is better and cheaper and not proprietary which can allow a vendor to become sloppy in areas ... and what can you do about it?

I agreed with that in my post. I, however, think Microsoft can easily position themselves accordingly, and in fact they've already been making strides to do so.

jamie

wkempf wrote:

You have one item in your list that's not cosmetic,

Ive never had any issues with vistas plumbing... its fast. no blue screens.

so the rest is all cosmetic.. i guess - assuming productivity / connectivity is cosmetic

daytrip00

andy_hanger18 wrote:

Then why didn't you write your software in VC++, something that didn't need the .NET Framework then? You can't moan after the event. You must have known this before hand. You can't expect to use a new UI toolkit (as you called it) without installing anything.

Our software is 5 years old. .NET 1.0 had a 20 meg redistrubutable exe. You're saying we shouldn't complain because we should have expected it to grow by an order of magnitude? uh-huh... When I saw the release of 3.5 i wanted to tear my hair out. Basically we can never upgrade the framework because people have to download our software and a 205 meg downloader would be totally prohibitive.

andy_hanger18 wrote:

daytrip00 wrote:At any rate, I'll be polishing my Mac development skills in case Windows users defect en masse, as I think that's actually possible now. I guess a small part of me hopes they do. That's significant for a developer that's staked a career on .NET. I also hope that you guys get your act together.

Not the best career move in my opinion. Thats more of a rant statement I think.

I just hope you've chilled now

Why? Our biggest support request is to create a Mac version of our software. I would say about half of my friends are using Macs now and their numbers are growing. And here we are locked into a 4 year old version of the .NET Framework for the forseeable future. Quick... name one good comercially released app that uses .NET > 2.0.

wkempf

daytrip00 wrote:

Quick... name one good comercially released app that uses .NET > 2.0.

Expression Blend

daytrip00

evildictaitor wrote:

The web-installer for .NET is significantly smaller, and MSIs can be instructed to install the .NET framework by downloading it from the Microsoft download site during installation.

The .NET framework is completely ubiquitous on the Windows platform for all but the most stubborn of customers. It is required for programs such as MSN and Yahoo Messenger (which are often installed even by very non-technical users) and comes as part of Windows Vista. For users who have installed no significant application since the turn of the centuary, you should ask why they would suddenly change their mind about your application and begin a new installation spree.

You should not be shipping the complete .NET redistributable as part of your application unless your application comes on fixed media (e.g. a CD or DVD), where size on disk is irrelevant and speed is a more significant hastle.

Actually, this is pretty much flatly wrong. Right now, 70% of the users that download our software don't already have the .NET framework installed. Hardly ubiquitous...

Also, i suspect you've never actually created an installer, because MSIs don't go and download stuff. Have I missed the checkbox for "download .NET if it isn't on the machine"? We've had to deploy the .NET framework using installers like Wise or InstallShield, and it's an extremely error prone process. Web installers have been even more so.

daytrip00

wkempf wrote:

daytrip00 wrote:
Quick... name one good comercially released app that uses .NET > 2.0.

Expression Blend

Yes, i know. I've used it. I should say name one that isn't specifically for building WPF apps. So we can exclude ZAM, Blend, Design, etc.

As a side note, notice that the Blend installers ask you to install the .NET framework separately...