The LSE project and C9

I think it's somewhat ironic that during a discussion of the LSE project, C9 demonstrated the kind of suckiness that the Computerworld blogger may have been eluding to. I find it hard to believe that a company the size of Microsoft cannot implement a simple forum-based service without subjecting its users to this crap.

What hope did the LSE have?

To be fair, don't umbrella microsoft from one product / team.. there are vastly different quality of products coming out.. some great, some not so great..

Although it has to be said, microsoft STILL isn't good with www yet, I think its only in the last year or so they have even begun to realize they need to target both serious web developers (who want lots of control, but still with powerful abstractions when possible) as well as devs that want more of a winforms drag and drop gui experience..

I don't know much about what happened with the LSE project. Why is it being blamed on Microsoft and/or Microsoft's technology? Most projects that fail do so because of the people designing/making them and not so much generic technology choices like Windows/Linux or C++/.Net/Java.

(Of course, some tasks are more suited to some of those things than others.)

I've worked on several mission critical systems in the financial industry which ran on Windows, in C++ and C#, and the Microsoft technology didn't let us down so I don't buy the statement that the LSE project's failure shows that Microsoft tech isn't suitable for mission critical systems; that's clearly garbage.

(In my experience, for code that's to do with financial stuff, the ability to easily run or talk to the same code within Excel often -- not always but often -- outweighs any slight advantages which other platforms/technologies may have. Having to port/emulate code or communicate via complex cross-language/platform middleware uses up a lot of time that could be spent on something else. I'm actually not a fan of Excel from the developer's point of view but it's what everyone uses on the trade floors I've worked for and thus cannot be ignored. If you write a system people are going to want to talk to it, or maybe run some of its calculations, within Excel. If the system is presented as a Java web service or similar, you're probably in for a world of pain. If it's hosted on WebLogic then, god help you, you're almost certainly in for a world of pain! heh. Which isn't to say it can't work well if you do things right, but for me I'd want a very compelling set of reasons to use anything other than Microsoft tech for most financial work.)

LeoDavidson said:

I don't know much about what happened with the LSE project. Why is it being blamed on Microsoft and/or Microsoft's technology? Most projects that fail do so because of the people designing/making them and not so much generic technology choices like Windows/Linux or C++/.Net/Java.

(Of course, some tasks are more suited to some of those things than others.)

I've worked on several mission critical systems in the financial industry which ran on Windows, in C++ and C#, and the Microsoft technology didn't let us down so I don't buy the statement that the LSE project's failure shows that Microsoft tech isn't suitable for mission critical systems; that's clearly garbage.

(In my experience, for code that's to do with financial stuff, the ability to easily run or talk to the same code within Excel often -- not always but often -- outweighs any slight advantages which other platforms/technologies may have. Having to port/emulate code or communicate via complex cross-language/platform middleware uses up a lot of time that could be spent on something else. I'm actually not a fan of Excel from the developer's point of view but it's what everyone uses on the trade floors I've worked for and thus cannot be ignored. If you write a system people are going to want to talk to it, or maybe run some of its calculations, within Excel. If the system is presented as a Java web service or similar, you're probably in for a world of pain. If it's hosted on WebLogic then, god help you, you're almost certainly in for a world of pain! heh. Which isn't to say it can't work well if you do things right, but for me I'd want a very compelling set of reasons to use anything other than Microsoft tech for most financial work.)

 

Projects that are contracted out to large IT consultancies go bad all the time. When they do, it makes zero difference what technologies they were using

rhm said:

LeoDavidson said:

*snip*

Projects that are contracted out to large IT consultancies go bad all the time. When they do, it makes zero difference what technologies they were using

QFT!

"Projects that are contracted out to large IT consultancies go bad all the time. When they do, it makes zero difference what technologies they were using"

VERY VERY TRUE....

most of the really good software i have ever seen has came from a very small core, often 1-3 folks create the design and the first version then you have to be very carefull to only add more folks when and where they can add value.

the most common failure in management is to think that more hands will make it go faster.

and Acenture has a rather poor history on many other projects.

@ray7  wtf?  That makes no sense. That is like saying the sky is blue so MS sucks.  The computerworld guy should be fired. Not for hating MS, but because he is an idiot.  No facts presented or linked to.  And what he did say flew in the face of any published facts I could see.  LSE clearly said there was a network sw update on monday - and btw, there was an issue same day.  hmmm, wonder if it was a Cisco update?  He should be railing on Cisco or the * that applied an IOS update without testing everything (to be fair, I did this before and also had an issue.  IIRC, the update reset some IOS metadata....).  Nowhere is there any facts shown detailing a .net issue.  Nor could c# be an issue, because c# does not live in the running program.  But he probably does not understand what a compiler does either.   Moreover, if it is a coding issue, it has nothing to do with the tool set or .net.  That would be like saying linux sucks because paint crashed.  Lets please get real and have some intellectual honesty here.  This guy obviously has an agenda.  Not sure how OSS affords to pay him or if he thinks it is just cool to rail on .net without really knowing anything about large projects or coding.  These kind of people need to be called out.