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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

> The bounty "prize" is you will eventually have a working product to use.

While an IDE running under Windows is hardly what I would like to work with, a bug that manifests itself only on such extreme circumstances cannot be called a showstopper.

I would worry more about other instances where this Peek() method is being misused like this, perhaps on other situations that happen more frequently than Visual Studio 2013 starts.

As a prize, a Microsoft T-Shirt, a gift card and some public recognition wouldn't hurt. The person who reported this bug did a great job of pinpointing its cause.

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I sent a package of branded stuff to someone once - stuff I bought out of my own pocket at the company store - and got upbraided for sending such shitty gifts. Won't make that mistake again.

I also worked for a startup where we had a handful of users that really went above and beyond reporting bugs. We sent them $25 amazon gift cards as thanks - the feedback was we were being cheap. One of those gift cards has yet to be spent, years later.

Hey, I think sending some cash is cheap too. It is that "you are worth exactly $25" I hate. If it were - - a public thanks, that would be way better than anything. Either send nothing, or do something good. This bug is not major, but as you said "went above and beyond" some cheap giftcard only implies "you got your $25 that you worked so hard for and we are not grateful anymore, it was a nice trade." These people usually do this because they like it.

This is my point of view and not necessarily right nor wrong.

It's not strictly rational but when you are giving extrinsic rewards, like a gift card, they are not perceived as an added reward but as a replacement. What did they replace? The intrinsic motivation/justification that prompted them to perform the action in the first place.

When the motivation switches from intrinsic (I'm doing this because I'm a good person) to extrinsic (I'm doing this for money) we use a different value of judgment which in this case appears to not have worked as well for you as you would have liked. Instead it may have been better to offer some form of recognition/acclaim to reinforce the intrinsic motivation and promote this behavior. For example helping people on stack overflow rewards you with feeling good about being a productive member of a community; the "reputation" score reinforces that same fact. Now imagine instead of having the reputation score mechanic you were paid 25 cents for every accepted answer instead? Would we have seen the same adoption or would people have not bothered "working" for a few dollars an hour?

> While an IDE running under Windows is hardly what I would like to work with

Visual Studio is probably the best IDE ever created. Have you even used it?

Yes. I used Visual Studio since 97 (and other Microsoft development tools that eventually merged into VS since 1991). I used VS more than any other development tool until 2001 or 2002. Used it occasionally until 2010. Visual Studio is a very good IDE, but, unless whatever you are developing is designed to run (or be served from) Windows, it's not particularly useful.

My problem is not with Visual Studio, but with Windows. After many years using Macs and Linuxes, Windows is an incredibly confusing environment. With Linux and Macs I always know what to expect. Trivial things like setting up wireless networking or a network printer or a multi-monitor setup often involve downloading a program that will install an application that will manage what you want to do. It's insulting to have to download a hundred megabytes of stuff just to use a printer and then have yet another icon somewhere on the screen that doesn't even visually merge with the rest of the environment.

And then you have an environment where you can't even delete an open file. Or eject a USB stick just because some program decided to quit in an unclean way and leave a file open.

After you get used to a consistent and predictable platform, using anything else becomes almost intolerable.

We really must be in the age of Linux on the desktop if setting up multiple monitors and printers is trivial...

With Linux, either (a) it works perfectly or (b) you're buggered - there's no in-between.

With Windows, it might work somewhat or with great annoyance. Or it might be lovely! Until Windows rot sets in.

I think Windows rot stopped being a thing since XP. Windows 7 and Windows 8 installations rarely slow down over time, unless you're installing toobars and adware.

I have a Windows 7 that suffered Windows rot over the year I used it. I finally gave up and went back to the Ubuntu share (despite the Toshiba brightness bug) when Windows refused to suspend properly.

Which other ones have you spent significant time on? : )

IntelliJ is made by the folks that create the resharper plugin that adds decent refactoring to vstudio.

Eclipse has equally good refactoring, -out of the box just as IntelliJ

Over the years I have used NetBeans and Eclipse a lot. NetBeans could be beaten for J2ME and was fairly decent for Java web applications. Never really used it for non-web stuff, but it seems reasonable. Eclipse is a complex beast - it's the Emacs of Java (I've jokingly called it Egacs after its tendency to consume all available memory) and is incredibly modular. With that modularity comes complexity and some brittleness. I've used Emacs mostly for Java web application development, but used PyDev for a while. I also used the Eric IDE for Python, but now I write mostly Python and I just use Emacs as my text editor, ipdb (or pdb, when ipdb is not an option - looking at you, Google App Engine) and a couple terminals.

I have used it and I have to agree with the grandparent. It is probably one of the worst IDEs I have had to use. Bloated, slow, and in my way even on a modern multicore machine with 8+ gigs of memory.

Of the IDEs I have worked in (Turbo C++ v3.0, Borland C++ v3.1, NetBeans, Eclipse, Rubymine, DrScheme, Turbo Delphi Explorer, RAD Studio XE5, EiffelStudio, GNAT Pro, Visual Studio 6, 2010 and 2013, along with several embedded C environments), Visual Studio is my least favorite. For C++ development on Windows I prefer Eclipse or SublimeText for editing, build using the command line, and debug in WinDbg in order to avoid the awfulness that is the Visual Studio GUI.

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