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Comment by stusmith1977 | Hacker News Reader

stusmith1977

In situations like this, you can report the bug to Microsoft Connect:

1. Submit bug report. 2. Wait six months. 3. MS tech will post a comment, "this will be fixed in the next release". 4. Wait two more years. 5. Bug report will be closed as "won't fix".

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This. One bug in IE9 clickOnce launching thanks to them changing how download prompting works.

1. Reported to connect whilst in preview release status. Closed. Reported again. Closed. FULL test cases provided.

2. We're a gold partner with a £500k spend a year on licenses. Partner support. 19 hours on the phone over 6 months, blame shifting between the IE and .net teams and a daily call to get the case closed without resolution. Got a registry patch from ass-end support after 4 months that we have to ship to 2000 users at 200 different companies rather than an upstream fix. This checks a check box in the security settings.

They broke their own product and won't fix it. Basically you can't use JS to redirect to a clickonce URL.

Now today, IIS just stopped serving shit with no errors, nothing. Can't get anything out of minidumps+windbg. Just stops. None of our code is running.

Who am I going to call?

Redhat that's who.

Yup. Its funny as a dot net dev you learn to really love a few ms things and really hate the others. C# is a brilliant language. Entity framework is an awesome ORM. But anything to do with deployment? IIS? So very much rage. I'm in charge of the build process on my team and I'm quickly becoming "that guy in the corner who swears all the time".

Your still not cursing as much as the guy building msi installers though...

Again, this. Even with WiX it's painful. HKLM vs HKCU + corporate deployment hell + why the fuck do I need two MSIs to bootstrap the CLR and VSTO. Argh.

I deal with VSTO, WiX, ClickOnce, IIS, COM, MSMQ and the usual bits. Pays well but it made my hair fall out and has taken a couple of years off my life at least.

I long for the gong to ring so I can go home to my MacBook and OpenBSD (where I truly belong).

I actually do that job too. That horror falls under the umbrella of "deployment."

Not a great fan of c#. It always dissolves into generic programming and constraint hell. Most of it is satisfying the compiler and working around shit (like non-serializable dictionaries), piss poor frameworks like MVC etc which have dubious lifecycle management for filters/attributes and state problems galore. Oh and sealed classes. Thanks bastards, I'll never need to mock them will I - oh wait!

Yes deployment is a broken pile of crap. We inevitably did an NIH and wrote a massive push deployment framework for that. Cost a fortune. And I look after our integration environment as well (TeamCity). TC is nice but the .Net toolchain is horrific. Requires so much maintenance it's unbelievable. Also everything is stateful meaning repeatability is a PITA.

I'm the sweary guy too. Usually "we should have used Java - we don't have to invent new wheels every two mins".

The only bit of our infrastructure that is reliable is some memcache boxes on CentOS which have been online without a reboot for over two years!!!

Give me a C compiler, preferably LLVM and let me leave all this behind.

I've had more luck then. Strange they first say it will be fixed and then later say it won't be fixed anyway, I always had the impression they had their stuff together at Connect. Slowly of course but I guess that's what's to be expected because of the sheer size (this is not in their defense, at all, just my idea of why that is). Probably also spend tons of time looking at issues posted by people thinking Connect is a Q&A like StackOverFlow. Anyway for the 6 or so bugs I filed, all for the C++ compiler, the flow was

1. Submit bug report. 2. Get response like "we're looking into it" 3. Wait 2 to 5 months

4a. MS tech (or sometimes event Stephan T. Lavavej himself) posts a comment, "this will be fixed in the next release" 5. Bug report closed as fixed 6. Wait x time where x mainly depends on the point in time of the release cycle where 1 occurred. The later 1, the smaller x. You've gotta time those bugs to get them fixed quickly :P

4b: "won'tfix" / "by design" i.e. I got an explanation of what I did wrong, or otherwise why it happens

4c: "deferred" i.e. posted something that can be worked around and considered too minor of an issue to fix soon

Hah. I filed a bug via MS Connect years ago and it was eventually fixed in release. It may take time, but it sometimes works.

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