Comment by keithnoizu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keithnoizu | Hacker News Reader

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I think my pet peeve at Microsoft was that the tooling, TFS included just wasn't that good for agile development. I mean you can see SD smothered all across TFS and while SD was nice for it's time it's grossly inferior to github/mercurial in every regard other than supporting massive codebases.

There's also in my opinion a huge problem in that what sort of technology you can use is severely restricted by what Microsoft makes. I'd get push back for asking for a license for something like reflector (yes we had a ilasm dissambler but it was horrible) let alone something like recommending using selenium instead of some horrible, under maintained internal solution.

Then there are just the utterly ridiculous political restrictions on the development pipeline. "Oh you have to use Razzle or CoreXT instead of TFS because even though you're a html5 website with SOA components your team is technically part of windows and they use Razzle."

You know, in 2003 we (I'm the original author of CoreXT) had some attempts at a serious discussion of merging CoreXT + Razzle and whatever the VS team was doing. I was told "Windows is too big" and "Visual Studio is built for a different customer than Microsoft developers" and the "future is Team System".

Here we are 10 years later ...

Hey! I was the one running the build environment stuff in VS at the time.

IIRC, CoreXT didn't handle some really oddball scenarios we had that involved self-hosted compilers and runtimes. e.g., rerunning the build with the compiler you just built or just the runtime you just built, or...

We were also trying to shift as much of the managed parts of the stack as possible to using MSBuild natively, which required a custom local runtime build to support asmmeta (which rudi and I created to solve the circular build dependencies in managed libraries in VS).

We were also using subtly different versions of build.exe whose parallel build support and support for scenarios with files over 2^31 bytes differed in non-trivial ways.

In the end, I think I stole everything I liked in CoreXT (which was a lot!) but we couldn't really adopt the workflow without breaking basic requirements that VS had that nobody outside of a compiler toolchain really sees.

(BTW, I apologize if some of this is off. Like you pointed out, this is more than 10 years ago.)

Heh!

First, say hi when in NYC, dblock at dblock dot org.

I think workflow, spirit and approach are the real deal. Everything else is just software :-)

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