3 ms·
>You listen to Hanselminutes or .Net Rocks, and you hear about all these great things people are doing. My problem with these kinds of Microsoft technology eva
by TheRealDunkirk 10y ago
>You listen to Hanselminutes or .Net Rocks, and you hear about all these great things people are doing.
My problem with these kinds of Microsoft technology evangelism articles/videos is that it always seems like Microsoft has juuuust gotten their new hotness to work, and is telling the world that it's awesome, and ready for production. Then you go to implement it, and as soon as you leave the perfect world of their demo, it all falls apart, and THEN you find out the docs were written for the beta version, and no longer apply, so you're left guessing at the right invocation signature for the method you need.
My most-recent example of this was their Ruby bindings for Azure blob storage. I wasted DAYS fiddling with the docs, which showed MANY different ways to call the functions, none of which worked for me. I eventually had to have a discussion with one of the people linked to the documentation to get it to work. This sort of thing -- announcing new stuff that isn't ready for prime time -- has happened before (I'm looking at you, EF and WSL), and I expect it will continue to happen, because MS is usually playing catchup with other market hotness.
I haven't used them, but I have no problem assuming that, if I were to go startup a project with the bleeding edge of, say, Erlang, or Node.js, I could find enough documentation to get a working prototype up and running without a lot of hassle.
I guess it goes both ways, though. Once you muscle through Microsoft's bleeding edge, it really feels like you've accomplished something. My Rails app is sending messages, with JSON payloads, to an Azure blob queue, which is getting picked up by my internal Windows service, to be batch processed by a legacy command-line tool, and I'm having the time of my (development) life.
- xemdetia 10y agoOne of the things I would always recommend if you are working in the Microsoft stack at bleeding edge I would start trying to talk to the evangelists sooner than later. It feels on the outset that this is how their product cycles work so making friends with these people can help you get past the 'on rails' presentation of the demos. I say this as someone who goes to in-person presentations from these evangelist types and poked holes in their demos and got satisfactory admittance of guilt or meaningful follow-ups.