4 ms·

If shit hits the fan in the .NET stack for a big enough corporate project, someone in the office can phone/email MS and get support for their problem. That's t

by pohl 16y ago

If shit hits the fan in the .NET stack for a big enough corporate project, someone in the office can phone/email MS and get support for their problem. That's the canard, but it has seldom worked out that way for me. Whenever I've encountered a problem that can be traced to a flaw in their products, the suggestion of calling for support is usually met with riotous laughter. (In other words, everybody says it's a selling-point of their stack, but nobody believes it.) Maybe none of our corporate projects have been "big enough". How big, exactly, does one have to be? Edit: come to think of it, most of the problems I have seen have been things that would go against their lock-in strategies, and maybe that's where the laughter comes from. The solution is always something like waiting for hackers to reverse engineer something like NTLM, or Samba, or WINS, or exchange integration...

jimbobimbo 16y ago
...or start with the official documentation coming from - gasp! - Microsoft: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd208104(PROT.10).aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd208104(PROT.10).as...
- pohl 16y ago
  I mean no offense by this (even though your condescending gasp makes me relish the thought of offending you) but you're probably too young to appreciate the requisite historical context. The link you provided is a relatively recent change in posture for the company in question.
acabal 16y ago
A company I worked for in the past (MM pageviews a day, you've probably heard of them) was a big MS proponent and an early adopter of some of their new stuff, like--at the time--Silverlight. We had a fairly direct line to someone at MS if something crazy happened. It might not always get fixed right away (a bug that might need to wait for the next cycle), but MS was always on top of what needed fixing. Contrarily, we had one guy working on some OSS stuff in a corner of the office--Apache, PHP, Rails, stuff like that. Whenever he ran into a problem that needed to be solved yesterday, he had to find and call a $100/hour consultant who may or may not even be able to solve the problem, or even guarantee that it would be patched at a later date. That's the big MS selling point.
- jerf 16y ago
  "MM pageviews a day, you've probably heard of them) was a big MS proponent and an early adopter of some of their new stuff, like--at the time--Silverlight." Yes, and that's about what it takes to get attention. Especially the "early adopter of Silverlight", you probably had a dedicated team back at MS. And there are other large companies that also rise to this size. What confuses me is the 30-person ISV that believes that they can get magical super awesome support from Microsoft. They can't, or at least nothing better than they can get from open source. And typically, I find they know it too; they know better than to try to contact Microsoft, yet they still hold the mythical ability to do so in their hands like a security blanket. That's what confuses and to some extent annoys me; saying "I can get support from MS" when it's true makes sense, but using that as a reason to use MS when it's not is just silly. It's a big selling point and that's legitimately true, but unless you're absolutely huge it doesn't apply to you.
  - thecodemonk 16y ago
    Wow. We are a 10 person company (entire company, not just dev staff), and we had a major issue and I called MS and the issues was fixed in 2 days. And no, it wasn't some wierd setting or some hotfix that was already available, it was a bug in 2008 R2. Minidumps, remote sessions, and long conference calls for 2 days, but they ended up providing some files in the end to work around it until the next patch.
kenjackson 16y ago
How about one person? I recently had an issue with VS 2010 and long hangs in the editor for a specific type of file. I got a series of minidumps for them... we narrowed it down to an issue with type resolution. They sent me a QFE drop and then incorporated the fix into a tools release they were doing. I was acting as single dev, not even on a support contract.
- shoover 16y ago
  I think I need that fix. Thanks for reporting it!

by pohl 16y ago

jimbobimbo 16y ago

...or start with the official documentation coming from - gasp! - Microsoft: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd208104(PROT.10).aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd208104(PROT.10).as...

pohl 16y ago
I mean no offense by this (even though your condescending gasp makes me relish the thought of offending you) but you're probably too young to appreciate the requisite historical context. The link you provided is a relatively recent change in posture for the company in question.

acabal 16y ago

A company I worked for in the past (MM pageviews a day, you've probably heard of them) was a big MS proponent and an early adopter of some of their new stuff, like--at the time--Silverlight. We had a fairly direct line to someone at MS if something crazy happened. It might not always get fixed right away (a bug that might need to wait for the next cycle), but MS was always on top of what needed fixing. Contrarily, we had one guy working on some OSS stuff in a corner of the office--Apache, PHP, Rails, stuff like that. Whenever he ran into a problem that needed to be solved yesterday, he had to find and call a $100/hour consultant who may or may not even be able to solve the problem, or even guarantee that it would be patched at a later date. That's the big MS selling point.

jerf 16y ago
"MM pageviews a day, you've probably heard of them) was a big MS proponent and an early adopter of some of their new stuff, like--at the time--Silverlight." Yes, and that's about what it takes to get attention. Especially the "early adopter of Silverlight", you probably had a dedicated team back at MS. And there are other large companies that also rise to this size. What confuses me is the 30-person ISV that believes that they can get magical super awesome support from Microsoft. They can't, or at least nothing better than they can get from open source. And typically, I find they know it too; they know better than to try to contact Microsoft, yet they still hold the mythical ability to do so in their hands like a security blanket. That's what confuses and to some extent annoys me; saying "I can get support from MS" when it's true makes sense, but using that as a reason to use MS when it's not is just silly. It's a big selling point and that's legitimately true, but unless you're absolutely huge it doesn't apply to you.
- thecodemonk 16y ago
  Wow. We are a 10 person company (entire company, not just dev staff), and we had a major issue and I called MS and the issues was fixed in 2 days. And no, it wasn't some wierd setting or some hotfix that was already available, it was a bug in 2008 R2. Minidumps, remote sessions, and long conference calls for 2 days, but they ended up providing some files in the end to work around it until the next patch.

kenjackson 16y ago

How about one person? I recently had an issue with VS 2010 and long hangs in the editor for a specific type of file. I got a series of minidumps for them... we narrowed it down to an issue with type resolution. They sent me a QFE drop and then incorporated the fix into a tools release they were doing. I was acting as single dev, not even on a support contract.

shoover 16y ago
I think I need that fix. Thanks for reporting it!