4 ms·

I have no idea what you're trying to tell me. How is EF related to developers working on side projects?

drivebyacct2 15y ago
Sorry, I took "The Garage is a community" to mean non-Microsoft employees. More to that apology, a re-read of your comment leaves me wondering just what I was thinking. Alas, I'll continue with my thoughts; feel free to ignore them or consider them OT; I apologize. My point might be summarized or expressed in a different way. I worked with .NET for the last 12 months and I can remember (just off the top of my head) 4 distinct issues that were trivial to fix but where not documented or described anywhere. They were weeks of work. On the other hand, I'm working with non-Microsoft tools and languages now, and I've had more than three of these scale of issues resolved in literally less than a minute in an IRC channel, and if not, in a tweet, or a forum post. My joke is that if Google/Binging is not productive in a .NET technology/tool/etc, my next best hope is posting on a forum with ridiculously buggy forum-software, and waiting two weeks for a response. There have been more than one post about this phenomena on HN as well. To be clear, I don't necessarily think this is a "Microsoft problem", I'm just not sure why the tactics and resources available for more open or community-based projects are so vastly different than the .NET/Azure/Windows scene (again, in my experience).
- shriphani 15y ago
  There's definitely a very active win32 channel on freenode - if not there's channel 9 (which isn't unusable) and apphub. What were you using ? * Alas, I'll continue with my thoughts; feel free to ignore them or consider them OT; I apologize. * Why use an unrelated thread to give a braindump ? You seemed to have no problems posting trollbait in response to this post.
  - drivebyacct2 15y ago
    First of all, excuse me, I'm not sure what I said to warrant such an adversarial response. Channel9 is not even remotely close to a support or technology centric forum. There are what, 3, 4, main forums with everything just shoved in there. (and sadly, while I'm at it, I checked. It's still the ancient, very broken attempt at a WYSIWYG editor in channel9. I've wasted more countless minutes trying to make a bug report or question look intelligible with this software both here and in the Azure support forums) Not even close to what I'm talking about. Nor is #win32 appropriate for .NET, VS, Azure, WCF questions, and they're quite happy to remind you of it. I've been there before in times of desperation. I didn't find my reply to be troll bait at all (edit, if parent was referring to my other post on this thread, I'm happy to address my reasoning there, and shall). As I mentioned, I'm not the first to bring up the disparity of community among Microsoft products on HN... and while I misinterpreted the original post I replied to, I think my criticism still makes sense on this topic. Why is it necessary for Microsoft employees to release tools under the Microsoft brand and control? This would be far better suited as an open alternative to Synergy, though that will surely never be the case. (Maybe lay off the kool-aid next summer. This isn't a battle, it's a perception as a developer who comes from an open-tool, open-community centric background who found the stark difference of the Microsoft-stack community to be a bit behind the times. I love c-sharp and .NET, we don't need to be extreme about this.) edit: Further, upon more investigation, Garage doesn't even sound that great. It sounds like these projects are often rolled into MS properties (fine) but are otherwise only allowed to be released "every once in a while", only if there is "a lot of request from employees who want to be able to share it with their friends and families", according to this very article.
  - xpaulbettsx 15y ago
    There's also the MSDN forums which are surprisingly good, despite their absolutely awful forum software
    - drivebyacct2 15y ago
      Again, it's purely anecdotal, but I've had more than one topic go without any reply, and one result in a Microsoft employee asking me to email logs. One of which was over 600MB in size, just from loading VS and after sending the email, I never heard back. I eventually gave up on that particular issue and took the only remaining option which was reimaging my machine. (A Microsoft produced and supported VS addon was causing errors in the .NET runtime that were uncaught and untraceable. Reinstallation of VS, SP1, and all installed version of the .NET runtime were futile). (funny, the parent reply was posted, my post was downvoted and shriphani's post were resurrected all within 30 seconds. Can't we just have a conversation about this without it being personal or political? I know you both work or have for Microsoft)
      - ryanmolden 15y ago
        >Again, it's purely anecdotal, but I've had more than one topic go without any reply, and one result in a Microsoft employee asking me to email logs. One of which was over 600MB in size, just from loading VS Yes, sometimes to trace down a problem dump files are necessary, and with full heap info they can be big. If you expect psychic debugging based on (often times) vague descriptions of your problems or a problem that they can't repro on their side, then you will be disappointed, then again with expectations like that I imagine you will be disappointed a lot in life from pretty much every software company you ever deal with. >A Microsoft produced and supported VS addon was causing errors in the .NET runtime that were uncaught and untraceable. This sounds...unlikely. Not because Microsoft produced AddOns can't possibly have bugs (of course they can), but saying something is 'uncaught and untraceable' is like saying there is a evil demon in your machine, it just doesn't stand to reason. Exceptions are exceptions are exceptions. Debuggers can and do catch them rather handily, if they didn't / couldn't they would be pretty much useless. I think a more accurate explanation would be 'I couldn't figure out how to diagnose the problem myself'. Without sources that is understandable as often times it is necessary to get to the root of the issue. >Reinstallation of VS, SP1, and all installed version of the .NET runtime were futile So you never solved the issue and continue to see it to this day? Or you just stopped using VS or this particular add-in all together?
- drivebyacct2 15y ago
  lol Are the downvotes because #win32 is comparable to #django, #python, etc? Or what exactly? No one bothered blessing me with a explanation for why I've been crucified here. What ever, this is sad.

Sorry, I took "The Garage is a community" to mean non-Microsoft employees. More to that apology, a re-read of your comment leaves me wondering just what I was thinking. Alas, I'll continue with my thoughts; feel free to ignore them or consider them OT; I apologize. My point might be summarized or expressed in a different way. I worked with .NET for the last 12 months and I can remember (just off the top of my head) 4 distinct issues that were trivial to fix but where not documented or described anywhere. They were weeks of work. On the other hand, I'm working with non-Microsoft tools and languages now, and I've had more than three of these scale of issues resolved in literally less than a minute in an IRC channel, and if not, in a tweet, or a forum post. My joke is that if Google/Binging is not productive in a .NET technology/tool/etc, my next best hope is posting on a forum with ridiculously buggy forum-software, and waiting two weeks for a response. There have been more than one post about this phenomena on HN as well. To be clear, I don't necessarily think this is a "Microsoft problem", I'm just not sure why the tactics and resources available for more open or community-based projects are so vastly different than the .NET/Azure/Windows scene (again, in my experience).

shriphani 15y ago
There's definitely a very active win32 channel on freenode - if not there's channel 9 (which isn't unusable) and apphub. What were you using ? * Alas, I'll continue with my thoughts; feel free to ignore them or consider them OT; I apologize. * Why use an unrelated thread to give a braindump ? You seemed to have no problems posting trollbait in response to this post.
- drivebyacct2 15y ago
  First of all, excuse me, I'm not sure what I said to warrant such an adversarial response. Channel9 is not even remotely close to a support or technology centric forum. There are what, 3, 4, main forums with everything just shoved in there. (and sadly, while I'm at it, I checked. It's still the ancient, very broken attempt at a WYSIWYG editor in channel9. I've wasted more countless minutes trying to make a bug report or question look intelligible with this software both here and in the Azure support forums) Not even close to what I'm talking about. Nor is #win32 appropriate for .NET, VS, Azure, WCF questions, and they're quite happy to remind you of it. I've been there before in times of desperation. I didn't find my reply to be troll bait at all (edit, if parent was referring to my other post on this thread, I'm happy to address my reasoning there, and shall). As I mentioned, I'm not the first to bring up the disparity of community among Microsoft products on HN... and while I misinterpreted the original post I replied to, I think my criticism still makes sense on this topic. Why is it necessary for Microsoft employees to release tools under the Microsoft brand and control? This would be far better suited as an open alternative to Synergy, though that will surely never be the case. (Maybe lay off the kool-aid next summer. This isn't a battle, it's a perception as a developer who comes from an open-tool, open-community centric background who found the stark difference of the Microsoft-stack community to be a bit behind the times. I love c-sharp and .NET, we don't need to be extreme about this.) edit: Further, upon more investigation, Garage doesn't even sound that great. It sounds like these projects are often rolled into MS properties (fine) but are otherwise only allowed to be released "every once in a while", only if there is "a lot of request from employees who want to be able to share it with their friends and families", according to this very article.
- xpaulbettsx 15y ago
  There's also the MSDN forums which are surprisingly good, despite their absolutely awful forum software
  - drivebyacct2 15y ago
    Again, it's purely anecdotal, but I've had more than one topic go without any reply, and one result in a Microsoft employee asking me to email logs. One of which was over 600MB in size, just from loading VS and after sending the email, I never heard back. I eventually gave up on that particular issue and took the only remaining option which was reimaging my machine. (A Microsoft produced and supported VS addon was causing errors in the .NET runtime that were uncaught and untraceable. Reinstallation of VS, SP1, and all installed version of the .NET runtime were futile). (funny, the parent reply was posted, my post was downvoted and shriphani's post were resurrected all within 30 seconds. Can't we just have a conversation about this without it being personal or political? I know you both work or have for Microsoft)
    - ryanmolden 15y ago
      >Again, it's purely anecdotal, but I've had more than one topic go without any reply, and one result in a Microsoft employee asking me to email logs. One of which was over 600MB in size, just from loading VS Yes, sometimes to trace down a problem dump files are necessary, and with full heap info they can be big. If you expect psychic debugging based on (often times) vague descriptions of your problems or a problem that they can't repro on their side, then you will be disappointed, then again with expectations like that I imagine you will be disappointed a lot in life from pretty much every software company you ever deal with. >A Microsoft produced and supported VS addon was causing errors in the .NET runtime that were uncaught and untraceable. This sounds...unlikely. Not because Microsoft produced AddOns can't possibly have bugs (of course they can), but saying something is 'uncaught and untraceable' is like saying there is a evil demon in your machine, it just doesn't stand to reason. Exceptions are exceptions are exceptions. Debuggers can and do catch them rather handily, if they didn't / couldn't they would be pretty much useless. I think a more accurate explanation would be 'I couldn't figure out how to diagnose the problem myself'. Without sources that is understandable as often times it is necessary to get to the root of the issue. >Reinstallation of VS, SP1, and all installed version of the .NET runtime were futile So you never solved the issue and continue to see it to this day? Or you just stopped using VS or this particular add-in all together?
drivebyacct2 15y ago
lol Are the downvotes because #win32 is comparable to #django, #python, etc? Or what exactly? No one bothered blessing me with a explanation for why I've been crucified here. What ever, this is sad.