4 ms·

Yep. Was a Microsoft dev from 1992 until 2017. Won’t touch them now because I spent my entire career rewriting rug pulls. It paid off a mortgage and fed me well

by ohgr 1y ago

Yep. Was a Microsoft dev from 1992 until 2017. Won’t touch them now because I spent my entire career rewriting rug pulls. It paid off a mortgage and fed me well but it was a bad outcome for my orgs and customers. If anyone remembers WCF/AppFabric/WWF and Silverlight, that was the last stack I rewrote someone out of the shit on.

Aloha 1y ago
I’m still dealing with the long goodbye of a silverlight app which now must be somehow ported.
- EasyMark 1y ago
  if there's an escape hatch you should probably use it. In my experience companies never support you during rewrites "well why don't you just convert the code to X language" almost never works on a huge project, it takes a ground up approach, and relying on the old stuff as "more like guidelines than the actual law"
  - Aloha 1y ago
    The escape hatch is OpenSilver basically. A clean rewrite isnt possible for a variety of business reasons.
mrj 1y ago
I started my career rewriting a product using Microsoft's DNA business server with Java and never looked back. I'm shocked this keeps happening, honestly. I guess I'm a "never again" sort but surprised there's not more companies refusing to deal with Microsoft. Due to experiences like that I refused to buy volume licenses from them, too. Sometime later I got an audit demand for which I had a reply ready. "lol, no."
- globnomulous 1y ago
  Sorry if I'm being dense, but what is an "audit demand?" (Looked it up and couldn't find anything obviously relevant.)
  - PeterStuer 1y ago
    I think he refers to Microsoft auditing a business' licence compliance. Have you aquired the correct amount of licenses for all the instances you are running and accessing. Microsoft licensing is so insanely complex that even if you ask 2 MS sales reps what licenses you need to cover a certain scenario, you will get a different answer each time. This is also why an audit almost 100% results in finding non-compliance. https://www.npifinancial.com/smartspend-bulletins/the-anatomy-of-a-microsoft-license-audit https://www.npifinancial.com/smartspend-bulletins/the-anatom...
  - bombcar 1y ago
    An Enterprise customer of Microsoft agrees to be audited by MS. In exchange they pay a certain amount for effectively “unlimited use” of the appropriate software. In the past this meant volume license keys that would always activate; wouldn’t count how many devices, etc. And MS audit would check that what you reported was what you had. And could result in big increases in contract pricing. Now that everything is cloud this and 365 that I don’t know how much it applies anymore - everything is dynamic and traceable. Famously in the early 2000s it was a huge issue for “medium” businesses who had used enterprise-style licensing. Tiny and small businesses just bought normal computers and software and would often escape notice.
    - sgerenser 1y ago
      That was one aspect of the auditing, but they also sent audit notices to random small and medium businesses who were not volume license customers. Basically fishing for license violations, which obviously were very common (and usually unintentional) back in the 90s and early 2000s. Things like installing windows XP or Office on multiple machines without buying extra licenses. AFAIK it was mainly a scare tactic to pressure companies into compliance and mostly just involved scary looking letters from a Microsoft-hired law firm.
aggieNick02 1y ago
There was a lot of hype and momentum around Silverlight back in the day, until their wasn't. You got a cross-platform (Mac/Windows) WPF-like UI and C# programming environment, which was powerful. I had the fortune to be involved developing the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 programming software. Under the hood, it was a small web browser shell (using Mono on Mac and WPF on Windows) around a Silverlight Out-of-Browser app. Anything beyond the permissions of the Silverlight app (e.g. bluetooth/USB comms) was an RPC from Silverlight to the shell. After completing the Mac/Windows app, LEGO wanted to deliver a similar experience on iPad. There was no Silverlight there, and it was clear there never would be. But we were able to leverage Xamarin stuff to reuse most of the same codebase, just with an iOS UI on top.
- zdimension 1y ago
  By chance, do you happen to know if the Mindstorms NXT (the old one, before EV3) software was based on the same toolkit? I always wondered what UI framework it used, it had an unusual look.
  - aggieNick02 1y ago
    It was not... it actually was, IIRC, a LabVIEW program with some tweaks here and there. The UI was basically a LabVIEW VI front panel with a LabVIEW 2D Picture Control. Most of the program logic and the compiler to the NXT was LabVIEW G code.
- bombcar 1y ago
  There was a hot minute (and it was about a minute!) where Silverlight was absolutely phenomenal. Too bad “every app is just a website” took over because of the cross-platform issues.
- aggieNick02 1y ago
  oof, :%s/their/there
int_19h 1y ago
Funnily enough, those ancient WPF, WinForms, and even MFC apps still compile and work fine. The rug pull only became the standard operating procedure at a certain point.
p_ing 1y ago
> WCF/AppFabric/WWF SharePoint Server Subscription Edition still uses those techs today.

by ohgr 1y ago

Aloha 1y ago

I’m still dealing with the long goodbye of a silverlight app which now must be somehow ported.

EasyMark 1y ago
if there's an escape hatch you should probably use it. In my experience companies never support you during rewrites "well why don't you just convert the code to X language" almost never works on a huge project, it takes a ground up approach, and relying on the old stuff as "more like guidelines than the actual law"
- Aloha 1y ago
  The escape hatch is OpenSilver basically. A clean rewrite isnt possible for a variety of business reasons.

mrj 1y ago

I started my career rewriting a product using Microsoft's DNA business server with Java and never looked back. I'm shocked this keeps happening, honestly. I guess I'm a "never again" sort but surprised there's not more companies refusing to deal with Microsoft. Due to experiences like that I refused to buy volume licenses from them, too. Sometime later I got an audit demand for which I had a reply ready. "lol, no."

globnomulous 1y ago
Sorry if I'm being dense, but what is an "audit demand?" (Looked it up and couldn't find anything obviously relevant.)
- PeterStuer 1y ago
  I think he refers to Microsoft auditing a business' licence compliance. Have you aquired the correct amount of licenses for all the instances you are running and accessing. Microsoft licensing is so insanely complex that even if you ask 2 MS sales reps what licenses you need to cover a certain scenario, you will get a different answer each time. This is also why an audit almost 100% results in finding non-compliance. https://www.npifinancial.com/smartspend-bulletins/the-anatomy-of-a-microsoft-license-audit https://www.npifinancial.com/smartspend-bulletins/the-anatom...
- bombcar 1y ago
  An Enterprise customer of Microsoft agrees to be audited by MS. In exchange they pay a certain amount for effectively “unlimited use” of the appropriate software. In the past this meant volume license keys that would always activate; wouldn’t count how many devices, etc. And MS audit would check that what you reported was what you had. And could result in big increases in contract pricing. Now that everything is cloud this and 365 that I don’t know how much it applies anymore - everything is dynamic and traceable. Famously in the early 2000s it was a huge issue for “medium” businesses who had used enterprise-style licensing. Tiny and small businesses just bought normal computers and software and would often escape notice.
  - sgerenser 1y ago
    That was one aspect of the auditing, but they also sent audit notices to random small and medium businesses who were not volume license customers. Basically fishing for license violations, which obviously were very common (and usually unintentional) back in the 90s and early 2000s. Things like installing windows XP or Office on multiple machines without buying extra licenses. AFAIK it was mainly a scare tactic to pressure companies into compliance and mostly just involved scary looking letters from a Microsoft-hired law firm.

aggieNick02 1y ago

There was a lot of hype and momentum around Silverlight back in the day, until their wasn't. You got a cross-platform (Mac/Windows) WPF-like UI and C# programming environment, which was powerful. I had the fortune to be involved developing the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 programming software. Under the hood, it was a small web browser shell (using Mono on Mac and WPF on Windows) around a Silverlight Out-of-Browser app. Anything beyond the permissions of the Silverlight app (e.g. bluetooth/USB comms) was an RPC from Silverlight to the shell. After completing the Mac/Windows app, LEGO wanted to deliver a similar experience on iPad. There was no Silverlight there, and it was clear there never would be. But we were able to leverage Xamarin stuff to reuse most of the same codebase, just with an iOS UI on top.

zdimension 1y ago
By chance, do you happen to know if the Mindstorms NXT (the old one, before EV3) software was based on the same toolkit? I always wondered what UI framework it used, it had an unusual look.
- aggieNick02 1y ago
  It was not... it actually was, IIRC, a LabVIEW program with some tweaks here and there. The UI was basically a LabVIEW VI front panel with a LabVIEW 2D Picture Control. Most of the program logic and the compiler to the NXT was LabVIEW G code.
bombcar 1y ago
There was a hot minute (and it was about a minute!) where Silverlight was absolutely phenomenal. Too bad “every app is just a website” took over because of the cross-platform issues.
aggieNick02 1y ago
oof, :%s/their/there

int_19h 1y ago

Funnily enough, those ancient WPF, WinForms, and even MFC apps still compile and work fine. The rug pull only became the standard operating procedure at a certain point.

p_ing 1y ago

> WCF/AppFabric/WWF SharePoint Server Subscription Edition still uses those techs today.