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Nobody is suggesting Microsoft is the only company that deprecates and drops development technologies. But Microsoft is a chronic, habitual offender. It's a po
by Legion 14y ago
Nobody is suggesting Microsoft is the only company that deprecates and drops development technologies.
But Microsoft is a chronic, habitual offender. It's a point of routine at MS rather than an occasional occurrence.
- moolcool 14y agoWhen they're not innovating, it's a problem. When they're throwing things against the wall to see what sticks, it's a problem too. I feel like they really can't win here. Is XNA really that far off from other Microsoft platforms anyway?
- eropple 14y agoIt's not. You can transition to DirectX in a couple of weekends. You can transition to OpenGL (which I would call a better move) in a week or two. The principles are all the same, everywhere you go. The names change and the exact implementation details differ, but it's the same stuff with a different hat.
- Legion 14y ago> When they're not innovating, it's a problem. When they're throwing things against the wall to see what sticks, it's a problem too. I feel like they really can't win here. There's perhaps some truth to that, but they could handle things so much better. Some of these technologies should perhaps be in perpetual beta or something, until they decide they're going to support it long-term. The problem is that Microsoft flogs them as the blessed platform, puts out the rallying cry for all developers to come running and use this cool new thing, and then drops them like a bad habit.
- benologist 14y agoThere are always winners, losers and progress. It's fair to be skeptical about MS's future but it's only habitual because they've been at it 3 decades.
- niggler 14y ago" Microsoft is a chronic, habitual offender" I actually can't think of a case as bad as Apple axing the Xserve line and telling people to use mac minis and mac pros in a rack.
- bunderbunder 14y agoMuch worse: LINQ to SQL. Long story short: Microsoft realized that Entity Framework was taking longer than expected. But they really wanted an ORM to ship with LINQ. So they took a smaller mini-ORM project that was really written for testing LINQ and was never intended for production, hastily dressed it up, and pushed it onto the market as a stopgap. Entity Framework was still happening, mind you - Microsoft never actually planned to support LINQ to SQL long-term. But they never really mentioned that was their plan. So a great many developers had already written data access layers based on it by the time Microsoft announced they were going to stop supporting it approximately 11 months after it was initially released.