9 ms·

Interestingly enough there is a point at which I thought Microsoft was really going to hit some home runs not all that long ago. Since then though the trifecta

by zainny 13y ago

Interestingly enough there is a point at which I thought Microsoft was really going to hit some home runs not all that long ago. Since then though the trifecta of Windows Phone 8, Windows 8, and Xbox One has turned me away from their entire product line. Combined with my own movements over the years towards open source desktop software and web applications (Google Docs, etc.) and Microsoft barely rates a mention in my world on a day to day basis. In short there is nothing Microsoft is doing now that is of interest to me.

hboon 13y ago
I'm not a fan of most of their products, but I've heard good things about Azure, even for Linux hosting. Disclosure: I was at Microsoft for a couple of months due to an acquisition.
- zainny 13y ago
  I did actually try Azure about a year ago - I built a few WP7 apps (just to see what the platform was all about) and used Azure as the back-end for one. While I didn't have a bad experience, I also didn't find anything particularly compelling about it compared to the competition (though I admittedly used it in a very simple capacity).
- kryten 13y ago
  I find the actual process of deploying stuff to Azure very costly and terribly slow. If something doesn't work as intended on Azure, your turnaround time is quite high. This is far too common a problem as well as the development services they offer for local dev aren't 100% the same as the target environment.
  - pm 13y ago
    Not to mention things like no automatic logging, no automatic HTTPS, 20-60 minute deploy times, unstable dev tools. I've dealt with the quirks of MVC4 which I grew accustomed to, but the other problems are making deploying a solution (something I'm trying to do now) very painful.
    - JoshGlazebrook 13y ago
      I think you have to keep in mind Azure is not just a PaaS (which of course is still in beta as websites) It's has an IaaS equivalent of EC2.
      - daliusd 13y ago
        But PaaS is what sells it to me as developer who can show something cool to his management. Now you say that I should drop all PaaS benefits? Why not start with EC2 from the start?
      - pm 13y ago
        If I wanted to do IaaS I would have done so already, and most likely on EC2. However, I don't want to spend time doing devops, which is what makes PaaS so attractive in the first place. Actually the true PaaS is Cloud Services, which we've integrated along with the queues and tables. It's definitely not in beta - it's been out for quite some time. Most of my PaaS experience comes mostly with App Engine, which I liked as a platform (save for the odd quirk). When I first signed up with Azure, I was blown away by how good the interface looked compared to App Engine. However, over time as we've developed a non-trivial but not overly complex (internal) service, I found many things that I took for granted on App Engine had to be coded from the ground up on Azure (namely, logging and HTTPS). Who writes a cloud platform thinking that logging is not important, and instead gives me a dashboard with pretty graphs with information no-one ever uses? Instead you have a separate Diagnostics module which intermittently works and then the best you can do is store as a blob or to a table, which must then be read out with another tool. Which you need to write yourself, or Azure Storage Explorer, a bare-bones table reading tool on CodePlex. Then there's the crown jewel of the Azure clusterfuck, the Azure emulator. Deploys take anywhere between 20-60 minutes, after coming from App Engine's 30 second deploys (they used to take about 2 minutes to upload and begin serving - the difference it makes is astounding in being able to keep in flow). If there's no way around that time, then your local dev tools need to be rock fucking solid, because if you deploy, you want to make sure that you've got all those really dumb mistakes out the way. Instead, random roles intermittently stop logging, and the Azure emulator craps out with random shit after a few Build and Runs. So then it's time to restart. That's if VS2012 doesn't suddenly decide to hang when I right click on the Solution name to publish, after which it comes up with the most bizarre message "VS is currently completing an action - you'll have to wait" (paraphrased). It never does finish so Ctrl-Alt-Esc we go, kill the process... except the process still hangs around. So you restart and you end up with the same problem, except you now get another process of VS chewing through 180Mb of RAM for no reason. Okay, time to restart. I've had my issues with the App Engine tools running on OS X (mainly a really odd issue with pytz, and the single-threaded local webserver which was slow as shit until 1.7.6), but I've only had to restart my computer a handful of times in a year and a half of development. Two months in Windows and I'm restarting 5 times a day. After dealing with all that, the annoyance generated by every other minor issue becomes magnified by an order of magnitude, and you begin to ask yourself, who the fuck is designing this shit? ASP.NET MVC4 ApiController. At it's most basic settings it allows you to do REST. You get model binding on static objects, which is good for the most basic of validation. There are a billion tutorials on how to specify routing rules so you can specify "/api/objects/" or if you're being adventurous, "/api/objects/action", because that's all you'll ever need. There's a whole heap of magic, but it's the wrong fucking magic. Aaron Swartz showed the world how to do this in 2005 with web.py, it's not rocket science. To make development bearable, I have to add an insane amount of NuGet packages. You end up with masterpieces like AttributeRouting, for which I could never thank the author enough, but I shouldn't need to add a package to get sane routing. And model binding? The moment I move from static objects, it breaks. Looks like you need to write your own custom fucking model binder now (although I may not have to - still looking into it - Scott Hanselmann had a blog post about it somewhere). Oh, and sending something as JSON? Microsoft were at least smart enough to add in JSON.NET over their own overengineered mess, and yet somehow I still need reams of code just to be able to send an object as JSON. Just restrict the damn types to JSON types when you send it and be done with it! I don't want to type three pages to send serialised text when in Python all I have to do is json.dumps()! In all this mess, the reason we went with Azure is because we have to connect to Exchange and Microsoft were smart enough to put out the EWS (Exchange Web Services) Managed API, which is actually works as intended. It was either that or write a SOAP handler in Python for the 5 different Exchange schemas (which are similar but not exactly the same). In the end dealing with Azure and not having to maintain an internal Exchange library is worth the trouble (but not by much).
- bergie 13y ago
  I don't know if that has improved, but at least a year ago their Linux servers were awfully unreliable. Shame, I really loved the idea of having Microsoft host my Linux systems ;-)
- obtino 13y ago
  > I'm not a fan of most of their products, but I've heard good things about Azure, even for Linux hosting. I have to agree on Azure. It's simply amazing for Linux VM hosting. I urge everyone to try it (whether you like MS or not). The UI for this service is simply amazing!
  - riskable 13y ago
    You actually use the UI? I've been using Rackspace and AWS for a while (years?) now and I can't say I've logged into their web interfaces much at all. Not in months, for sure. How's their API? Can I whip up (and down) servers and DNS from a Python script in a few minutes? That's what I do with AWS and Rackspace and franky, I won't use a cloud provider that doesn't give me that power. Automation is critical for any use of the cloud these days.
    - jmcqk6 13y ago
      Their UI is actually just a wrapper around their API, so while I haven't used Azure, I believe the answer to this is yes. Microsoft also publishes Node/javascript bindings to their API.
sn0v 13y ago
Sure, WP8 has its quirks but I don't think it's all that bad? The interface is clean, the OS is smooth and the app store has quite a few useful apps (although a few major ones are still missing).
- joshka 13y ago
  Many would disagree (about being bad) http://windowsphone.uservoice.com/ http://windowsphone.uservoice.com/ Most apps have significant issues and causes for regular frustration.
- precisioncoder 13y ago
  I've heard that what you say above is possible with the right third party apps but after trying it out I decided that it's Vista 2.0. Vista had good things going for it but they were cancelled out by the annoying features. IMO win7 is the best release Microsoft has ever made and I wouldn't be surprised if it had the same long lifespan as winXP while win8 languishes in obscurity. With the strides gaming has been making on Linux though I'm really hoping that I can make a permanent switch at some point soon.
  - skrebbel 13y ago
    He said WP8, so Windows Phone 8.
    - precisioncoder 13y ago
      Thanks, misread that
venomsnake 13y ago
Microsoft had all the cards to win the device war. But they forgot what made them win the PC war. They tried to emulate apple while forgetting that people that bought into apple ideology already had apple. If the W8 arm was unlocked it would have been a big winner. WP7 just needed fast moving instead of stagnation and they almost got everything right with the original xbox and X360 in the beginning. But I am moving away from microsoft right now even as a desktop. Arch with KDE is almost as good. There is surprising gaming support and the only real show stopper is the terrible fonts in JetBrains products.
- archivator 13y ago
  Slightly offtopic but can you point me to a description of said font issues? My Android Studio (IDEA) fonts seem fine (on latest Kubuntu and Fedora w/ KDE).
  - SamColes 13y ago
    IDEA-57233 Editor font antialising/appearance problems on Linux http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-57233 http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-57233
    - stoolpigeon 13y ago
      I had huge issues with swing fonts. Bad enough that I bought a couple jetbrains products that I wasn't using at all. Then when the Android Studio came out I installed it just to look at it and noticed it looked good. I fired up my other swing stuff and saw noticeable improvement. This is on Fedora 18 (64 bit if it matters, KDE is my desktop) with the Oracle JVM. I don't know what changed - if it was something in Fedora, Java or what - but I'm pretty happy with how things look now, whereas before I couldn't stand it. I tried all the java switches and what not to no avail - but now it just works. All that said, KDevelop has made such great strides I can see it becoming my primary environment for all my development.
    - timrichard 13y ago
      Hi, have you tried the AAHack plugin? It made a difference for me when running IDEA on Arch/Gnome.
facorreia 13y ago
You might want to look at System Center 2012 R2 and SQL Server 2014. There's some impressive technology there.
RyanMcGreal 13y ago
Every Microsoft debacle peels off a few more users. I grew up on DOS as a kid and rode the Microsoft train through Windows 3.1, Win95, Win98SE, Win2K and WinXP but jumped ship to Ubuntu in 2008 after everyone had a chance to see just how bad Vista was. I was also increasingly conscious of the cultural shift in Microsoft: away from a legendary fidelity to API stability and toward an ever-shifting grab bag of disposable fashions and fads, starting with the compatibility break from VB6 to VB.NET.
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  My impression is that Linux is not some weard system that nobody uses anymore. Now it's a weard system that this or that person uses because they like to be different for difference sakeness. I wonder how many more users Linux must gain untill people perceive it as something normal that they can just use.
  - jmcqk6 13y ago
    >I wonder how many more users Linux must gain untill people perceive it as something normal that they can just use. If that happens, it will happen after the people no longer notice what OS they're using and don't even know that they are using Linux (E.g. android, chromebook, etc).
  - RyanMcGreal 13y ago
    I can't tell whether you're being facetious.
    - breckinloggins 13y ago
      No, I can see that evolution as well. I started playing with Linux in 1993-95 era and in that time it has gone from something you could only get if you went somewhere geeky and found a table with Slackware CDs on it, to something that the geeks knew about but no one else did, to "that hacker thing I've heard my geek friend talk about", to "that alternative OS that also runs on my cable box and I hear it has something to do with Android", and finally to "yeah my friend runs that cuz he hates MS and Windows". In other words, it's true that to the average person, it's still kinda 'weird', but SO many more people know about it now and seem to always have "a geek friend that runs it" that I also wonder if we are approaching some kind of critical user mass. If we get more Steam games on Linux, I can see this happening MUCH quicker.

by zainny 13y ago

hboon 13y ago

I'm not a fan of most of their products, but I've heard good things about Azure, even for Linux hosting. Disclosure: I was at Microsoft for a couple of months due to an acquisition.

zainny 13y ago
I did actually try Azure about a year ago - I built a few WP7 apps (just to see what the platform was all about) and used Azure as the back-end for one. While I didn't have a bad experience, I also didn't find anything particularly compelling about it compared to the competition (though I admittedly used it in a very simple capacity).
kryten 13y ago
I find the actual process of deploying stuff to Azure very costly and terribly slow. If something doesn't work as intended on Azure, your turnaround time is quite high. This is far too common a problem as well as the development services they offer for local dev aren't 100% the same as the target environment.
- pm 13y ago
  Not to mention things like no automatic logging, no automatic HTTPS, 20-60 minute deploy times, unstable dev tools. I've dealt with the quirks of MVC4 which I grew accustomed to, but the other problems are making deploying a solution (something I'm trying to do now) very painful.
  - JoshGlazebrook 13y ago
    I think you have to keep in mind Azure is not just a PaaS (which of course is still in beta as websites) It's has an IaaS equivalent of EC2.
    - daliusd 13y ago
      But PaaS is what sells it to me as developer who can show something cool to his management. Now you say that I should drop all PaaS benefits? Why not start with EC2 from the start?
    - pm 13y ago
      If I wanted to do IaaS I would have done so already, and most likely on EC2. However, I don't want to spend time doing devops, which is what makes PaaS so attractive in the first place. Actually the true PaaS is Cloud Services, which we've integrated along with the queues and tables. It's definitely not in beta - it's been out for quite some time. Most of my PaaS experience comes mostly with App Engine, which I liked as a platform (save for the odd quirk). When I first signed up with Azure, I was blown away by how good the interface looked compared to App Engine. However, over time as we've developed a non-trivial but not overly complex (internal) service, I found many things that I took for granted on App Engine had to be coded from the ground up on Azure (namely, logging and HTTPS). Who writes a cloud platform thinking that logging is not important, and instead gives me a dashboard with pretty graphs with information no-one ever uses? Instead you have a separate Diagnostics module which intermittently works and then the best you can do is store as a blob or to a table, which must then be read out with another tool. Which you need to write yourself, or Azure Storage Explorer, a bare-bones table reading tool on CodePlex. Then there's the crown jewel of the Azure clusterfuck, the Azure emulator. Deploys take anywhere between 20-60 minutes, after coming from App Engine's 30 second deploys (they used to take about 2 minutes to upload and begin serving - the difference it makes is astounding in being able to keep in flow). If there's no way around that time, then your local dev tools need to be rock fucking solid, because if you deploy, you want to make sure that you've got all those really dumb mistakes out the way. Instead, random roles intermittently stop logging, and the Azure emulator craps out with random shit after a few Build and Runs. So then it's time to restart. That's if VS2012 doesn't suddenly decide to hang when I right click on the Solution name to publish, after which it comes up with the most bizarre message "VS is currently completing an action - you'll have to wait" (paraphrased). It never does finish so Ctrl-Alt-Esc we go, kill the process... except the process still hangs around. So you restart and you end up with the same problem, except you now get another process of VS chewing through 180Mb of RAM for no reason. Okay, time to restart. I've had my issues with the App Engine tools running on OS X (mainly a really odd issue with pytz, and the single-threaded local webserver which was slow as shit until 1.7.6), but I've only had to restart my computer a handful of times in a year and a half of development. Two months in Windows and I'm restarting 5 times a day. After dealing with all that, the annoyance generated by every other minor issue becomes magnified by an order of magnitude, and you begin to ask yourself, who the fuck is designing this shit? ASP.NET MVC4 ApiController. At it's most basic settings it allows you to do REST. You get model binding on static objects, which is good for the most basic of validation. There are a billion tutorials on how to specify routing rules so you can specify "/api/objects/" or if you're being adventurous, "/api/objects/action", because that's all you'll ever need. There's a whole heap of magic, but it's the wrong fucking magic. Aaron Swartz showed the world how to do this in 2005 with web.py, it's not rocket science. To make development bearable, I have to add an insane amount of NuGet packages. You end up with masterpieces like AttributeRouting, for which I could never thank the author enough, but I shouldn't need to add a package to get sane routing. And model binding? The moment I move from static objects, it breaks. Looks like you need to write your own custom fucking model binder now (although I may not have to - still looking into it - Scott Hanselmann had a blog post about it somewhere). Oh, and sending something as JSON? Microsoft were at least smart enough to add in JSON.NET over their own overengineered mess, and yet somehow I still need reams of code just to be able to send an object as JSON. Just restrict the damn types to JSON types when you send it and be done with it! I don't want to type three pages to send serialised text when in Python all I have to do is json.dumps()! In all this mess, the reason we went with Azure is because we have to connect to Exchange and Microsoft were smart enough to put out the EWS (Exchange Web Services) Managed API, which is actually works as intended. It was either that or write a SOAP handler in Python for the 5 different Exchange schemas (which are similar but not exactly the same). In the end dealing with Azure and not having to maintain an internal Exchange library is worth the trouble (but not by much).
bergie 13y ago
I don't know if that has improved, but at least a year ago their Linux servers were awfully unreliable. Shame, I really loved the idea of having Microsoft host my Linux systems ;-)
obtino 13y ago
> I'm not a fan of most of their products, but I've heard good things about Azure, even for Linux hosting. I have to agree on Azure. It's simply amazing for Linux VM hosting. I urge everyone to try it (whether you like MS or not). The UI for this service is simply amazing!
- riskable 13y ago
  You actually use the UI? I've been using Rackspace and AWS for a while (years?) now and I can't say I've logged into their web interfaces much at all. Not in months, for sure. How's their API? Can I whip up (and down) servers and DNS from a Python script in a few minutes? That's what I do with AWS and Rackspace and franky, I won't use a cloud provider that doesn't give me that power. Automation is critical for any use of the cloud these days.
  - jmcqk6 13y ago
    Their UI is actually just a wrapper around their API, so while I haven't used Azure, I believe the answer to this is yes. Microsoft also publishes Node/javascript bindings to their API.

sn0v 13y ago

Sure, WP8 has its quirks but I don't think it's all that bad? The interface is clean, the OS is smooth and the app store has quite a few useful apps (although a few major ones are still missing).

joshka 13y ago
Many would disagree (about being bad) http://windowsphone.uservoice.com/ http://windowsphone.uservoice.com/ Most apps have significant issues and causes for regular frustration.
precisioncoder 13y ago
I've heard that what you say above is possible with the right third party apps but after trying it out I decided that it's Vista 2.0. Vista had good things going for it but they were cancelled out by the annoying features. IMO win7 is the best release Microsoft has ever made and I wouldn't be surprised if it had the same long lifespan as winXP while win8 languishes in obscurity. With the strides gaming has been making on Linux though I'm really hoping that I can make a permanent switch at some point soon.
- skrebbel 13y ago
  He said WP8, so Windows Phone 8.
  - precisioncoder 13y ago
    Thanks, misread that

venomsnake 13y ago

Microsoft had all the cards to win the device war. But they forgot what made them win the PC war. They tried to emulate apple while forgetting that people that bought into apple ideology already had apple. If the W8 arm was unlocked it would have been a big winner. WP7 just needed fast moving instead of stagnation and they almost got everything right with the original xbox and X360 in the beginning. But I am moving away from microsoft right now even as a desktop. Arch with KDE is almost as good. There is surprising gaming support and the only real show stopper is the terrible fonts in JetBrains products.

archivator 13y ago
Slightly offtopic but can you point me to a description of said font issues? My Android Studio (IDEA) fonts seem fine (on latest Kubuntu and Fedora w/ KDE).
- SamColes 13y ago
  IDEA-57233 Editor font antialising/appearance problems on Linux http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-57233 http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-57233
  - stoolpigeon 13y ago
    I had huge issues with swing fonts. Bad enough that I bought a couple jetbrains products that I wasn't using at all. Then when the Android Studio came out I installed it just to look at it and noticed it looked good. I fired up my other swing stuff and saw noticeable improvement. This is on Fedora 18 (64 bit if it matters, KDE is my desktop) with the Oracle JVM. I don't know what changed - if it was something in Fedora, Java or what - but I'm pretty happy with how things look now, whereas before I couldn't stand it. I tried all the java switches and what not to no avail - but now it just works. All that said, KDevelop has made such great strides I can see it becoming my primary environment for all my development.
  - timrichard 13y ago
    Hi, have you tried the AAHack plugin? It made a difference for me when running IDEA on Arch/Gnome.

facorreia 13y ago

You might want to look at System Center 2012 R2 and SQL Server 2014. There's some impressive technology there.

RyanMcGreal 13y ago

Every Microsoft debacle peels off a few more users. I grew up on DOS as a kid and rode the Microsoft train through Windows 3.1, Win95, Win98SE, Win2K and WinXP but jumped ship to Ubuntu in 2008 after everyone had a chance to see just how bad Vista was. I was also increasingly conscious of the cultural shift in Microsoft: away from a legendary fidelity to API stability and toward an ever-shifting grab bag of disposable fashions and fads, starting with the compatibility break from VB6 to VB.NET.

marcosdumay 13y ago
My impression is that Linux is not some weard system that nobody uses anymore. Now it's a weard system that this or that person uses because they like to be different for difference sakeness. I wonder how many more users Linux must gain untill people perceive it as something normal that they can just use.
- jmcqk6 13y ago
  >I wonder how many more users Linux must gain untill people perceive it as something normal that they can just use. If that happens, it will happen after the people no longer notice what OS they're using and don't even know that they are using Linux (E.g. android, chromebook, etc).
- RyanMcGreal 13y ago
  I can't tell whether you're being facetious.
  - breckinloggins 13y ago
    No, I can see that evolution as well. I started playing with Linux in 1993-95 era and in that time it has gone from something you could only get if you went somewhere geeky and found a table with Slackware CDs on it, to something that the geeks knew about but no one else did, to "that hacker thing I've heard my geek friend talk about", to "that alternative OS that also runs on my cable box and I hear it has something to do with Android", and finally to "yeah my friend runs that cuz he hates MS and Windows". In other words, it's true that to the average person, it's still kinda 'weird', but SO many more people know about it now and seem to always have "a geek friend that runs it" that I also wonder if we are approaching some kind of critical user mass. If we get more Steam games on Linux, I can see this happening MUCH quicker.