5 ms·

It's going to take a hell of a lot from MS in order to have someone like me buy back in. I'll present one of the other perspectives. I was all-Microsoft, from

by NDizzle 13y ago

It's going to take a hell of a lot from MS in order to have someone like me buy back in. I'll present one of the other perspectives. I was all-Microsoft, from MS DOS up through Windows Server 2003. Late 90s MCSE, nothing but MS. Most of my time was spent building and maintaining NT4.0 installations and then migrating to 2000. I got tired of keeping pace with the amount of changes in all of the services somewhere between Server 2003 and Server 2008 and have since jumped ship. Now I use entirely open source software and a mix of AWS instances and dedicated servers in various parts of the country for heavy lifting. (I work with multiple small companies rather than one large company that would benefit from the perfect AWS deployment.) This is after having spent time and personally maintained dozens of machines in half a dozen different data centers stretching back to 1998. It's going to take a hell of a lot.

csmithuk 13y ago
I did the opposite. I was a Unix/netware guy for years. Netware fell off a cliff and so did commercial Unix. Left me with Linux and FreeBSD. Whilst I rather like FreeBSD, when I have to throw an architecture together that will survive over a decade, Microsoft wins every time. They're the only company which provides certainty. RedHat are close but their support sucks.
- acqq 13y ago
  I'm sorry but I just can't believe you're real. Red Hat has the most stable (measued in the years of support without the change in the underlying technologies) OS configurations of all commercial offerings. What was that that you got better supported from Microsoft than from Red Hat? Specifics please.
  - csmithuk 13y ago
    Actually no. We get 13-14 years out of Microsoft offerings which is enough lead time for test, provisioning and an 8-10 year lifecycle. Plus due to overlap we have enough time to test v.next. With respect to support you get a very narrow configuration of supported software and hardware with RH. Keeping it rolling isn't as easy as it looks. The developer support is awful as well. Documentation is shitty,you're tied to C++/JDK versions that are ancient etc. Also no MSDN, no partner support (which is pretty awesome). My few dealings with RedHat support have left us without a solution. For ref - platforms: Exchange, Windows Server, IIS, SQL Server (the latter I've got an installation that has been cleanly upgraded since 1996 though TWO versions)
    - gnaffle 13y ago
      How are you any more tied to old JDK versions on Linux, compared to Microsoft? Also, I'm curious to what requirements you have that makes it OK to upgrade hardware and apply service packs and Java updates, but not to do OS release upgrades on Linux?
      - csmithuk 13y ago
        There are no supported versions by RedHat other than that which ships with the OS distribution. To get a recent JDK we then have to deal with Oracle as well and the cost goes right up. With the CLR and Microsoft there is one point of call under one contract. Plus no one wants to deal with Oracle. Hardware isn't upgraded. It's replaced when it fails. It's easier to get hardware off the shelf that is certified for Windows Server (any version!). This is particularly true on the tail end of a product lifecycle. The OS upgrades in Linux are usually utterly painful (Debian included). If you go with CentOS/RH, you have to do this every 5 years at average due to the API churn in Linux distributions[1]. You need to get your developers on there ASAP. With Service Packs and Java updates, a simple test cycle will suffice as they don't break the API contracts. They promise this and deliver. [1] The kernel syscall interface is fine but major versions of Apache, glibc and compilers and anything even vaguely related to client-side stuff is a PITA.
        72deluxe 13y ago
        I had to upgrade a machine running an old version of Slackware on the 2.0 kernel. Yes, from about 1999 I think. It was impossible to get that Perl web system running on anything modern without massive pain. For the wonderful bliss of Linux-land, at least with Windows you know that something written 20 years ago will probably still work. (Yes, I know - they shouldn't have written it in Perl)
        draegtun 13y ago
        If it had been written in some other scripting language then I'd guess you would have had even more issues upgrading! Because Perl, despite all its supposed warts & bad image, remains highly backward compatible. NB. The biggest issues I've seen in upgrading are modules that use C libraries (unfortunately things do change over time!). As an example I'm still running a Perl web system & data munging backend that I wrote back in 2001 with only minor tweaks over the years for new/modern systems.
spiderPig 13y ago
That doesn't sound like a good habit to have in this industry, things change and software evolves. Android's first few versions sucked..a lot for instance. Heck, most the of the early versions of OSS suck. Are you saying there should be a constant rate of change? If you're a programmer, you should really try coding on Visual Studio 2012/.NET/F# and C#. It's a breeze. Very smooth compared to Eclipse.
- gnaffle 13y ago
  How is it compared to IntelliJ?
  - sz4kerto 13y ago
    It's different. On Windows, it has brilliant debugging capabilities. IntelliJ is maybe the best general-purpose IDE out there, so even being comparable to IntelliJ is a big feat.
  - danieldk 13y ago
    I am not a Windows user or developer. But JetBrain's Resharper brings much of IntelliJ's refactoring support to Visual Studio.
  - efdee 13y ago
    For fans of IntelliJ, there is the Resharper plugin (from the same guys) that brings over much of the refactorings, quickfixes and other features that you know and love from IntelliJ.

by NDizzle 13y ago

csmithuk 13y ago

I did the opposite. I was a Unix/netware guy for years. Netware fell off a cliff and so did commercial Unix. Left me with Linux and FreeBSD. Whilst I rather like FreeBSD, when I have to throw an architecture together that will survive over a decade, Microsoft wins every time. They're the only company which provides certainty. RedHat are close but their support sucks.

acqq 13y ago
I'm sorry but I just can't believe you're real. Red Hat has the most stable (measued in the years of support without the change in the underlying technologies) OS configurations of all commercial offerings. What was that that you got better supported from Microsoft than from Red Hat? Specifics please.
- csmithuk 13y ago
  Actually no. We get 13-14 years out of Microsoft offerings which is enough lead time for test, provisioning and an 8-10 year lifecycle. Plus due to overlap we have enough time to test v.next. With respect to support you get a very narrow configuration of supported software and hardware with RH. Keeping it rolling isn't as easy as it looks. The developer support is awful as well. Documentation is shitty,you're tied to C++/JDK versions that are ancient etc. Also no MSDN, no partner support (which is pretty awesome). My few dealings with RedHat support have left us without a solution. For ref - platforms: Exchange, Windows Server, IIS, SQL Server (the latter I've got an installation that has been cleanly upgraded since 1996 though TWO versions)
  - gnaffle 13y ago
    How are you any more tied to old JDK versions on Linux, compared to Microsoft? Also, I'm curious to what requirements you have that makes it OK to upgrade hardware and apply service packs and Java updates, but not to do OS release upgrades on Linux?
    - csmithuk 13y ago
      There are no supported versions by RedHat other than that which ships with the OS distribution. To get a recent JDK we then have to deal with Oracle as well and the cost goes right up. With the CLR and Microsoft there is one point of call under one contract. Plus no one wants to deal with Oracle. Hardware isn't upgraded. It's replaced when it fails. It's easier to get hardware off the shelf that is certified for Windows Server (any version!). This is particularly true on the tail end of a product lifecycle. The OS upgrades in Linux are usually utterly painful (Debian included). If you go with CentOS/RH, you have to do this every 5 years at average due to the API churn in Linux distributions[1]. You need to get your developers on there ASAP. With Service Packs and Java updates, a simple test cycle will suffice as they don't break the API contracts. They promise this and deliver. [1] The kernel syscall interface is fine but major versions of Apache, glibc and compilers and anything even vaguely related to client-side stuff is a PITA.
      - 72deluxe 13y ago
        I had to upgrade a machine running an old version of Slackware on the 2.0 kernel. Yes, from about 1999 I think. It was impossible to get that Perl web system running on anything modern without massive pain. For the wonderful bliss of Linux-land, at least with Windows you know that something written 20 years ago will probably still work. (Yes, I know - they shouldn't have written it in Perl)
        draegtun 13y ago
        If it had been written in some other scripting language then I'd guess you would have had even more issues upgrading! Because Perl, despite all its supposed warts & bad image, remains highly backward compatible. NB. The biggest issues I've seen in upgrading are modules that use C libraries (unfortunately things do change over time!). As an example I'm still running a Perl web system & data munging backend that I wrote back in 2001 with only minor tweaks over the years for new/modern systems.

spiderPig 13y ago

That doesn't sound like a good habit to have in this industry, things change and software evolves. Android's first few versions sucked..a lot for instance. Heck, most the of the early versions of OSS suck. Are you saying there should be a constant rate of change? If you're a programmer, you should really try coding on Visual Studio 2012/.NET/F# and C#. It's a breeze. Very smooth compared to Eclipse.

gnaffle 13y ago
How is it compared to IntelliJ?
- sz4kerto 13y ago
  It's different. On Windows, it has brilliant debugging capabilities. IntelliJ is maybe the best general-purpose IDE out there, so even being comparable to IntelliJ is a big feat.
- danieldk 13y ago
  I am not a Windows user or developer. But JetBrain's Resharper brings much of IntelliJ's refactoring support to Visual Studio.
- efdee 13y ago
  For fans of IntelliJ, there is the Resharper plugin (from the same guys) that brings over much of the refactorings, quickfixes and other features that you know and love from IntelliJ.