Okay, maybe Microsoft gets more business in Kazakhstan than in Iceland. Maybe.
But I still think Borat has something to do with this: the Microsoft EMEA Visual Studio reseller list has a special map cutout for Kazakhstan, while in the main map Iceland is not linked to anything.
There is a Microsoft Iceland; don’t they feel slighted by this?
Why so grumpy?
Regardless of the content of criticism, its presentation is inversely proportional in harshness to the perceived humanness of its target.
When you criticize what you perceive to be an opaque corporate wall, it is easy to get unnecessarily harsh and negative and ranty.
When you criticize what you perceive to be humans and their work, you may have exactly the same things to say, but you present them in a manner that is more balanced, more respectful/-able, and probably more useful.
(Well, many of us do.)
Probably for this reason, Microsoft gets more flak per unit of suckiness than other software companies.
Nobody is ever suckiness-free. Minimizing flak means both:
(Yeah, decorporatize is a word now. 127 results on Google say so.)
I suspect blogs.msdn.com was the best move Microsoft ever made to improve their image among developers.
Of course, releasing a stable, usable SCM would be an even better move. I hope TFS SP1 turns out to be that move.
You can choose to reboot now or later. Note that your computer may not function correctly until the reboot.
As far as I know, I did not agree to install any operating system updates.
If there weren’t any, why is a reboot necessary?
If there were, why wasn’t I told in advance?
My ongoing multi-hour installation stopped (without notification) to ask me, once again:
Do you want to install Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Explorer – ENU Service Pack 1 (KB926601) on Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Explorer – ENU?
“Gee, hey, I’m feeling wild, I think I’ll just skip this part of my 432MB installation, and see what breaks!”
Suggestion for future lengthy installations: either ask right at the beginning, or don’t ask at all.
By the way, what is it exactly that I am installing? What bugs did they fix? What improvements did they make?
Well, let’s find out. The download page says:
Additional details and known issues regarding this Service Pack can be found in Release Notes Knowledge base article 928957.
But click that link and you get “The Knowledge Base (KB) Article You Requested Is Currently Not Available”
So let’s try the KB article contained in the name of the service pack, KB926601.
Nope. “The Knowledge Base (KB) Article You Requested Is Currently Not Available”
Some companies have the guts to open up their bug database. I guess it makes business sense not to do so when you’re a 300 billion dollar lawsuit target. But that doesn’t make it any less customer-unfriendly.
—
Update: Brian Harry summarizes major new features and bug fixes in the TFS part of this service pack. Kudos to him … but this is almost three months old and there is no link to it from the download page or other pages about the service pack release. Why is this not done officially, and accessibly, and up-to-date, for the whole product?
Update 2: Brian Harry comments that it will be. They just haven’t finished the release notes yet.
Do you want to install Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Developers – ENU Service Pack 1 (KB926601) on Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Developers – ENU?
(Wait, didn’t it just finish doing that? Oh, nono, that wasn’t Team Edition for Software Developers, that was Premier Partner Edition. Silly me.)
After about 15 minutes, this installation is still at 50% of the step “Gathering required information.”
So it’s time for Moore’s law 2005 Premier Partner Edition for Software Developers – ENU Service Pack 1 RTM:
Every 18 months, the following metrics double:
Seems unprofessionally short and concise. A 432MB installation needs a more majestic name.
How about adding “Customer Technology Preview Limited Beta Release Candidate Ultimate Enterprise Communication Expression Interactive Presentation Foundation” at the end?
And maybe sprinkle in a few ™s and ®s? The crowd loves those.
Update: As an afterthought, I think I’ll add a couple of ☺ ☺ smileys here. This blog series ended up getting terribly negative!
If that were ever true, you wouldn’t see it.
My current software installation has been saying that for about three minutes now.
Yeah, Team Foundation again.
When we started using Subversion at work (AnkhSVN in alpha and no VisualSVN yet), I managed Subversion adds and commits and updates manually using the excellent TortoiseSVN, and left Visual Studio out of it.
The downside of that was moving and renaming files. Doing it in Visual Studio left Subversion unaware of the change, and doing it in Subversion left Visual Studio unaware of the change. Either way, one of them ended up seeing one file missing, and another file popping up that they knew nothing about.
Generally I renamed in Subversion and then manually edited the .csproj project file accordingly. Not everybody is happy doing that, and if you happen to do it when Visual Studio has unsaved changes to the project file, then it gets a little messy.
So moving to Team Foundation (and hence SCM integration) should have made file renames less painful.
Indeed, renaming a file is now a single operation in Solution Explorer. But it takes a full minute.
I’m not pulling that number out of anywhere dark and unhygienic. I measured just now. 78 seconds.
78 seconds renaming a file!
Okay, two files. It’s a workflow class file with a .Designer.cs sidecar file. But still. Renaming one file took 38 seconds, measured just now.
38 seconds renaming a file!
And these are files that haven’t even been checked in yet. They’ve just been added. And it’s not auto-updating references to the class name in my solution, because there aren’t any.
It’s like that every time, even late at night when I’m alone in the building. It’s not because of load. Team Foundation is set up on a virtual machine in one of my company’s VMware container machines a dedicated monster machine with 6 CPUs and silly amounts of RAM, serving maybe 60 or so developers. Our Subversion server was a wee VMware machine also running Trac and some other stuff, and was plenty fast enough (but to be fair, it was only serving about 15 people). Our admins assure us that the machine is not overloaded. If it’s a matter of “killing it with iron,” then TF sure needs a heck of a lot of iron.
The clincher: it took me less time to do the rename manually (flipping out to Explorer, renaming in TortoiseSVN, editing the project file in a text editor, reloading the project in Visual Studio) than it now takes Visual Studio to do the rename automatically.
And, of course, Visual Studio is completely locked up during the operation, so my work gets to wait. Because, you know, background operations are just too much to ask.
OK, I feel better now. Just had to vent. Sorry.