Addendum 1 to Lists Of Microsoft's Fame And Shame - 2008

by Jon 4/19/2008 10:27:00 AM

After posting my blog article, "Lists of Microsoft's Fame and Shame - 2008", I knew going in that there were some things I was going to miss, on both sides (fame and shame).

There's one thing that I'm a little disgusted with myself for forgetting, and that is:

Shame:

  • SVN (Subversion)
    • Nothing makes it seem to the software community more so than SVN that Microsoft "knows" software from only the confines of their own innovations and culture. On this technology alone, it sometimes seems like they live in a box and engineer in a cave.
    • Visual Source Safe is not version control. It's change control. The difference is as much cultural as it is functional; think a bunch of productive engineers in an agile group ("update", "OK, merged"), versus a bunch of wedgie-suffering tightwads in a red tape overwhelmed corporation ("can you please check that in so I can edit some of the code?")
    • I tried and failed to install Team Foundation Server three times and never got it right. The list of steps is a full page long, and each step takes several minutes of installing stuff -- set up Windows, figuring out whether or not to set up Active Directory, set up SQL Server Std. (not any version but Standard!), set up Windows SharePoint (don't confuse it with Office SharePoint! Don't confuse the version number!), optionally configure SharePonit for Active Directory, etc., etc. In the end, I always had something up and running, but when I would go load the SharePoint intance up in a web browser it would give me some stupid IIS error. Was I not supposed to hit it with a web browser? I don't know; the Help file didn't say.
    • I don't consider mysef a genius, and I don't consider myself a moron either. I consider myself having slightly-better-than-average intelligence. I think my I.Q. was measured 115 when I was a kid, whoopty doo. But I can set up SVN server and SVN client (w/ TortoiseSVN) without a lot of effort, as well as a few free issue tracking web sites like Gemini. I don't have Visual Studio integration (but you can use Ankh or Visual SVN), but I do have version control and a tracking system.
    • This blog post is very telling of the whole cultural situation over there in Washington.

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About the author

Jon Davis Jon Davis (aka "stimpy77") is a software and web developer by day and a software and web enthusiast (geek) by night. He was recently a senior web engineer for the enthusiast division of a major magazine publishing company for nearly two years. He has been a programmer, developer, and consultant for web and Windows software solutions professionally since 1997, with experience ranging from OS and hardware support to DHTML programming to IIS/ASP web apps to Java network programming to Visual Basic applications to C# desktop apps.
 
Software in all forms is also his sole hobby, whether playing PC games or tinkering with programming them. "I was playing Defender on the Commodore 64," he reminisces, "when I decided at the age of 12 or so that I want to be a computer programmer when I grow up."
 
Jon is currently engaged in a short-term ASP.NET contract and is available for hire for short-term or permanent work in Phoenix or via telecommute.
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