Lazycoder

Vista will only support VS 2005

There has been a lot of discussion around the announcement that Vista will only support development using Visual Studio 2005, and even then only with a service pack. I haven’t seen a lot of comments from MS about WHY the older versions (except for VB 6, it’ll work fine under Vista. Go figure!?) won’t work.

Scott Guthrie, one of the best resources at Microsoft in my opinion, left a comment at Paul Wilsons blog. That I’d like to highlight.

The big technical challenge is with enabling scenarios like advanced debugging. Debuggers are incredibly invasive in a process, and so changes in how an OS handles memory layout can have big impacts on it. Vista did a lot of work in this release to tighten security and lock down process/memory usage – which is what is affecting both the VS debugger, as well as every other debugger out there. Since the VS debugger is particularly rich (multi-language, managed/native interop, COM + Jscript integration, etc) – it will need additional work to fully support all scenarios on Vista. That is also the reason we are releasing a special servicing release after VS 2005 SP1 specific to Vista – to make sure everything (and especially debugging and profiling) work in all scenarios. It is actually several man-months of work (we’ve had a team working on this for quite awhile). Note that the .NET 1.1 (and ASP.NET 1.1) is fully supported at runtime on Vista. VS 2003 will mostly work on Vista. What we are saying, though, is that there will be some scenarios where VS 2003 doesn’t work (or work well) on Vista – hence the reason it isn’t a supported scenario. Instead, we recommend using a VPC/VM image for VS 2003 development to ensure 100% compat. Hope this helps – even if the answer isn’t entirely what we’d all like it to be, Scott

There are a couple of things about this statement that bring up questions I’ve had for a while.  How closely does the Windows team work with the IDE team? It seems odd to me that this issue wasn’t one of the first issues to be addressed. How much has the debugger changed in between versions? If the memory management has changed that drastically between versions, and it appears that is has, was that really a good idea?

What I think this really points to is a lack of dogfooding by the Development team. I also wonder about the effectiveness of all of the Vista beta and alpha testers. I see lots of developers posting about Vista in their blogs, but what are they really doing? Are they just booting it up, opening up iCal, browsing with IE7, and calling it good? Are there any developers who are using Vista for their every day work? I see Sam Gentile has said he is using for “hard core development”. But he is also not using any old technology, just “everything bleeding that pushes the edge.” So he is Microsofts poster child for how you should use Vista if you are a developer. Where does that leave the rest of us? I still have to support a .Net 1.1 web site which is architected in such a way that migrating it requires a complete re-write.

I’m not even going comment on the idea that we should install a separate OS in a VM to continue to support my older apps. If I’m going to do that, I’m not going to use Windows as my host OS. I’ll use something more stable and better supported by it’s company than Windows.

BIG asS tV SHOws

(capitalization of the title courtesy of my daughter)

So I decided to download a few of the new 640×480 TV shows from iTunes. They had an episode of Lost and Grey’s Anatomy. Can’t beat that price, even with DRM. So I click on it and they que up for download. Then I notice the file size. It’s close to 1GB for EACH SHOW.

!!

I’ve got a standard DSL package at home, it’s fast enough for email, games, etc… So to download the two episodes (about 3 hours of video) iTunes estimated it would take 24 hours. I don’t live in the boondocks, I’m in the Seattle metro area. I could boost the speed of my DSL service, at a greater cost. And the resolution of these shows and movies isn’t even the HD that the nerd herd is clamoring for. I can’t imagine how big the true HD movies and shows would be. So a standard season, lets say 20 episodes, would take up about 10GB of space (give or take). Even on the cusp of the terrabyte era, that’s a lot of space.

I think it’ll be a long time before this kind of a’la carte programming takes off. I think at some point the networks will decide to cut out the middle-man (cable companies) and sell the season passes direct, while also selling through the major players like iTunes. My bet is that the major pro-sports leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB, maybe even the BCS or the NCAA) will be the first to offer a’la carte streaming though. They have the leverage with the networks and the money to pull it off. I know I’d pay 10$ each week to watch a Chiefs or K-State football game when my only other option is to fly back to Kansas or pay umpteen dollars for the ESPN passes that give me a bunch of teams I don’t care about. Heck, let me pay $100 just for all the Chiefs games each season. I’d pay that.

Zune a Zon’t?

Why does Microsoft hate itself so much?

Are there ANY MS employees, who aren’t completely delusional evangelists, who think that Zune not being “Plays for Sure” compatible is a good idea? Who think that brown is a GREAT color for a music player. Brown leather, now we’re talking. What TV shows will be available at launch for the Zune? What movies? Heck, what happens to MSN music? Heck, what HAPPENED to MSN Music. Talk about opportunity squandered.

I don’t know what it is with Microsoft lately. It just looks like they are flailing around. And it’s hard to make fun of them anymore. I mean it’s like teasing autistic kids or something. If they weren’t a multi-billion dollar company, it’d be wrong.

Windows live writer uses font tags?

I just looked at the HTML for the last post in Windows Live Writer Beta. (I noticed that the background color for the text after the quote was the same as the quote in my editing window) and I saw this.

<font style=”background-color: #f5f6f7″>

It’s nice to know the Frontpage team is keeping themselves busy by writing the HTML editor for Windows Live Writer beta. Even an inline style tag would be better than a ont tag I think.

TDD devs can fool themselves

This post by Eric Sink at the Daily WTF is a perfect example of one of the things I think is wrong with TDD.

I was ashamed of myself when I wrote this, but the fact is that it allowed me to move forward and all of my unit tests pass.

Granted, it wouldn’t be hard to create a unit test which causes this code to fail.

I’ve said all along that if “Red – Green – Refactor” is your goal, you’ll find ways to make sure that bar stays green, even if it means fudging your tests a little. You’ll “get to that later”. This coupled with the fact that you can’t always think of EVERY possibe failing scenario means that TDD is usually just extra work.