Let down twice today by Microsoft

Posted by Kirby Turner on November 22, 2005

This is more of a rant then anything else but I gotta say it. I’m really disappointed with Microsoft today. It started at the NYC Product Launch event for Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk 2006.

Today’s event was a let down for me. I have been to many similar Microsoft events over the years and have always left thinking “This was well worth my time.” Today’s event was only worth my time because of the free giveaways. The actual event itself was a let down and left me wondering if Visual Studio Team Services is really ready.

For starters the demo of VSTS used a pre-RTM version. This was a launch day event and pre-released software was demoed…WTF! On top of that many of the features demoed did not work, presumably because the pre-RTM release was used. Unit tests did not run, web tests did not run, load tests did not run, reports could not be displayed, and in certain cases bad practices were demoed such as saving the list of work items in SharePoint as an Excel spreadsheet. I would not want my team working from a static list of work items when Foundation Server is installed and live information can be used.

Disappointed with the event I decided to return to the office early to get some work done. My plan for the rest of the day is to evaluate the SqlBulkCopy class for a customer. I wanted to quickly see the class definition for SqlBulkCopy so I went to load wincv.exe.

For those of you who don’t know what wincv.exe is, it is a class viewer for the .NET Framework classes. I often use it to identify property and methods names, which is faster using wincv.exe then the MSDN documentation. But to my surprise wincv.exe is NOT included with the .NET Framework 2.0 SDK. What gives? I found it to be a very useful tool that I used on a regular basis. Now it is gone. Even the wincv.exe page says it ships only with version 1.0 and 1.1 of the .NET Framework.

I have been using this tool for 4 years and I’m disappointed that I cannot continue using it with the new release of the framework. Needless to say this adds to my disappointment in Microsoft today. If only my Xbox 360 had arrived today. Things might seem different.


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