Sean Kelly wrote:
== Quote from Andrei Alexandrescu ([email protected])'s article
At a company we were using MS Transaction Server. I went around and
asked my bosses why. Nobody knew. I asked what features of it we need.
Nobody knew, and they didn't knew even what the MTS was supposed to do.
The fact the company had bought it was a pure marketing trick from MS'
part. To continue the anecdote: my boss at the time woke up every
morning, came in early, checked out the new code - from Visual Source
Safe (another useless make-believe product that has never hold a candle
to even the, um, obsolete cvs that uses equally obsolete text files),
built it, deregistered each of a dozen objects from the graphical MTS
console, and then registered each again. This was the only known way to
make our updates work.
The registration aspect of MS programming technology has got to be about
the most broken concept I've encountered in Windows. It's abstruse, brittle,
and incredibly error-prone. In my brief exposure to .NET programming, this
feature had me tearing my hair out more often than any other.
Yah, and the anecdote also illustrates the contempt that Windows has
towards automation. Back then I didn't know any Unix, but I did have the
intuition "it's a computer, so I'm supposed to have it do what I want...
right?"
Speaking of which, due to my participation in MSR/UW symposia, I happen
to know a tad more about MS' server technology than I care. I could
summarize that in a thought: MS will have trouble getting on the Net
where Google, Yahoo, or Amazon are, simply because they are constrained
to using Windows. Even some internal big wigs acknowledge that. It would
be terrible PR if they started using Unix technology, so they *have* to
use Windows Server. IMHO they'll never get anywhere interesting with it.
Andrei
