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From the blog post:

"Every Visual Studio Online account provides 60 minutes of free build time per month, making it friction free to get started with hosted build. "

So some free time, but probably not enough for project of any reasonable size. Basically more like a free trial.

As usual, poor article submission is confusing everyone!

There is a real IDE, with proper syntax highlighting, code completion, etc, that runs in any browser. It's called Visual Studio Monaco. It's only available for Azure users right now.

See here for a few videos of the thing in action.

The hilarious (or maybe hilariously horrifying) thing is that MS has been providing awfully forgiving backwards-compatibility since the Windows 95 days. The really horrifying part in the linked example is that they provide this hand-holding to people who didn't even read "past the first page" of the SDK when the program was originally written for Win 3.1.

That said, "it made sense at the time" and/or "we really didn't have a choice back then" seem to be recurring themes in Windows development (at least on Raymond Chen's blog).

To BOTH the then VP of Windows Client Performance Division (right here on /. no less where HE CONCEDED I AM CORRECT ON NO LESS -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1467692&cid=30384918 ) & also to Mr. Steven Sinofsky's blog on "Engineering Windows 7" -> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/02/25/feedback-and-engineering-windows-7.aspx?PageIndex=3

* Did they change it - even though it was conceded to SLOW DOWN a part of Windows in the IP stack?

ANSWER = No...

(No - They, of ALL people since they're "in charge" there or were @ the time, even though they SAID they would? Never got back to me in the 1st case though they said they would!)

Which personally I could give 2 shits about on "getting back to me" (OR even giving me credit for finding the blunder) - no, instead: PLEASE, just FIX it!

NOW, however: What did I hear, that ASTOUNDED ME the most (from the VP, not the then head of Windows in Sinofsky)?

"PASS THE BUCK BULLSHIT" is what:

Pretty much "It's not MY dept. - talk to the guys who designed the IP stack" - WTF?!?

Hey... This IS a performance issue, one YOU conceded, & YES YOU ARE THE HEAD OF THE DIVISION CONCERNING PERFORMANCE!

MS needs NEW & BETTER mgt... period, & all the way around from my experience there!

(Especially, vs. ignorant "we are in the billionaire boys club frat together rats", who "pass the buck" when confronted AND shown to have their pants down during doing so as I did to them...)

APK

P.S.=> Sometimes, MS pisses me off even though I am a HUGE "fanboy" of theirs, I have to admit it...

So "initiatives" like this just make me laugh, they really truly do!

See - I know a LOT of things that need fixing (both in security AND in other areas like efficiency, & that's only SCRATCHING THE SURFACE above - only thing is, they're TURNED ME OFF to even trying anymore, since nobody does a damned thing about it... not even the "top dogs")...

... apk

Yes, this is called multimedia redirection and it seems to work with any DirectShow-using application (so you'd expect VLC to blow up).

AIUI the idea is that you just stream the compressed video, plus some metadata for "it goes here, it's this big, and it's at this point". It seems to work pretty well, because obviously the compressed video is much smaller than 30 images a second that need to be individually compressed.

Maps are never a fun job. Especially over disputed regions.

Hell, Microsoft had the problem when they allowed people to select the time zone using the map (as may Linux distributions do these days). There were huge fights over a few pixels.

Google and China are on "Fuck You" terms so I don't see why Google would bother making China happy.

Technically, Google is banned in China - so Google Maps doesn't even have to care. It's also why Android phones sold in China have to come with third party app stores because Play store isn't available, and why Chinese phones usually end up with epidemics of Android malware. (The Chinese app stores are really bad about cleaning their crap up and often accept cracked and pirated apps).

It's just another thing anyone who does a map has to deal with in the end.

I understand that it looks stupid, but knowing the way that MS think about these things (IE from the myriad blogs) it will be likely that they didn't want to introduce incompatibility between the behavior of 32bit and 64bit .Net.

If you're looking for a real answer though, you could do worse then hit up Raymond Chen's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/.

There's an interesting Clang talk at Channel9: The Care and Feeding of C++’s Dragons. Speaker: Chandler Carruth, Clang lead, Google.

More to the point, who would bet that kind of cash, and their corporate health and/or reputation, on Microsoft?

Heck, Azure itself was down for hours last leap day:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2012/03/09/summary-of-windows-azure-service-disruption-on-feb-29th-2012.aspx

It is ... the most interesting code update in the world.

I can well believe there are differences in battery performance between the OSes but we need someone to sit down with programs performing exactly the same operations on base configurations of all the OSes and then report the results. Saying they vary is one thing but far more interesting is to know why. Is it the drivers, is it the scheduler, is it the kernel, is it a better userspace or is it some combination of all of them?

My understanding is that both Linux and Windows supported timer coalescing before OS X. Linux had a tickless kernel. OS X's XNU kernel is allegedly tickless but I can't find out when this change actually took place. As for Windows it's not clear - my understanding is that Windows 8 is tickless but I can't find a clear reference only one that says Windows 8 idles more than Windows 7 so perhaps it has dynamic ticks and hence can be tickless. That last link seems to suggest that Microsoft have put a large amount of effort into trying to make Windows more battery friendly...

In addition to the above, Windows has a huge number of energy saving features: Idle detection that can control things like what processes are allowed to start, Windows 8 store apps use a "only focussed app runs" model unless it's a background task, USB suspend (Windows 7), adjustable tick rate (Windows 2000) (Windows seems to suffer from programs that push for higher resolution ticks though). It would be nice to know whether all these things are having an impact.

One of the things I noticed on OS X 10.8 though is that when the battery is near to depletion it seems to force the CPU to run at a slower rate until the machine power goes out completely. I don't know the other OSes do this or whether it's a positive impact but it could impact on results that purely go on time rather than amount of work done.

I can well believe there are differences in battery performance between the OSes but we need someone to sit down with programs performing exactly the same operations on base configurations of all the OSes and then report the results. Saying they vary is one thing but far more interesting is to know why. Is it the drivers, is it the scheduler, is it the kernel, is it a better userspace or is it some combination of all of them?

My understanding is that both Linux and Windows supported timer coalescing before OS X. Linux had a tickless kernel. OS X's XNU kernel is allegedly tickless but I can't find out when this change actually took place. As for Windows it's not clear - my understanding is that Windows 8 is tickless but I can't find a clear reference only one that says Windows 8 idles more than Windows 7 so perhaps it has dynamic ticks and hence can be tickless. That last link seems to suggest that Microsoft have put a large amount of effort into trying to make Windows more battery friendly...

In addition to the above, Windows has a huge number of energy saving features: Idle detection that can control things like what processes are allowed to start, Windows 8 store apps use a "only focussed app runs" model unless it's a background task, USB suspend (Windows 7), adjustable tick rate (Windows 2000) (Windows seems to suffer from programs that push for higher resolution ticks though). It would be nice to know whether all these things are having an impact.

One of the things I noticed on OS X 10.8 though is that when the battery is near to depletion it seems to force the CPU to run at a slower rate until the machine power goes out completely. I don't know the other OSes do this or whether it's a positive impact but it could impact on results that purely go on time rather than amount of work done.

before you think it, i'm no MS shill, i use Linux and only Linux. that said, the MSIE team is doing it right this time with IE11.

while many people here are slamming on the basis of standards compliance, there is something you should know: it's broken because they are striving standards compliance.

as we all know, there are plenty of MSIE exclusive ways of doing things in the DOM and render hacks that have had to be done so you end up with code that has "browser detection" to apply browser specific hacks. MSIE is making a clean break from all of that. so all those IE only apps like Outlook Web App will now fail because all the IE specific stuff has been removed. they went so far as to remove "MSIE" from their user agent string to prevent any old code from detecting it as Internet Explorer.

IE10 user agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/6.0)
IE11 user agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv 11.0) like Gecko

so while it seems to have growing pains, as far as IE goes, IE11 is a step in the right direction.

some nice differences:

Deprecation of file:// based Proxy configuration scripts
Deprecation of document modes
Deprecated VBScript in IE11 mode pages
navigator.plugins -- now a supported extensibility point <-- ironically chrome is removing this support
ActiveX now behaves like a navigator plugin.
Silverlight plugin is not installed by default (they got Netflix to support HTML5 via Encrypted Media Extensions aka DRM in the HTML5 spec)

more info:
http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2013/07/02/internet-explorer-11-dont-call-me-ie/
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/archive/2013/09/24/internet-explorer-11-changelist-change-log.asp

Yes, VS2012 and VS2013 still support XP. I'm running some stuff on Server 2003 right now, that I compiled with VS2013RC.

Here's how it's done:
Windows XP Targeting with C++ in Visual Studio 2012

Works exactly the same in VS2013 also.

2012 was fine if you use the registry setting to fix the capital letters in the menu bar, and update 2 added a "Blue" theme. Then it looks like 2010, but with all the new functionality.

I particularly like all of the "TODO" comments in production code.

It's part of the test plan.

Exactly. It reminds me a bit of this

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2007/02/01/1573160.aspx#1591874

Now, CIFS is pretty much just a serialization of NT I/O semantics over the wire (for some reason this surprises and confuses people from the UNIX/TCP camps. What do they expect?).

In the same way that CIFS aka SMB is a "serialization of NT I/O semantics over the wire", the .doc data formats are a serialization of Word's internal representation of a document. There's a lot of subtlety in that representation as he mentions. The Mac and Windows versions had different epochs, there's a whole bunch of things like "keep this paragraph with next" in the UI that need to be encoded in the file format. Also Office depends heavily on OLE (which was developed for Office) and thus OLE compound documents are part of the spec. They can include Windows Metafiles which are a serialization of GDI commands.

So you ended up with something that had a load of features and run fast on 80's and 90's machines with by current standards glacially slow CPUs and disks. It was cross platform in the sense that it worked on Windows and Mac. It was never really designed to be something that people outside Microsoft could reimplement easily. In fact I bet the original Mac version of Word wasn't intended to run on Windows - the point was to ship it on Mac.

Mind you I use OpenOffice on Windows these days and it seems like .doc and .xls files are now supported pretty well there. On Android Polaris Office seems to have no problems opening .xls files. Now the Open Office and Polaris Office teams must have spent ages getting this stuff to work, but it does. MS is still musing whether it should release Office on Android, but essentially the world has moved on without it.

Samsung: Korean HQ

Gates Foundation: Seattle HQ

Microsoft:Redmond Campus

Also there is a lot of content from the research group on Channel 9.

Another vote for Channel 9. One of the best side-things Microsoft is currently churning out.

Microsoft research is doing some amazing things. Also there is a lot of content from the research group on Channel 9. Microsoft's problem is that their userbase is conservative. But as a result of their research they could at will turn on the tap and have tremendous innovations pouring out.

For example Microsoft people (its open source but the contributors are mainly Microsoft) developed C-- which is a portable assembly language which has tail recursion, accurate garbage collection or efficient exception handling. I don't think anyone could follow how much this group does but from innovations in compilers, new systems for concurrency, new algorithms, computation biology.... it is frankly amazing. I only wish Microsoft was more aggressive in pushing their products to adopt more from their research team. Much as the slides talk about the problem Xerox had with Parc, Microsoft has the same problem.

Microsoft calls this the "secure attention sequence." I have heard that older PCs' keyboard interfaces would directly generate an interrupt on reception of ctrl+alt+del, but I can't find anything to back that up.

Supposedly ctrl+alt+del was chosen to be the SAS in Windows NT because no existing app used it as a key combination.

If you are interested, the GoingNative 2013 talks include a C++11/14 Sampler by Scott Meyers.

I think they locked down the local machine zone in XP SP2: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/archive/2011/03/23/understanding-local-machine-zone-lockdown-restricted-this-webpage-from-running-scripts-or-activex-controls.aspx

well, hmm
try adjusting the sharpness anyway. Best not to discard an easy, reversible fix out of hand. But if that doesn't work, mess about with Cleartype tuner. In particular, subpixel rendering can give smoother results on digital displays, but if your display orders the subpixel stripes in the wrong order it doesn't work.

Recall http://blogs.msdn.com/b/olivnie/archive/2012/12/14/windows-8-fast-boot.aspx
Startup and shut down speed was something MS was talking about wrt Windows 8 vs older MS products.

To Microsoft's credit, they publish reasonably interesting root-cause-analysis after each significant failure, where as Google seem to have a canned response (so far). Their response to the Outlook.com outage and their response to the recent Azure outage caused by an expired SSL certificate.

Vitriol falling on regular folks is direct result of these regular folks attention-seeking diva behavior that is so prevalent in the gaming industry.

Sure, their skirts were clearly to short. They wanted it.

For example, you don't see "regular folk" speaking for Microsoft,

No, regular folk - what an imbecilic weasel word - at Microsoft don't do that.

But I wonder how many other folks have very expensive hardware like this that will probably never be upgraded to run on anything other than XP.

Expensive like ... what?!? Are you kidding?

DirectCompute into
Some good samples on the MSDN forums

Take a look at C++ AMP. It is a small language extension that lets you target the GPU using C++. The platform takes care of most of the mechanics of running code on the GPU. Also check out this blog post for links to tutorials and samples.

I'd prefer Raymond Chen as CEO, but I realize that's probably not a realistic option. What Microsoft needs to maintain its position is an obsession with backwards compatibility and not breaking anyone's workflow, and an understanding that they will never be hip or cool. They need to transition from a growth company to a dividend-oriented company.

So, IBM?

I'd prefer Raymond Chen as CEO, but I realize that's probably not a realistic option. What Microsoft needs to maintain its position is an obsession with backwards compatibility and not breaking anyone's workflow, and an understanding that they will never be hip or cool. They need to transition from a growth company to a dividend-oriented company.

If a single drunk driver is able to stop your production and that production is critical you are doing something wrong to begin with. While the cloud might (and probably will) offer better HA and DR it will not fix a bad design by itself.

The article also states: " I didn't want to create my own internal IT department". I' guessing Andrew Oliver is a PHB.

Because cloud services have never had extended outages...

Honestly, anyone who sees cloud services as the great fix for reliability problems is an idiot, especially reliability problems caused by a once-in-a-lifetime drunk-driver incident. Most of the cloud services seem to have had their fair share of incompetence-related downtime. I wouldn't mind betting that if he'd put all his IT stuff one one of the commercial cloud platforms for the last 2 years, he would've had more downtime than he had running them in his offices.

In any case, shoving stuff in the cloud doesn't absolve you of needing a competent IT admin to handle backups and such, unless you're insane enough to trust *everything* to a cloud operator who, at the end of the day, doesn't actually give too much of a crap about one tiny customer who might've lost all their data.

KB2775511 has substantially reduced the CPU load and improved file-sharing performance on one of our heavily-used Windows 2008 R2 file servers.

Microsoft recommends that it be applied to both servers and workstations.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askpfeplat/archive/2013/03/12/slow-boot-slow-login-sbsl-hotfix-rollup-for-windows-7-and-server-2008-r2-available-today.aspx

But there may be problems with it under some circumstances:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/winsdk/archive/2013/05/13/roll-up-update-kb-2775511-reports-with-smb-2-0-data-truncation.aspx

You know when I'll believe things have changed at Microsoft? When Raymond Chen is put in charge of the Windows division (or better yet, the whole company). More than anyone else I've heard about, he actually understands why people use Windows and stick with it: because of the consistent focus on backward compatibility at all costs that was the hallmark of the pre-Ballmer era.

Legacy compatibility is the #1 thing keeping Windows alive. But if the Ballmer/MSDN camp keeps winning victories over the Raymond Chen camp, that will continue to be eaten away, and Microsoft will one day wake up to find that no one needs them any more.

You know when I'll believe things have changed at Microsoft? When Raymond Chen is put in charge of the Windows division (or better yet, the whole company). More than anyone else I've heard about, he actually understands why people use Windows and stick with it: because of the consistent focus on backward compatibility at all costs that was the hallmark of the pre-Ballmer era.

Legacy compatibility is the #1 thing keeping Windows alive. But if the Ballmer/MSDN camp keeps winning victories over the Raymond Chen camp, that will continue to be eaten away, and Microsoft will one day wake up to find that no one needs them any more.

Yes, I agree not having a main article on Doug's death is saddening and disrespectful to Doug Engelbart's legacy -- or at least an indication of increasing cluelessness or lack of historic awareness among the slashdot editors. Slashdot still has its moments though, but I agree, having been reading slashdot for ten or so years (I would have had a lower user ID except I did not post for a long time), it has changed.

Of course, people have been saying slashdot is dying since 2005 or maybe earlier, and Apple has been "dying" for decades, so, who knows what the future has in store? Contrast:
http://agilepartners.com/blog/2005/12/20/is-slashdot-dying/
with:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/alexbarn/archive/2006/01/12/512238.aspx

That latter part's really changed. At some point MS realised they could get spur adoption by localizing gobs of central Asian languages, and went overboard with expanding the list of supported languages. For the low, low price of a few naive interns, they can easily throw in a few new languages to please their shareholders. As far as maintaining a competitive product goes, it's largely busywork, since adoption is slow (?) and their existing markets are threatened, but it's an understandable mode of retreat for a company going through a midlife crisis where most of the key people have recently left.

No it isn't indisputable fact, and where it's "established" in literature that literate is rather old and dated

So we should toss out relativity and quantum mechanics as well, eh? (Old doesn't mean invalid.) Put that ACM DL subscription to good use. You shouldn't have too much trouble finding more modern if that's important to you.

The arguments made a bit more sense when keywords like protected weren't implemented, or were implemented poorly

Again, you don't understand the problem. It's a fundamental problem, not something that can be fixed by adding a few language features!

Compare and contrast this to the original argument that Javascript does not properly implement OO and is badly designed as a result

A couple things: 1) There is no such thing as "proper" OOP. There is no consensus on the definition. 2) You have not established that JavaScript "does not properly implement OO" As I explained earlier, it's prototype based, not class based -- like several other languages. It's not bad simply because you don't like it.

I've explained twice why inheritance doesn't inherently have to break encapsulation in well designed languages

The problem is that your explanations don't actually address the issue at all! Again, it's fundamental -- this is very well established in the literature. It's not magically changed simply because a book you found on wikipedia and the paper I offered were older. Put that ACM DL subscription to use and find something to make your case -- you'll find that it's indisputable: Inheritance breaks encapsulation.

An example of a design flaw is PHP's === equality operator not working consistently and it's == operator not being transitive. There's not excuse for this

Assuming you're talking about the NaN thing from before, you'll find that it's a natural consequence of IEEE 754 -- and that that behavior is correct and expected in all languages. (Seriously, it's in the damn standard.) If you're speeking more generally, you'll find that PHP's == and === operators do indeed work consistently, behaving like similar dynamically typed languages. (Go ahead and try out some of the examples you found of "inconsistency" online in C, with explicit casts and you'll find the behavior is identical. Don't like C? The same will hold for Java as well.)

One language is better than another if it has less design flaws

That's not an answer to the question. What are these "design flaws"? How can they be identified?

The required additional syntax to create a new scope to make this work is nonsensical and a result of the lack of foresight in the language's design

No, the problem was that the stackoverflow posted doesn't understand closures. You'll find the EXACT same behavior in C# -- one of your exemplar languages. In fact, this confusion over closures lead Microsoft to change the behavior of foreach loops!

It's not an issue of language design, it's just how closures work. (Imagine how bizarre and unexpected the behavior of for loops would be if MS decided to change their behavior to match that of foreach!)

Surely you must at very least understand that simplified and more readable syntax to solve an identical problem is both better for developer efficiency and is better for supporting less buggy software.

Readability is important. I couldn't agree more. However, in the example you gave, C# behaves just like JavaScript. It's not a language design problem. It's not a problem at all. It's just how closures work.

I hope you can finally grasp why unnecessarily verbose code to solve simple problems resulting from lack of foresight during language

Microsoft doesn't give a flying fuck what is said about them on Slashdot.

Heh. Even Herb Sutter (from the Visual Studio team) has mentioned Slashdot in his talks at Channel 9. I'm sure microsofties occasionally bump on the comments on Slashdot too. This is a quite well-known technology website. I agree that the impact is probably still quite small, but it's not a complete "flying fuck".

Official information on the IE blog: https://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2013/06/26/introducing-ie11-the-best-way-to-experience-the-web-on-modern-touch-devices.aspx

I wanted the Start button but not the Start menu. Using a hot spot instead of the Start button made it more confusing when running Windows 8 over remote desktop, so now they put the Start button back that issue is fixed.

Microsoft has proven that the new Metro Start screen is more useful for launching applications and finding things than the Start menu was. There is no question any more. Your argument has been defeated. To insist on repeating it is to simply to cry "waaah I don't like change". The usefulness of the Metro apps themselves is another thing entirely, and I personally find no practical use for them on the desktop. But the Start screen, when used as an application launcher, (and in combination with the Admin menu, which you open by right clicking the lower left corner) is demonstrably more useful than the old Start menu was. Don't like the new Metro apps? Unpin them from the Start screen and just put desktop apps there. Do that, and you might just find that it's actually better than the old way.

Microsoft is integrating Git in Visual Studio. It starts small but you'll see, soon all they do will be open.

true, but MS had made plenty of mistakes with C#.

Look at Chris Brumme's excellent blog posts about what they did to make the CLR work the way it does. Questions like "why did we host the CLR in SQL Server and IIS like that", "why did we allow AppDomains to be such a security risk", "why are exceptions so slow" and a million other nuggets of insight into why writing a system like .NET was so difficult (hint: its mostly about interacting with the rest of MS ecosystem).

Its awesome what he did, and fortunately he's a techie type who gives it to us straight.

which is a struct (stack-allocated...

Eric Lippert would disagree with you:

It is usually stated incorrectly: the statement should be "value types can be stored on the stack", instead of the more common "value types are always stored on the stack".

How do you do something as basic as copy a file securely to another computer? I use scp on Linux.

On Windows it's much simpler. You connect using RDP and then use Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V. The RDP connection itself is encrypted.

RDP? Why not just post your private files on Facebook?

Microsoft (or at least Raymond Chen and his colleagues) seem to go to huge lengths to make the APIs in their operating systems extremely stable, from a compatibility point of view. Which I believe is what the grandparent was referring to when he said "write once, works 3 years from now."

Hmm, must have forgotten that huge swath of programs that failed to run on Vista+, for starters. Or things that required updates for Win7/2008 R2. Or the Office products that were incompatible with prior products on purpose in an effort to force upgrades (worked with Office 97, not so much with 2003 or whatever the first docx version was, nor with the 2010 "upgrade", which keeps warning you about potential compatibility errors and please run a check, even when there are no errors. But most funny, the article you linked is more about the bad effects that occur when you arbitrarily change error messages than any other thing. Also, this appears to be about MS DOS 7 (aka Win95) and has nothing to do with Windows APIs.

Ok, that's just total nonsense. Microsoft operating system and applications are, simply put, not known for their stability. I can't even imagine you typing that with a straight face.

Microsoft (or at least Raymond Chen and his colleagues) seem to go to huge lengths to make the APIs in their operating systems extremely stable, from a compatibility point of view. Which I believe is what the grandparent was referring to when he said "write once, works 3 years from now."

How do you do something as basic as copy a file securely to another computer? I use scp on Linux.

On Windows it's much simpler. You connect using RDP and then use Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V. The RDP connection itself is encrypted.

I wouldn't call windows networking or its installation of all the domain controllers and crap needed to get it working "much simpler". Remember, RDP is a proprietary protocol, so if your environment includes linux servers and windows desktops, as many do, you will still be using scp because it's much simpler. You'll be using samba and nfs shares to keep the non-techies in finance and billing happy.

How do you do something as basic as copy a file securely to another computer? I use scp on Linux.

On Windows it's much simpler. You connect using RDP and then use Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V. The RDP connection itself is encrypted.