Microsoft to Patch Problem Patch

slowroller writes to mention an eWeek article about a new patch to fix issues raised in their most recent release. From the article: "The company's plan is to target the rerelease only to Windows users who are affected. In a blog entry, Toulouse said the company's patch deployment technologies will have "detection logic" built into them to only offer the revised update to customers who don't have MS06-015 or are having the problem. The glitches, which Microsoft claims affect only a tiny fraction of the 120 million installations of the patch, stem from a new binary called VERCLSID.EXE that validates shell extensions before they are instantiated by the Windows Shell or Windows Explorer. On systems running Hewlett-Packard's Share-to-Web software, Sunbelt's Kerio Personal Firewall and some NVIDIA Drivers, users complained that the new binary stopped responding."

Comments

Here is the problem

[dick pubes]

The big problem when they do this is compatibility testing. I work at numerous companies where we need to read through each patch to see what they 'fix'. Now when Microsoft does this we will just have to guess what they might break in a legacy application deployed across the world.

Re:Millions of different system configurations.

[MustardMan]

No - Microsoft doesn't release patches fast enough and they don't do adequate testing. They don't win on either count.

Heh - "tiny" fraction could still be "lots"

[NotQuiteReal]

Many product vendors would love to have a tiny fraction of the 120 million installations - it would be more than their entire market!

I know this is not a popular opinion here, but MSFT really does have a tough job, if you are objective about it, from an engineering point of view.

Re:Heh - "tiny" fraction could still be "lots"

[mcrbids]

I know this is not a popular opinion here, but MSFT really does have a tough job, if you are objective about it, from an engineering point of view.

Hear here!

I agree 100%!

As a software engineer of a rapidly growing company, it's amazing to me how much higher the standard of testing and accountability has to be with each major product release. Our company has been growing exponentially, at least 2x annually. Just a year or two ago, a bug meant a few phone calls, but in the last year or so, it's gotten to where a single bug (even a minor one) can easily swamp our telephones!

The first release was like, a proof of concept more than not. It wasn't even feature complete at release - we relied on an update mechanism built in at the last minute to cover for the fact that not all the features were completed!

Not many phone calls from that issue, I might add. But, in the last year or two, a single bug affecting a relatively small percentage of our users still loads us down with dozens of issues ticketed in a single morning.

Ugh!

Since our deliverable is web-based, fixing a bug is still very fast, but we're working furiously to improve quality control testing prior to release. I can only imagine what a company with the market size of Microsoft has to deal with - when the vast majority of computing resources are in your hands, the task of dealing with bugs and updates must be simply gargantuan.

How do they do it with such a shoddy codebase?

Re:Millions of different system configurations.

[aussersterne]

Microsoft is a multibillion dollar corporation stuffed full of multibillion dollar men. They have a monopoly on the marketplace, power half of the world, and want to power the rest.

They can, will, and had better do both:

- Release patches quickly
- Release patches with adequate testing

If they don't, they should be punished.

Re:Affected

[baadger]

Oooo ooo I want to slam HP too.

The HP 'drivers' for my all-in-one machine come in at 180 megabytes! The interface is sheer bloat, it installs a handful of totally unnecessary (Disabling them has little consequence) services and startup processes, and there is still no x64 driver!

The HP sponsored linux drivers (HPLIP) work well on Linux 64, and it is nice to see Linux up on Windows for once in terms of hardware support.

That felt good.

Re:Millions of different system configurations.

[Splab]

You do realise that some things simply take a certain amount of time and no matter how much money or how many people you throw at the problem they will not get done any quicker, don't you?

If only people would realize that, especially managers. "Ohh so you need x hours to do that? Well I'll just go call this helper for y hours, then you only need x-y hours, so we'll ship on friday"... Glad I'm not doing that anymore. Incidently, we did have a few issues with the patch, but what it revealed for us isn't that there might be a problem with MS patches, but that theres a big problem with testing at our facility before rolling out patches.

MS might screw up, but it's our job to make sure that what they give us works before we roll it out.