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

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?