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Microsoft Cancels Major Developers' Conference
Kurtz'sKompund writes "Microsoft has cancelled its autumn Professional Developers Conference, citing bad timing in light of the launch of important infrastructure and platform products. This isn't the first time they have cancelled a PDC, for similar reasons."
By the way, who was chairing the conference?
Between the office's ribbon interface and the actual launch of Vista, you'd think that now would be the most important time to have a developers conference. With all the new challenges and the conference still several months away, wouldn't it be wiser to schedule the time now and make sure that critical issues are dealt with early?
I'd bet that the OSS developers won't even notice.
Unfortunately, they're all working on their own individual version of a ground-breaking text editor and extensible platform that will eclipse Eclipse.
Microsoft has cancelled its autumn Professional Developers, Developers, Developers Conference, citing there are too many chairs near the podium. This isn't the first time they have cancelled a PDC, for similar reasons.
Full Tilt
But I thought Microsoft was all about a sweaty bald guy screaming, "Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers Developers (gasp) Developers Developers..."
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
On a serious note: Has another company come close to supporting it's developers better than Microsoft?
So, they cancel a PDC. So what?
I keep reminding people that Microsoft is a MARKETING driven organization. No doubt, when they schedule the next PDC, it will be for THEIR benefit, not yours.
Dont like it? There are other options available.
Why bitch, bitches?
VS2005 targeting Win 2000 through Vista to be exact. Nice product VS2005. I can write very nice apps with c# and the .NET framework.
I adopted MS because the shop I began working IT with served mostly MS customers, and now my shop does as well... just a reality of working in a niche market where MS has been the accesible OS for so many years.
Why, I ask, am I pulling my hair out every other week?
Does a properly run company cause a dedicated client to want to pull his already diminishing supply of hair from his head every time he reads their press releases?
Products that have been *both* delayed and had functionality removed in the last 8 months:
Vista
Viridian (virtualization)
Server 2008 (announced that a major incremental will be released in 2009 to replace the functionality if that actually happens... so who the fuck is going to upgrade in '08?)
I depend on this shit. Why? Because you formed a friggin monopoly and all of my potential customers use your products.
Get your shit together.
Regards.
just missed the allow button.
A worthy goal. My experiences with eclipse have largely painful. Those who do not understand emacs are condemned to reimplement it, poorly. Eclipse seems to be obscure, bloated, and buggy. It behaves more like an MS office app than a programmer's tool; you can't obviously/easily reextend the extensions. We don't need to be reductionist viers; there needs to be a middle ground. Unfortunately emacs hasn't captured the imagination of next gen coders, and thus seems to be withering.
"As the PDC is the definitive developer event focused on the future of the Microsoft platform, we try to align it to be in front of major platform milestones"
Translation...
"The things we wanted to show at the PDC are so far behind schedule that we would look like fools for even demoing the software."
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Because others in my situation might need a laugh before the ship sinks.
Regards.
quitting smoking and have had too much coffee! You're just asking to be modd'ed Troll or Flamebait!
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Can't spare the legal staff to hold a Professional Developer's Conference without them.
After all, if someone mentions a "business process" during a panel, have to patent that baby for MSFT quick!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
They should come out and say it, due to lack of interest, we are canceling this gig. Man, so much money and what a waste. These bunch needs new blood!
MS has multiple conferences aimed at developers. MIX just recently gave developers a chance to learn about Silverlight. TechEd has hundreds of sessions for developers, and there's a dedicated European version of TechEd in Barcelona. PDC is always focused on showing off future technology (~2 years down the road), and not training on the stuff available today. Given that Vista has only recently shipped, and that the new versions of Server, SQL and VisualStudio aren't shipping til next year, it's not surprising that no one wants to talk about the _next_ versions of those things yet.
Developers! Developers! Devel...never mind.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
I really like NEdit, and so do many of the folks at work. A few holdouts do use Emacs but any appeal it may have is lost on me. The standard GNU Xemacs doesn't even have different open files show up in different tabs. My idea of a good programmers editor left the terminal window behind a long time ago, but emacs seems to still be stuck there.
DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
One said his wife was expecting, and the second was busy porting his game from the DirectX10 (codename 'Titanic') to OpenGL. The last said he was busy trying to get his Vista drivers working. He said all the UAC messages are slowing him down.
Go Vista! Go straight into a hillside!
> I agree.
.net IE/Windows only crap and see if they are receptive. Explore whether your existing stuff can be run under Wine and fix things until it does work. Then plant a bug in your customer's ear that you AREN'T one of those crappy little vertical vendors who only understands Microsoft. and that if they want to escape you won't be one of the vendors holding them back, that you can support other platforms. If everyone is a passive as you and waits for someone else to go first Microsoft wins.
No. You don't really. You like to bitch and moan once in awhile but you really don't mind taking it up the pooper whenever Microsoft wants to shaft you. Harsh? Yup. Happens to be true though, based on what you are writing.
Because you have KNOWN exactly what Microsoft is and how your fortunes (and you customer, etc) are tied to Microsoft's whims for years (hell, decades now) and I didn't hear you mention the FIRST step towards an attempt to correct a situation you yourself realize is ultimately going to hurt you.
Yes you are right, that you and your customers have become ensnared in Microsoft's trap of dependency. And you are at least toying with the first step of admitting you have a dependency problem. Now you need a plan to break the unhealthy addiction. You really needed to start years back to have a leg up on the smart competitors who already figured it out but perhaps it isn't too late for you to save yourself.
Step one: When you are in a hole that is rapidly filling with water, the first step has to be to stop digging. That means make every effort to avoid adding any new dependencies on Microsoft technologies. That means don't touch Vista or any of any of it's new technologies or APIs. Same for Office 2007.
Step two: Develop a roadmap that will lead you where you want to be tomorrow, not where Microsoft wants you to go. Many find the easy path to be web based apps, especially in this era of AJAX. Pitch your customers a client neutral web based version of the apps you currently push on them as
Step three: start finding and deploying alternatives whenever practical. OO.o instead of Office where it will work, Firefox instead of IE anywhere there isn't a lot of ActiveX BS to snarl things up. Outlook/Outlook Express should be trashed anywhere people aren't already addicted to Exchange stuff. The more of those dependencies you can break, both for yourself and your customers, the easier it will be to open up options down the road. Same for file/print servers. They can make a great first step and let you gain practical experience.
Step four: Explore and experiment, learning what is out there is half the struggle. Microsoft crams their stuff down your craw, the free stuff is often waiting for you to go looking for it.
Step five: Don't just look at Linux. Yes a Mac isn't any more RMS pure than Windows and they want the same power Microsoft has, but Microsoft is the threat to independent developers and users today. And a Mac can run Photoshop/etc.
Democrat delenda est
individual version of a ground-breaking text editor
They're re-doing notepad???
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I had to deal with the stress of Visual BASIC 5.0 and 6.0 and using OLE/DDE to control MS-Word 2000 objects, and when VB closed the Word document, it locked up the Word toolbar. My code did not do that, it was a bug with Office 2000. I removed the close command and the toolbar didn't lock up, but the user had to close the document by themselves. Microsoft was aware of the problem but said that SP1 or SP2 of Office 2000 might fix the problem, and my managers wanted it fixed right away so they could migrate from 97 to 2000. They didn't understand that I didn't have the Word 2000 source code to fix the bug, and that the problem was not with my program, and Microsoft documented that it was a Word 2000 problem.
.Net migration with Visual Studio 2002 was a bear. I was put on disability, but now I am trying to find a way to return to work.
Ah well at least Microsoft has an offer to get Visual Studio 2005 Standard for completing two virtual lab surveys, so this time I don't have to buy Visual BASIC 2005 Standard or use the clipped Visual BASIC 2005 Express edition that is free.
I must say that Microsoft has a lot of free online documentation and eBooks that have helped out as well.
I am glad I quit in 2002, I heard the
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Most new developers think lisp is what makes daffy and donald duck talk funny.
Eclipse Eclipse in terms of RAM usage? Is that even possible? Eclipse uses what, like > 100MBytes before even loading a project, doesn't it? LOL...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
And I have step four covered. I have tried various distros and even rolled my own Gentoo install. Not claiming to be a guru or anything.
My issue is user adoption. My opinion is the opinion of only one of their providers.
You are correct on most points, but like many others fail to address one thing. Users want the simplest solution. They are correct in believing that MS is the simplest solution. They don't mind sacrificing security, freedom, and mobility so that they can have something that is monocultural and uniform like Windows.
Thank you for taking the time to write your post. Maybe it will help.
Regards.
PDC is not Microsoft's preeminent developer conference. Tech Ed 200X is. My understanding is that TE is Microsoft's biggest developer conference, and it's running next week, June 4-8 (or 3-8 if you registered for the pre-conference sessions.) Picture 10,0000+ geeks trying hard to make dinner conversation, cavernous convention halls, and (literally) dawn-to-dusk classes and sessions for six days. Quite an experience.
Conferences get cancelled all the time for all kinds of reasons: I was scheduled to go to Lynda.com's DX3 in Boston, and it got nixed a few weeks out, probably because of competition from FlashForward, MIX, and TechEd. Conferences can get nuked for any of a number of reasons: attendence, competing events, a sense of quiet. I'd rather they schedule developer conferences for when they're warranted, rather than trying to hype up whatever's finished according to a timetable.
In this case, we're in something of a quiet period: SQL Server 2005 and VS.NET 2005 have been released, ASP.NET 2.0 has been out for awhile, and everyone's waiting for the next big shoes to fall: the growth (or failure) of Silverlight, an ORM-ish technology called LINQ, and the next version of VS.NET, which will fold a lot of web dev/expression stuff into VS.NET. My guess is that "Orcas" will be an extremely significant release for MSFT, in that it will finally turn a wo rld class programming/DB interaction environment into a tool that advanced designers and Dreamweaver users will want to use.
All of that's a bit off, and so for now, a quiet conference schedule may represent some honesty from Redmond. Personally, among Microsft technologies, I'm currently most excited about some of the third-party stuff coming out. Check out the controls offered by Telerik, or even more gee-whiz cool, the just-released EntitySpaces 2007 ORM framework. Awesome tools. I think Mike & Co. just released this to production yesterday.
BTW, I will be at Tech Ed if anyone wants to meet over junk food and ice cream. As I have a bit of a background programming Actionscript, I'm interested particularly in seeing what Expression/Silverlight can do.
There are a couple of glaring problems with Eclipse, I think. The first is that it's next to impossible to redistribute project files in any meaningful manner, last time I checked. All you get is a mess in your .workspace directory. The second, and most obvious, is that the GUI is based on sluggish Java garbage. Like Azureus, it's just excruciating to use. Which is a shame, because for editing Java code, it's unparalleled.
Oh, and the One True Editor is Vim, you heathen scum.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
And slowly but steadily, each and every one of those mutates into a full-blown operating system, flooding the open-source world with yet more operating systems that implement almost identical APIs.
Because my shop is a Windows shop (ugh) I have no choice but to develop on Windows. But we've all agreed to do our in-house Windows development using Java and Oracle tools rather than Microsoft tools. So for us, this is a non-event.
Consider the benefits of this approach:
1. We don't have to worry about porting our applications to Vista, because it's Sun's and Oracle's responsibility to make their platforms Vista-compatbile. All we have to do is copy files to a new server. So we can spend our time actually writing code, instead of worrying about porting issues.
2. In the event we DON'T move to Vista, our stuff will work on Linux, or Mac OS/X, or anything else Oracle and Java run on. It's not likely we'll get a mainframe, but if we did, we'd STILL be able to copy our stuff onto it.
3. Our skills have a long shelf-life. New versions of Java tend to ADD capabilities, but the language itself doesn't tend to change in ways that require re-writes. Oracle's the same way, mostly.
Overall, I don't know why anyone still uses Microsoft tools, given the way they like to "churn" their environment. It seems kind of chaotic and random to me. Remember the switch from VB6 to VB.Net, and how people howled about that? Phew...
NO CARRIER
"Developers! Developers! Develop--oops, sorry, we've got some big launches coming up. You guys will have to come back later."
Chris Mattern
Oh, they do notice, it's just that they really don't care.
Thing is, if MS treat their developers with this type of contempt, imagine how lowly their users would rate?
"End users, who needs them? We know they will not have a choice sooner or later, and if they do, we'll kill whoever is opposing us... or at least try to"
HEX offender mugshot ID: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
of steve balmer lurking, hunched over, and furtively whispering, "developers.....developers....developers...develop ers..."
/., where so many of us are programmers. I hope he's ticked off about canceling the PDC, whatever the reason. And maybe I go to heck for making that joke).
(OK, joking aside, though I rather dislike Ballmer, that was a really great video of a truly great attitude for him to have had and it's really unfair that gets slagged for it. It's especially unfair that he gets slagged for it on
I depend on this shit. Why? Because you formed a friggin monopoly and all of my potential customers use your products.
Sounds like your market is ripe for a disruptive technology.
Do something on linux that's far-and-away better than what exists today - do it in AJAX - and they will come.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Yep, Leopard and the iPhone. ;-)
Apples worldwide Developer Conference is on June 11-15. It would be embarrassing for MS if more developers showed up at SJ's event than SB's beside they need a few more days for there secret new OS features to be copied ^H^H^H^H^Hentered into powerpoint
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
I've been around too many broken windows servers when I see "PDC" and think "primary domain controller."
But do Microsoft really support their developers that well these days? I mean compare VS2005 (note the year folks) with what is coming out of eclipse (let alone the commercial extensions to eclipse) and its hard to justify the claim that VS is the "best" developer IDE, its just that VS folks haven't used the alternatives whereas the Java folks can switch like the wind. So IDE wise they aren't supporting their developers. Even things like the testing framework are an issue, most people use the open source JUnit or NUnit but MS couldn't stand that so created their own, bulkier and worse, alternative, again not great for developers.
So what about features? Well if you do enterprise software they haven't had a major revision of the set since 2004(!) and even on the desktop with things like Office the amount of porting information from old to ribbon isn't as great as you'd expect (its more this is how you BUILD stuff with ribbon).
There is MDSN which is great for software access (and you pay for it) and some of the forums are pretty good. The problem with MS is that the community is so MS centric, what I mean by this is that when you compare with Java you aren't asking whether Sun support Java people better than MS but whether SAP, Oracle, IBM, BEA, Sun, Open Source, etc support Java people better.
I've regularly sat on both sides of the fence, and I think that competition between vendors tends to give developers better support.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I'm not that surprised. If WinHEC (the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference) was anything to go by, Microsoft have post-coital fatigue after the (premature?) release of Vista, and have very little to say. The main keynote at WinHEC was totally uninspiring, there are a couple of neat things happening with Windows Server, but the rest of the conference was zero content. Attendance seemed low to me, compared to the one PDC and three or four other WinHECs I've been to.
a.
I love the idea of Java, but the implementation poor. I used to be a Java dev, but I've fully converted to the dark side since, essentially because I found Java's implementation just impractical. Things like VM versions (Java has countless varying versions (of which any number can be installed in varying locations), .Net has 4 - of which only 2 are particularly significant imo - 1.1 + 2.0), designing forms (I found a plug-in for Eclipse once that made it ever-so-slightly faster than coding it manually), and frankly, the god-awful speed of the it running....all made Java just a bit of a pipe dream rather than a practical reality.
.Net cross-platform portability (which is a bummer), but Java just doesn't cut the mustard for applications for these reasons, plus others.
I know what you mean about
throw new NoSignatureException();
> My god, you really are a fanatic OSS troll,
Guess you missed the part where I recommended Macs in certain scenarios. Longterm, yea I'm a Free Software believer. But mostly I think Windows is a menace and a disaster. Other than gamers I really don't know of a question where Windows is a good answer.
But more importantly Microsoft is fast becoming a threat to the entire idea of 'personal computers.' I'm becoming convinced they intend, and have a fair chance of attaining, nothing less than the elimination of the general purpose computer, replacing it with something more akin to an X-Box that runs IE and Office. If we can't gain enough control to offer credible competition before they manange to buy a law requiring all unregulated hardware to enforce code signing and DRM we all lose bigtime. On that day all small independent software houses are going to be hosed.
Democrat delenda est
This all fits in perfectly with Microsoft's new company strategy, getting rid of them annoying developers and start hiring more lawyers! Why bother making better products than your competitors, if you can just sue them out of existence?
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63
Whatever the question, Windows is probably the wrong answer. The sole exception is a gamer who wants more than a Playstation/X-Box can offer.
Holly fuck, surely that is why Dell, HP, Gateway, Lanix, PC-World, Best Buy and even the guy in the corner PC shop keep offering Windows XP/Windows Vista machines... and not only that *drumrolls*.... people keep buying it...
If you haven't experienced a thin client or server hosted homes on a thick client you can't really understand the difference. In my world (with 100 total seats at six sites) a workstation can die and we don't care. We toss the spare out and get on with our work. NO inportant data lives on the clients even though ours still have the OS on a local HDD. .
In my University they have every document saved in RAID storage which is backed up every night. It is as possible and trivial to configure Windows and Linux to do it, it is also equally possible to make raw disk writing to replace hard disks... most people here use Windows XP, I use Fedora Core and it is equally easy.
But until you experience it and truly understand there is a better way than unreliable Dells running unstable Windows you won't be able to explain it to others..
Unreliable Dells?, Unstable Windows?, come on this is bullshit and you know it. What version of Windows are you using? ME? 98? The cliche that Windows is unstable is in the same level than the cliche that Linux is "not ready for the desktop". Linux zealots hate the later, but they keep trying to believe the former... its plain FUD.
To conclude answering your trollish rant, the Microsoft Windows OS family is aimed to certain population (90% of the whole population by the statistics), CentOS is aimed to other population and Ubuntu to yet another. As I have read again and again in here when someone wants to make kids like you enter in reason, when you grow up, you will understand that these operating systems are just *tools*, each one of those are useful for certain different tasks. Until then, you can get all sentimental with your sets of 0's and 1's which is what Windows and Linux are...
The rest of us? we just use what is needed for the work.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
It's also pretty nice for people working with XML Schema or WSDL, so much so that it makes it just about possible to work with those formats...
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Compile, debug, pack, play chess, translate morse code?
I guess not.
Rethinking email
I don't think one needs to be anti-Microsoft, so much as one should be doing their job and protecting their customers from unnecessary lock-ins. Quite frankly, I'd be quite happy to run Windows workstations with *nix servers doing the file sharing. I think the greatest evil that Microsoft has done is marketing themselves as the only truly useable and useful solution to every problem. Whether it's video games, workstations or servers, the Microsoft marketing machine is all about propagating this idea. In reality, solutions should not be based on the most popular vendor, but rather on what an organization needs. If all they do is some basic wordprocessing and spreadsheets, then I don't necessarily see it as necessary to advocate a complete abandonment of the Windows platform, but merely moving them to OpenOffice, thus saving the organization money in licensing fees. Windows may very well still be the best workstation platform, and I certainly don't want to upset the balance by advocating a radical shift that could create a lot of problems that will ultimately come down on me.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
...Other than gamers I really don't know of a question where Windows is a good answer.... Even this is not true. Microsoft is attempting to force all gamers and game companies to upgrade to vista by making directX 10 only for vista and not for XP.