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Trouble For Microsoft Developers With the Windows Store
An anonymous reader writes "This blog post from an un-happy Microsoft developer highlights many of the problems that developers are having with submitting to the new Windows store. His app, that won 2 App X challenges from Microsoft, has been rejected 6 times over 2 months with no clear indications as to the cause. This is even after going through a rigorous early-certification process. With Windows RT relying solely on apps from the store, and there being just over 7,000 apps total, Microsoft could have a big problem here."
No, pretty sure *you* are the idiot here. If you'd actually RTFA, instead of whatever brief skim you took, you'd have seen that the guy ran WACK every time... and that it always ran clean on his system. He eventually got a failure out of it by running his VM's performance down to the Win8 mimum specs, but even after fixing that he continued getting unexplained errors from the certification process that didn't show up on his local system.
Also, WACK failed to catch a very simple and obvious thing - a piece of dev/test code that he'd left in a constructor, which will crash the app when run if installed from the store - that it clearly should have. That's exactly the kind of thing that static analysis should have found.
I'm rather shocked by Microsoft's failures, here. Usually, they're very good with dev tools and communication. Not this time, it seems. You'd think they'd have learned from the problems Apple had... it almost feels like they're trying to repeat Apple's mistakes too.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Why do you think that another mobile failure will marginalize MS? None of the previous ones did. Are you under the impression that everybody's going to throw away their PC and start using a tablet? That's not what's happening. PC sales are stagnant because the market's saturated. Tablet sales are booming because it's new use case that users are just beginning to move to. One is not being replaced by the other.
It's true that this is going to hurt MS. But they'll still collect a tithe for every non-Mac PC sold, and they'll still sell a lot of server licenses. As these markets saturate, they will cease to make MS uber-profitable, but these markets are still big, and will remain so — as will Microsoft.
For those who prefer metric, that's about 195.6 cm. He's well above 99th percentile for height. Big, too. Kind of an imposing-looking guy, in fact.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
How apt: belief based development.
Back in the mid 90s, I worked at a games company where we were struggling to get the performance of Direct3D Retained Mode (anyone else remember that?) up to anywhere near Glide levels on Voodoo hardware. It was "escalated" until some DirectX "evangelist" rocked up at our office to "assist."
His "assistance" consisted of looking out of the window and telling us that we must be doing something wrong, because his developers assured him that D3DRM should perform better than anything that we could roll ourselves.
"Look," we said, "here's the same app, showing the same scene, and the framerate of the D3DRM version is half that of Glide."
But he wouldn't look. He literally wouldn't look at the screens. He wouldn't even acknowledge the problem. Just kept going on about how we must be mis-using it, because he had been assured.
Needless to say, we dropped D3DRM, as did everyone else, and it died in a corner, alone and unloved. But it did give us a valuable insight into the developer and "evangelist" culture at Microsoft. I think all Windows developers learn it eventually, which is why Microsoft need a constant influx of bright eyed, bushy tailed young suckers who'll fall for the line that they only hurt us because they love us so much.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.