.NET 4.6 Optimizer Bug Causes Methods To Get Wrong Parameters

tobiasly writes: A serious bug in the just-released .NET 4.6 runtime causes the JIT compiler to generate incorrectly-optimized code which results in methods getting called with different parameters than what were passed in. Nick Craver of Stack Exchange has an excellent write-up of the technical details and temporary workarounds; Microsoft has acknowledged the problem and submitted an as-yet unreleased patch.

This problem is compounded by Microsoft's policy of replacing the existing .NET runtime, as opposed to the side-by-side runtimes which were possible until .NET 2.0. This means that even if your project targets .NET 4.5, it will get the 4.6 runtime if it was installed on that machine. Since it's not possible to install the just-released Visual Studio 2015 without .NET 4.6, this means developers must make the difficult choice between using the latest tools or risking crippling bugs such as this one.

Comments

The joys of youth

[weilawei]

Since it's not possible to install the just-released Visual Studio 2015 without .NET 4.6, this means developers must make the difficult choice between using the latest tools or risking crippling bugs such as this one.

If you're a dev, you shouldn't be chasing versions. Find a stable version, stick with it through your project. SE already has enough of that "stuff changing out from under me" feel without adding to the issue.

Re: The joys of youth

[John Bresnahan]

And if you have to support multiple applications, tied to various versions of .NET?

Re: The joys of youth

[Virtucon]

I wish it would go back to allowing side by side operation of .NET instead of replacing 4.5.X with 4.6. I have Win 10 isolated in VMs and 4.6 is already breaking quite a few things. Nicks got a good workaround for this particular problem but I still can't believe that something this basic missed QA in MSFT because .NET regression tests would be a basic must have including JIT problems.

Re:The joys of youth

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep.

Should also apply it to language of the week. Save that for your hobby projects that you are willing to throw away when you realize that the language wasn't the best tool for your project, or had crippling flaws.

C is pretty nice if you want stability. It is possible to talk about code and say things like "It compiles but you should probably not use syntax like that since it has been deprecated for a quarter of a century."

Re:The joys of youth

[Anonymous Coward]

Since it's not possible to install the just-released Visual Studio 2015 without .NET 4.6, this means developers must make the difficult choice between using the latest tools or risking crippling bugs such as this one.

If you're a dev, you shouldn't be chasing versions. Find a stable version, stick with it through your project. SE already has enough of that "stuff changing out from under me" feel without adding to the issue.

Except when your company makes tools other companies use, then you need to support the tools they use.
I wonder if this is what broke my VS installations recently. I can't open any designer tools (form layout) due to an error..

Re:The joys of youth

[Trailer Trash]

Since it's not possible to install the just-released Visual Studio 2015 without .NET 4.6, this means developers must make the difficult choice between using the latest tools or risking crippling bugs such as this one.

If you're a dev, you shouldn't be chasing versions. Find a stable version, stick with it through your project. SE already has enough of that "stuff changing out from under me" feel without adding to the issue.

Yeah, easy to say. When I was programming Microsoft systems (admittedly 20 years ago) the problem was that you were faced with the choice of upgrading and risking crap like this or not upgrading and dealing with problems that Microsoft would only fix "in the next upgrade".

So glad I left that behind.

Re: The joys of youth

[0123456]

I still can't believe that something this basic missed QA in MSFT because .NET regression tests would be a basic must have including JIT problems.

Didn't Microsoft lay off thousands of QA folks a year or so back?

Re:The joys of youth

[Anonymous Coward]

That's like suggesting young folks ought to settle down and get married, rather than chasing all the pretty skirts and handsome boys. Where's the fun in that?!

Re: The joys of youth

[Anonymous Coward]

Anon to preserve mods

I love it when one part of a development ecosystem saves themselves time/effort/cost/whatever by transferring ( sometimes in a way that multiplies ) that to others.

Re: The joys of youth

[Virtucon]

point taken.

Re:The joys of youth

[RingDev]

The fix is available in the .Net Git repo if you want it prior to the next official release.

-Rick

Re:The joys of youth

[johannesg]

Your advice means I would be stuck using Visual Studio 5, and GCC 2.8.0. Hope you don't mind me 'chasing versions'...

I have, however, refrained from chasing every Microsoft fad over the years, meaning I'm now in charge of a modern C++11 application, happily running on Linux and Windows, in 32-bit and 64-bit mode, and with full support for things like unicode and IPv6. Instead of hoping that Microsoft would get off their lazy ass and finally update MFC, or something...

There was a question here on slashdot on how to plan for 20 year development cycles the other day. I'm almost at that point now, and let me tell you what keeps an application alive:

- don't get locked in to single-vendor technology that might disappear on a moment's notice.
- hide API's inside your own classes. That makes ripping them out and replacing them with something else so much easier.
- stick to standards.
- invest in regular modernisation. Do it when reasonably can, not when you absolutely must.
- refactor whatever stinks.
- keep your own skills up to date. Apply as needed.

Just my two cents, of course...

Re:The joys of youth

[Bengie]

Find a stable version, stick with it through your project.

Which project? I have about 30 of them ranging from 10 years old to 1 month old.

Re:The joys of youth

[weilawei]

It's hard to do nuance in a first post. (I'm sick of the cow thing, so I'd rather have almost anything else first.) You raise great points.

When I say, "chasing versions", I'm referring to the practice of immediately upgrading to a new release of something, without a testing (community or otherwise) period for that specific version. In my experience, that practice made me great at finding stupid bugs and weird edge cases in other peoples' code. It's a lot of time and I'd rather not be that person if I need to ship a product.

Once things have shipped and you're in maintenance mode, you can make changes that cut across the entire project, because there's less pressure on you. What you've done sounds like exactly that: moderate advancement, rather than always being on the absolute cutting edge.

Okay, you ACs can make MOO cow jokes now.

Re:The joys of youth

[weilawei]

They can each have their own versions, yes? At least, that seems like the sane thing to do. Typically, there's a listing around somewhere saying which versions are expected, if for no other purpose than developer reference.

Re:The joys of youth

[netsavior]

If you're a dev, you shouldn't be chasing versions. Find a stable version, stick with it through your project. SE already has enough of that "stuff changing out from under me" feel without adding to the issue.

This mindset is why I still have to support companies that refuse to migrate from IE8. Thanks.

There are currently 2 common mindsets.

1) find a stable version and prevent yourself from ever getting anything better and any upgrade is sure to break tons of stuff
or
2) upgrade versions every time a new one comes out so you get the benefits of incremental improvements, sure stuff breaks, but the next patch will fix it in a matter of days/weeks

On April 8th 2014 the joyful day of XP/IE6 death, which should be considered an international holiday, I think a lot of companies realized that the days of use a "Stable version" for decades is over/no longer realistic.

Now I am not saying "just start upgrading everything always" because the worst thing you can do is try to step out in front of the subway car of continuous integration/continuous improvement after letting a project mature on "stick with the stable version" mentality; but I am saying... the half-assed "stable version" meets patch tuesday bullshit that microsoft is doing will continue to bite you and everybody else in the ass until that entire tech stack stops doing that crap and starts doing the continuous integration thing for real. Chrome does it, every app on your phone tries to do it, "cloud" products do it (that is one of the reasons execs love "cloud").

Microsoft might as well be mailing floppies for how broken and relevant their process is.

Re:The joys of youth

[spongman]

> stuck using Visual Studio 5

Visual Studio 97

Re:The joys of youth

[Bengie]

The issue being discussed is about the environment. I need a different computer/VM for each environment. The .Net 4.6 issue affects all thing .Net 4.x

Re:The joys of youth

[ADRA]

I've included some notes from my own experience to help those (not necessarily parent poster) avoid similar failures.

- don't get locked in to single-vendor technology that might disappear on a moment's notice.
Realistically, evaluate if said technologies can survive company collapse or not. Languages / Technologies with heavy internal investment like C# are a lot more coupled to their companies than say PHP, Ruby, etc. That said, maybe the Mono/Apache/etc.. type groups out there could keep the lang alive if MS pulled the rug. Java could be better off if Oracle killed it to open up the ecosystem pieces they've kept ransom. HTML/Javascript are completely open (though standards keep things semi-coherent) but realistically 3-4 vendors control the narrative and if 2 decided to go in a different direction, you'll have a lot of chaos to keep things working.

- hide API's inside your own classes. That makes ripping them out and replacing them with something else so much easier.
Well, the general mantra of layering access to things certainly mitigates unnecessary coupling which is a good thing. This should be applied everywhere though, not just inner class scoping.

- stick to standards.
Yep, and invent some of your own if there's a lack of good standardization where there should be.

- invest in regular modernisation. Do it when reasonably can, not when you absolutely must.
A tricky proposition, but one that should certainly be striven for. Admittedly, saying lets drop all this stuff that produces more revenue to work on X which may eventually help us maximize revenue in the future is certainly not as clear cut, but in the ideal world, the code is always getting improved, polished, simplified, etc.. Writing (CS101 here) low coupled, high cohesion code will vastly simplify future improvements. Just make sure that you always consider 3rd party libraries / platform libraries / language quirks included into external dependencies that may evolve over time.

- refactor whatever stinks.
Whenever I try refacting crap (core piece of functionality), I write a TON of extra tests for before/after comparison because no matter how perfect your re-implementation, there will always be those bazaar corner cases that worked (possibly through fluke/magic) in the original spahgetti that violates the implied or explicit contracts in the future. Refactor for sure, but don't ripshod, or your eventual replacement will be refacting/fixing your POC for much the same reason you refactored.

- keep your own skills up to date. Apply as needed.
This is never bad advice, but just remember that just because you learn a new technique / technology, don't go running out to refactor everything to use it. Generally if it was popular 10-15 years ago, its probably stood the test of time and passed, while newer tech should be looked at carefully and evaluated for specific cases where appropriate.

Re: The joys of youth

[0xdeaddead]

that was part of vista, and server 2008 when they declared automated testing was bettet. So no we suffer, because apparently all the hard work that went into 2003 wasnt worth it.

2012 is a joke of a server.

Re: The joys of youth

[0xdeaddead]

honestly i liked 97! And ms still had powerstation fortran before they sold them to compaq, then hp sold them to intel..

Re:The joys of youth

[Billly Gates]

If you're a dev, you shouldn't be chasing versions. Find a stable version, stick with it through your project. SE already has enough of that "stuff changing out from under me" feel without adding to the issue.

This mindset is why I still have to support companies that refuse to migrate from IE8. Thanks.

There are currently 2 common mindsets.

1) find a stable version and prevent yourself from ever getting anything better and any upgrade is sure to break tons of stuff

or

2) upgrade versions every time a new one comes out so you get the benefits of incremental improvements, sure stuff breaks, but the next patch will fix it in a matter of days/weeks

On April 8th 2014 the joyful day of XP/IE6 death, which should be considered an international holiday, I think a lot of companies realized that the days of use a "Stable version" for decades is over/no longer realistic.

Now I am not saying "just start upgrading everything always" because the worst thing you can do is try to step out in front of the subway car of continuous integration/continuous improvement after letting a project mature on "stick with the stable version" mentality; but I am saying... the half-assed "stable version" meets patch tuesday bullshit that microsoft is doing will continue to bite you and everybody else in the ass until that entire tech stack stops doing that crap and starts doing the continuous integration thing for real. Chrome does it, every app on your phone tries to do it, "cloud" products do it (that is one of the reasons execs love "cloud").

Microsoft might as well be mailing floppies for how broken and relevant their process is.

Speak for yourself! I can't consider learning HTML 5 until 2020 when 7 goes EOL as too many of the users have standardized on IE 8 HTML throughout the whole decade. I have 2 apps we support which are IE 6 only and can't be upgraded and not our call to upgrade it( client owned)

Re: The joys of youth

[Billly Gates]

that was part of vista, and server 2008 when they declared automated testing was bettet. So no we suffer, because apparently all the hard work that went into 2003 wasnt worth it.

2012 is a joke of a server.

Funny. On server 2012 R2 I can reverse AD schema deletions, go powershell only and or turn GUI on or off, use desired state configuration powershell templates, use DCs as VMs, and many many almost countless things I can't do on server 2k3.

Is it really true you need a 1990s modem plugged into a 2k3 server just to turn VPN on and then unplug the modem before it is ready??

Re:The joys of youth

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is the crap you're forced to deal with when your libraries are all bundled up into an "environment" which you cannot alter or run side-by-side with another "environment".

Libraries vs. Frameworks. Guess which one I don't like.

Re:The joys of youth

[johannesg]

Agreed.

My comment on being locked in specifically referred to the long train of Microsoft technologies that arrived, flowered for a short while, and then whithered over the years while I was working on this thing. One of my first choices as a young engineer was to use the win32 API instead of MFC. MFC proved to be a dead-end, so I feel fully justified in choosing what was (officially) the more difficult option. I forget the names of the others... Silverlight is a good example. I feel for anyone who invested in that. And .NET is on the way out, _in my opinion_ (feel free to disagree) - relying on that is a good way to be obsolete a few years from now. But there certainly were others. Who is using COM now, except to interface with specific Microsoft APIs? DCOM? ATL? OLE?

Modernisation is something I've always done during quiet periods. None of my customers needed (or need, even today) IPv6 support, but since adding it was fairly straightforward I've done so anyway. None of my customers needed unicode when I introduced it either, but we have since added a German customer who certainly appreciates being able to use that German S character. Could they have lived without it? Probably. Could we have built in unicode support while already under high load to tailor the software to their site? I very much doubt it. And consider this: the competition for this bid was a package I also happen to know, that crashes when you feed it any character that has the high bit set, so that was one point in our favor then. IPv6 will eventually make sense, and when some customer convenes a Tiger Team for Emergency Network Migration to IPv6 they will call me in, and I will nod sagely and say "click that checkbox over there, and it uses IPv6 instead."

My language of choice is C++. I find the hatred that language gets on /. astonishing - it is not only a powerful language that results in very fast programs, but also a well-established standard supported by multiple vendors with multiple compilers. Over the years I've compiled this project with Visual C++ 5, 6, 2008, 2012, 2013, and now 2015 (see me chase those versions!), acc, and uncounted GCC versions. I'd truly hate to be stuck with a single-compiler language.

We rely on plenty of external packages as well. The underlying database is currently Postgres. Before it used to be Oracle. Our SQL usage is not so arcane that we coulnd't run it on other SQL-compliant databases - a few specialty functions for things like checking database sizes would have to be rewritten, but the bulk of the software would run out of the box.

We have our own drawing API (about 7 primitives, nothing too fancy). It used to do win32 only. Then it got the ability to do X11 as well. Then we changed it to Cairo. We print using the same API - originally through xprint, and now through Cairo + CUPS. It may sound like a lot of change, but it was all confined to a handful of classes, with the rest of the software never knowing the difference.

Anyway, just rambling on now ;-)

Re: The joys of youth

[MemeRot]

Only 4.5.2 and one flavor of 3.x (and of course 4.6) will be supported come January. Makes me wish nuget had an option to only pull packages for supported frameworks, I think that's all on the package maintainer today

Re: The joys of youth

[MemeRot]

After Jan. 12, 2016, Microsoft will support IE9 only on Windows Vista, IE10 only on Windows Server 2012, and IE11 on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1.

IE7 and IE8 will drop off support completely, no matter what OS they run on.

Good motivator to migrate :)

Re: The joys of youth

[MemeRot]

Jan 2016 will kill IE7 and IE8.

Apparently Microsoft is not doing a good job of getting the message out.

Re:The joys of youth

[KingMotley]

Smart people recommend that you stay away from HTML 5 until version 5.1.

Got any good abo jokes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do seagulls have wings?

To beat the abos to the tip.

Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares about the dead interpreter known as .NET Why is the story of Slashdot being sold not on SLASHDOT!?!?!?

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/07/dhi-group-plans-to-sell-off-slashdot-and-sourceforge/

Re:Who cares?

[iONiUM]

Lots of people care, including myself. I develop using .NET and this is very useful information for me. This is the exact kind of information I would expect out of Slashdot: tech information that helps me in my tech-oriented job.

.NET is in no way "dead", despite your obvious hatred for it.

Re: Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is the story of Slashdot being sold not on SLASHDOT!?!?!?

You must be new here. Slashdot editors will only find out about it tomorrow when it's old news.

Re: Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe CmdrTaco will buy slashdot back...

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Company, however, has not successfully leveraged the Slashdot user base to further Dice's digital recruitment business

Great news, everybody! We win!

Re:Who cares?

[gstoddart]

Why is the story of Slashdot being sold not on SLASHDOT!?!?!?

Well, ignoring the rest of your comment, this is actually worth highlighting.

The Company acquired Slashdot Media in 2012 both to provide the Dice business with broader reach into Slashdot's user community base and to extend the Dice business outside North America by engaging with SourceForge's significant international technology user community. The Company, however, has not successfully leveraged the Slashdot user base to further Dice's digital recruitment business; and with the acquisition of The IT Job Board and success of Open Web, the anticipated value to the Company of the SourceForge traffic outside North America has not materialized. The Company now plans to divest the business, as it does not fit within the Company's strategic initiatives and believes the Slashdot Media business will have the opportunity to improve its financial performance under different ownership.

Good riddance, dice.

Sorry we couldn't help you leverage your synergies.

Actually, we're not sorry at all.

Re:Who cares?

[0123456]

I guess the expected tsunami of techies eager for SJW articles never arrived.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

He isn't the only one to hate it, so do I.
Unfortunately it's sometimes the right tool for the job.

Re:Who cares?

[weilawei]

That's a shame. (Really.) Dice were relatively benign overlords compared to some others who might have been even more aggressive in their attempts to monetize us.

Not that I particularly like Dice. But Slashdot is still here, mostly intact, and still the bastion of free speech that no one else wants to be. That ought to count for something.

Re: Who cares?

[Bloody Bastard]

I heard that slashdot was sold to 9gag...

Re:Who cares?

[serviscope_minor]

I guess the expected tsunami of techies eager for SJW articles never arrived

And yet here you are bringing it up. Funny how the people whining loudest about "SJW" and whatnot are tautologically the ones who make the biggest fuss about it.

How about you stick to the topic of the optimizer bug in .NET and not drag your hatred of bogeymen into it?

Re:Who cares?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Yeah, imagine that. A bunch of entitled little shits upset that they're being shown articles that their shit indeed does stink.

Re:Who cares?

[iluvcapra]

Hey, wether you visit to read, or you visit to start a Bro-splainer flamewar, it still counts as an ad impression.

Re:Who cares?

[weilawei]

I check the Disable Advertising box. Therefore, in order to contribute ad impressions, I must start flame wars.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, neckbeard dinosaurs don't even grasp the irony when they try to pretend .NET/Windows is "dead". They're so cute.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck Beta, fuck Dice, godd riddence.

Where's that Taco man?

Re:Who cares?

[Xest]

Apparently we've not been successfully leveraged.

That's unfortunate.

Re:Who cares?

[weilawei]

Yep. Shit has officially hit the fan. I think we're in for a bumpy ride.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you know the only people who ever use the term "SJW" are fucking assholes and losers who want to defend their rights to be assholes and losers?

If you don't, well, then we should point out that you're an asshole and a loser.

That you have a small penis, a tiny brain, and want to blame everybody else for your shortcomings is your fucking problem.

Grow up.

unless you need it wait...

[Virtucon]

Wait until the .1 release of Windows 10 unless you have to be on the bleeding edge. Despite the promises made by Microsoft, it'll have bugs, cause problems and third party support will be lagging.

Re:unless you need it wait...

[gstoddart]

Which is the problem with Microsoft trying to force people to use it, and deciding they're going to be forcing updates.

They're saying they're doing it for security, but time and time again Microsoft has demonstrated they're not trustworthy in their updates.

My experience says taking a day 1 anything from Microsoft is a recipe for disaster. In fact, taking a day 1 from anybody is.

Microsoft is basically breaking first and fixing later. The problem is it isn't Microsoft's stuff which ends up broken, and bad release engineering is costly to companies.

Sorry, but Microsoft hasn't demonstrated we should ever trust them with continuous releases. They've demonstrated the opposite, in fact.

Re:unless you need it wait...

[Virtucon]

wait, Microsoft doesn't have a lock on this kind of shit. Apple, Google, Samsung name a vendor and they have launch problems and it all stems from the complexity of building large systems or software projects. A regression gets missed or weren't there and now there's a quick shuffle to fix it. The measure we have to use is is how effective they get over time at reducing the defects by day zero but to expect zero defects is a false hope. So to your point, taking a .0 release from any vendor is risky but if you have to have it, you have to have it and learn to deal with the consequences.

Re:unless you need it wait...

[gstoddart]

So to your point, taking a .0 release from any vendor is risky but if you have to have it, you have to have it and learn to deal with the consequences.

Why, yes, I even said that

My experience says taking a day 1 anything from Microsoft is a recipe for disaster. In fact, taking a day 1 from anybody is.

I don't care who you are, I simply do not trust your fresh release of anything, I do not wish to fix your mistakes, and do not believe over time you'll be awesome at not breaking anything ever. In fact, I think that's impossible to do 100% of the time.

Not now, not ever. Because many many years of doing change management has told me that would be stupid and reckless, and I don't work in places which are willing to do that.

Unfortunately, Microsoft seems to be trying to go down the route of pretty much forcing as many people as possible to get the updates immediately.

Either because they're arrogant morons, or they figure it's just easier if everybody else does their beta testing.

There isn't a software vendor on the planet I would accept a first day release from. And I've seen far too many day 1 mistakes from Microsoft and other vendors to ever change that.

Re:unless you need it wait...

[Virtucon]

I don't care who you are, I simply do not trust your fresh release of anything, I do not wish to fix your mistakes, and do not believe over time you'll be awesome at not breaking anything ever. In fact, I think that's impossible to do 100% of the time.

Not now, not ever. Because many many years of doing change management has told me that would be stupid and reckless, and I don't work in places which are willing to do that.

Unfortunately, Microsoft seems to be trying to go down the route of pretty much forcing as many people as possible to get the updates immediately.

Either because they're arrogant morons, or they figure it's just easier if everybody else does their beta testing.

There isn't a software vendor on the planet I would accept a first day release from. And I've seen far too many day 1 mistakes from Microsoft and other vendors to ever change that.

But we've all become accustomed to accepting it. You buy that new cell phone for Christmas, it'll have a .0 release of the next gen of the O/S. It'll have bugs, problems, zero day vulnerabilities and as a consumer you'll be happy to wait 6 months to a year for a fix. You like that new Tesla because it's green, ultra cool and preppy. Is your fire insurance up to date? We do this because we want the glitter and in Win 10's case I'm not really too sure that it's revolutionary vs. Win 7 or Win 8.x. All I know right now is I have to migrate code to support it for a few customers.

There's an old joke I know that sums this up.

A little boy was annoying his mom. She then remembered that next door there was some construction going on and she told her son to go over there and watch the men working but don't get in their way. After about 2 hours she called him in for lunch.

During lunch she asked her son if he'd learned anything by watching. The little boy responded "Yes mommy!" and went to his room and brought back a ball of string. He gave one end of the string to his mother and told her to stand up, which she did.

He then order her to "move a little to the left."
"How move to the right."
"Naw, left a little bit."

He then said "Aww fuck it! nail it right there!"

Sometimes you just have to ship the product.

Re:unless you need it wait...

[gstoddart]

There's a massive difference between knowing there are likely bugs in your software and believing that the day a fix or patch comes out it doesn't introduce new issues.

Microsoft, and pretty much every other software vendor I've ever seen have demonstrated time and time again that they're incapable of releasing updates without breaking something else.

So, we let the reckless and the silly be the beta testers, and wait until the dust settles. And, that's fine, because we can simply choose to wait to apply the fix for a while.

Microsoft wants to go to a "break first and fix it later" approach, and that's just asinine. Because it isn't their computers which will be broken in the meantime.

Sometimes you just have to ship the product.

Sure you do. But don't be surprised that your users refuse to be your beta testers and wait for more people to do that. Your QA is your problem, and I have no intention of making it mine.

The people who go "oh, boy, a brand new update" provide the valuable service to the rest of us of being test subjects. And they can live with the consequences.

The rest of us, well, after the first bunch of times we've learned our lesson.

So, be my guest. Run through the fresh steaming shit with reckless abandon. But I won't. Because I've seen Microsoft updates be broken upon release quite a few times, as I have from pretty much every other vendor.

Re:unless you need it wait...

[Virtucon]

I think my OP said if wait but some of us however do have to work with Win 10 not only in the Beta stage but also the .0 release, it's not a picnic but that's what things entail sometimes. No software is perfect, no system is perfect, no organism is perfect that's why we have evolution. It's nice to see a somewhat technical post on SD, not the usual "Why does my toe hurt" thread.

Re:unless you need it wait...

[gstoddart]

Oh, don't misunderstand me ... I know people do need this stuff when it's fresh and steaming, and have no choice.

I'm saying that, in general, as a change management strategy, taking the first day release of a fix has been demonstrated to be a terrible idea. Over and over and over by pretty much every software vendor.

Many of us support production machines and mission critical things, which means there's no way in hell we'd apply these on the day they get released.

What really annoys me is Microsoft's increasing push to force people to take those updates on day one, and be stuck with the consequences of that.

So, imagine a world in which some poor schmuck is running the version of Windows 10 which doesn't let you defer updates. When Microsoft pushes this crap out, suddenly a huge amount of people have broken systems. Microsoft isn't going to pay to fix that. Microsoft isn't going to have to deal with the consequences of the outage.

So, the general advice of "if you don't absolutely need this on the day of release, wait" is the best strategy if you can't be on the bleeding edge every day Microsoft has a new fix.

Microsoft seems bent on taking that away. And that, in my opinion, is idiotic and dangerous.

If you need to be on the cutting edge, you should probably be taking your own steps to recover from that. Mine is let everyone else test first. ;-)

Change Is Life

[SuperKendall]

On the other hand if you fall behind current dev tools, you miss out on the potential for a lot of community support, risk being crippled by the bugs that remain in the older system that are fixed the new, and hamstring your ability to work as effectively as you might because you cannot use newer tooling/frameworks to help with development...

Yes SE has a lot of stuff changing, it always has and always will. But cringing from the pain will not help, SE is not finding any kind of safe plateau (because there are none). It is moving ever forward at a reasonable pace, using nettles as handholds where you must grasp them firmly as you ascend, living with the brief pain to move forward.

Re:Change Is Life

[weilawei]

You don't need to stick to it forever, just long enough for it to become stable and reasonably well accepted. You don't need to be the early adopter in the middle of active development. When you've got some breathing room (your stuff is relatively stable) and aren't going to waste a weeks worth of your team's money, then you can think about moving to newer versions of tools, libraries, etc..

Re:Change Is Life

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anon to preserve mods...

GP said "through your project", which usually means a finite time period. After release, you can make updating tools to x.y.n1 a story, include making sure your code plays nice with it, and just work on doing that... and most importantly, do it alongside your SEs so that they're not blindsided at the last minute.

It's not all that hard to stick with a toolkit version for a couple of months (or to be honest, even a project lasting up to 18 months is no big deal.) If you need to bump 'em that badly, then maybe you may want to look at what it is you're trying to do (and seriously, unless that newer version solves a very ugly long-standing and otherwise-intractable problem, there's no real need to just jump to it.)

Re:Change Is Life

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think posting AC preserves mods. I think it deletes them silently. OP was +1 Insightful, +1 Informative and is now just +1 Informative, with no corresponding downmod to change the score as of this post.

Re:Change Is Life

[Joce640k]

Wait for at least SP1. Let others be the beta testers.

Re:Change Is Life

[i.r.id10t]

I don't feel too sorry for paid developers who have to deal with this. Multiple machines (physical or virtual) with various OSes and libraries installed fix this, as does testing your stuff.

The folks I feel sorry for are the students - Win 10 is released Friday, all the new computers being bought for Fall term starting will have it, students taking programming courses will often be stuck with the newest of the new since the instructor adopted (or wrote) the latest text book, etc. And, they may be stuck with these versions of various software packages for a few years while they go thru a degree track...

Re:Change Is Life

[Anonymous Coward]

For Microsoft products, you'll need to wait until at least SP2 to be assured that most of the horrible breaking changes are fixed. SP3 is safer still, but by then, they've gotten bored and want to break something new, so it starts all over again.

Re:Change Is Life

[gstoddart]

You know, if Microsoft changes the library in place and breaks it ... I don't blame professional developers at all.

I blame whatever idiot at Microsoft was responsible for not fucking breaking existing stuff.

This is just lousy QA.

I feel bad for anybody who is going to be the victim of Micrtosoft's idiotic policy of deciding it's their computer and they'll update it as they see fit. Because it is a certainty Microsoft will break a large amount of computers and leave that to be the problem of the people who own it.

And, I'm sorry, but if Microsoft is going to force updates and break machines, they should be charged under the computer fraud and abuse act, or whatever it is.

Because this is pretty much damaging other people's property, and shouldn't be legal just because some asshole at Microsoft updated an EULA which says they're allowed to do this.

Re:Change Is Life

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct. The "mods will be deleted" warning vanishes when you check the box, but they still get deleted anyway.

100% certain this occurs. You probably need to be logged out and posting from a different IP to post and mod successfully.

Re:Change Is Life

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we just ban ever-changing EULAs already? They seem to be lists of ways in which the company shall screw you and you shall have no recourse except by kangaroo court which will screw you even harder.

Re:Change Is Life

[phantomfive]

On the other hand if you fall behind current dev tools, you miss out on the potential for a lot of community support

I might be flamed for saying this, but if you can't be a software developer without "community support" like asking questions on StackOverflow, then you're not really a software developer. (Likewise, if a tool can't be used without asking questions on stackoverflow, it's the wrong tool to be using for anything serious).

Re:Change Is Life

[sycodon]

Or, if you are in an environment managed by CSC and THEY chase versions so they can charge, you'll come in on a Monday and everything has gone to shit.

WTF M.S?

Re:Change Is Life

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to be ignoring the overwhelmingly positive utility of a site like that.

Asking questions may not get anybody anywhere - I have never asked one there - but as a repository of common troubles it is as invaluable as all the newsgroup archives, IRC channels, and forums that were around long before StackOverflow.

One does not NEED any of those things to be a software developer, but to ignore them might be at one's own peril and lead to a lot of situations of reinventing-the-wheel or just bashing-one's-head-on-the-same-old-rock.

Re:Change Is Life

[Anonymous Coward]

Or accept that they will be gone. The goal of moderation is to not post in the thread. Moderators should not be directing the conversation or taking part in the conversation that they are judging. The goal is impartial moderation I guess. I agree with it in theory. In practice you can find ways around it easily enough.

Re:Change Is Life

[phantomfive]

You seem to be ignoring the overwhelmingly positive utility of a site like that.

Please note, I didn't say that the website has no utility......the utility comes from compensating for weak developers and weak projects. If the developers are not weak and the projects have high discoverability, then there's no need to ask questions about it on stackoverflow.

(Of course, it can still fill a role, but all the basic questions would be gone).

Re:Change Is Life

[Joce640k]

I installed VS2015 on a spare machine for a laugh - I actually managed to get them to fix an ancient VS bug fixed by nagging them enough. The fix was in VS2015 and I wanted to see it with my own eyes.

It crashed and burned about once a minute for the entire time I tried it, no chance to save any work. So much for a new 'improved' version.

I only installed VS2013 a few months ago after it reached SP4. I'm not expecting VS2015 to be usable any time soon (I _would_ like to have my bug fixed though because it happens constantly...OTOH it's been bothering me since VC++ 6.0 so I'm almost used to it by now)

Re:Change Is Life

[ConceptJunkie]

I'm not going to flame you, but the Perfect World called and wondered when you were coming back. They miss you.

Re:Change Is Life

[tompaulco]

The folks I feel sorry for are the students - Win 10 is released Friday, all the new computers being bought for Fall term starting will have it, students taking programming courses will often be stuck with the newest of the new since the instructor adopted (or wrote) the latest text book,

That certainly wasn't the case when I was in school. They were years behind on versions of programming languages. As for IDEs, there weren't any in use. I used vi for my programming assignments. Borland C++ was available, but only on Windows, and the University mostly had Sun and SGI workstations.
On the whole, though, I think it worked out better, because I got an understanding of working with libraries and linking that would enable me to understand how to get something to work if it didn't work automatically in an IDE.

Re:Change Is Life

[tompaulco]

This is just lousy QA.

And who is to blame for lousy QA? You are, the person to whom Microsoft has outsourced their QA.

Re:Change Is Life

[tompaulco]

I might be flamed for saying this, but if you can't be a software developer without "community support" like asking questions on StackOverflow, then you're not really a software developer. (Likewise, if a tool can't be used without asking questions on stackoverflow, it's the wrong tool to be using for anything serious).

I have yet to ask a question on stackoverflow, but I refer to it a lot when dealing with third party tools and libraries. The reason being that documentation is usually extremely weak. You can usually find a reference to the methods, but to understand when you might want to use one or another is not really explained. it is helpful to find an example of someone who has used it. Then, you have to figure out what the latest hipster way to instantiate an object is since apparently constructors aren't cool anymore, and the best practice for instancing changes from week to week and the documentation is sometimes not updated to reflect that, it just has a constructor. Of course, examples are always point in time, and nobody ever goes back to edit those, so a lot of the time, you at least get deprecated warnings in example code, if not just outright failure because methods have gone away or signatures changed.
In other words, the same community that complains about MS constantly fixing what ain't broke, is constantly fixing what ain't broke.

Re:Change Is Life

[Bengie]

The discussions can be more important and the answers.

Re:Change Is Life

[Ravaldy]

So much for a new 'improved' version

I don't know if you were being negative or playful when you wrote this but with all major overhauls there's going to be bugs. You just need to give them a little bit of time to work out the quirks they didn't catch during internal QC. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe this was ever a public BETA.

I only installed VS2013 a few months ago after it reached SP4

I used VS2005 6 months after. It was perfectly fine. VS2010 was a welcomed upgrade that encountered minor issues along the way that were resolved with the patches released not that much later. I didn't force a 2013 upgrade for our dev team but I did trial it on a VM. VS2013 had noticeable issues at launch but that appeared all solved by the 30 day mark. We decided to wait for VS2015 because 2010 was fine and we didn't find 2013 had enough to offer in terms of improvement for our dev team.

The good news is that it was caught and will be fixed quickly by the sound of it.

Re:Change Is Life

[Ravaldy]

Why are you always ranting about MS? You know you don't have to use their products right?

You know that software bugs are part of every eco system right? Linux, MAC and MS have them. Many of them come in the form of bad firmware or bad drivers that can actually ruing hardware.

Should we all go after Seagate for putting out millions of drives with defective firmware that eventually self terminates the hard drive? I think that's far more destructive than this .NET bug which can be fixed with a simple update (one that will be posted shortly I'm sure).

Should we start talking about the heart bleed security flaw? I think a defective OS library is far less damaging to a person than their identify being stolen due to a bug in a security protocol.

If you hate MS that much stop using/buying their products because you clearly can't handle them. If you don't have MS products then just shut up or get a bias opinion that we can actually respect instead of this childish ranting.

Re:Change Is Life

[Anonymous Coward]

You are wrong; there were several community preview (beta) builds released for VS 2015.

Re:Change Is Life

[Joce640k]

So much for a new 'improved' version

I don't know if you were being negative or playful when you wrote this but with all major overhauls there's going to be bugs.

Sure, but... I expect an IDE crash to be more difficult than "compile my code then double-click a warning message".

(Yes, I did it three times with the same result)

Re:Change Is Life

[Anonymous Coward]

If you hate MS that much stop using/buying their products...

As soon as I find an employer that looks long term stable which doesn't use MS or Apple products for their core end user infrastructure... Locally, even the big banks and insurance companies with the Mainframes and Data Warehouses in-house still have MS contracts to have "terminals" running MS on everyone's desk.

Re:Change Is Life

[SuperKendall]

It's not all that hard to stick with a toolkit version for a couple of months (or to be honest, even a project lasting up to 18 months is no big deal.

That depends on the system. If you are doing iOS development, while 18 months is possible it's not advisable due to every new version of XCode (one major, a few minor updates every year) having more advanced tooling, compilers, frameworks... furthermore you are going to have to use a beta version at some point to test and debug your software on for un-released versions of iOS that you have to make sure you work well on before they are released.

I see your point, I was more speaking to the attitude of people that want to spend years without upgrading the underlying technologies involved in building and running your project... the longer you wait the worse the transition is, and like I said in the meantime you are also missing out on things that could have made development easier or resolved bugs you had to fix.

Re:Change Is Life

[jthill]

Switching to unrefusable automatic updates in the face of unavoidable (but forgivable, it's generally acknowledged that no one is immune to at least some of those) system-breaking bugs is pretty awful. As it stands with just a little research you can restore to before the last batch and selectively apply the good ones; unless I'm misreading something there will now be no way you can restore usability at all. It's just a matter of time before some driver incompatibility makes anything beyond safe mode unbootable.

Maybe GP's got a history of overreacting, but being forced to suffer the inevitable system-breaking bug -- taking the downtime from hours to days or for anything that falls through the fissure to finger-pointing hell, weeks -- just because you don't want to pay an extra $80 for the privilege of a system you don't have to let them break -- is pretty clearly unethical. And this from a company that has recently stooped to pushing adware. This deal Microsoft's pushing is laced with shit, no matter how good (and I'm betting they're very good) the good parts are.

Re:Change Is Life

[bondsbw]

Sure, but... I expect an IDE crash to be more difficult than "compile my code then double-click a warning message".

I'm not sure how you qualify expected difficulty of causing a crash. They could have run thousands of unit tests every build, had hundreds of internal testers running every test they could reasonably imagine, and run a large public beta, and still never come across the exact combination of environment and set of inputs that caused your particular crash for your particular project.

Re:Change Is Life

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not really impartial moderation though. Sometimes I value being able to direct the conversation through moderation than through posting.

Re:Change Is Life

[bondsbw]

The folks I feel sorry for are the students - Win 10 is released Friday, all the new computers being bought for Fall term starting will have it, students taking programming courses will often be stuck with the newest of the new since the instructor adopted (or wrote) the latest text book, etc. And, they may be stuck with these versions of various software packages for a few years while they go thru a degree track...

Windows 10 is using the as-a-service model, so any student-owned machines will get new upgrades (for free) as they are released for the lifetime of the device. Campus-owned machines would probably still upgrade at the same pace as normal. In my experience (being in college and working at a university for over a decade) this means security updates may be applied regularly, while feature upgrades happen over the summer. Since many schools are under MSDNAA, their experience with Windows 10 will be almost identical to how it was before, from what I can tell.

Re: Change Is Life

[cyber-vandal]

What you could do as a software developer is spend days trying to figure out an issue or you could ask other devs if they've had the same issue. In the good old days users might've understood that an IT issue might take longer than half an hour to fix but that's not the case now, especially with complex third-party software with crap documentation (looking at you Sharepoint).

Re: Change Is Life

[0xdeaddead]

virtualization.

Its become a part of life now.

Re:Change Is Life

[ATMAvatar]

We decided to wait for VS2015 because 2010 was fine and we didn't find 2013 had enough to offer in terms of improvement for our dev team.

That actually surprises me a bit. For my team, VS2012 (and later, VS2013) were night-and-day performance improvements over VS2010.

I have been using VS2015 throughout the betas with mixed results, but the latest RC was OK, so I put RTM on my main dev machine. There have definitely been some hiccups - it takes longer to load our main product's solution, and it hasn't been as stable as VS2013 was. However, I have stuck with it because Roslyn and its integration with the IDE is a leap forward compared to the tooling in VS2013, especially when you start looking into analyzers. Such is the price of living on the edge, I suppose.

Re: Change Is Life

[MemeRot]

Vs 2010 becomes unsupported soon, as does .net 4.5.1. Only 4.5.2 (in the 4.x family) and vs 2012/2013 will be supported starting in January

Re:Change Is Life

[Ravaldy]

Switching to unrefusable automatic updates in the face of unavoidable (but forgivable, it's generally acknowledged that no one is immune to at least some of those) system-breaking bugs is pretty awful

There's benefits and downfalls to either way of doing. On one side having a breaking change sucks. Most users currently get updates installed at 3am daily. MS's track record is pretty good with publishing good updates. Very few users were affected by the bad updates released in the last 5 years.

Fact is that MS will back track on this issue because there is enough pressure to do so. Production environments will refuse to use Windows 10 until there's a way to control when updates are applied. Possibly this can already be done through WSUS and group policies but for end users that's still an issue.

just because you don't want to pay an extra $80 for the privilege of a system you don't have to let them break

I'm out of the loop on this one. What $80 are you talking about?

And this from a company that has recently stooped to pushing adware

Well I guess the weekly paper that's dropped for free on my porch is vile as well. I have to pick it up and put it in the recycling. As far as I'm concerned this was only an issue for people with OCD and those who hate MS in the first place. Just gave them an excuse to complain more.

Most users I know were happy to see that icon pop up to find out they would get the next upgrade at no cost.

Re:Change Is Life

[Ravaldy]

I appreciate the feedback. I didn't test to that extent. We have good H/W and felt the compiling and editing was pretty good. I could see benefits in moving but the time required to do so was going to eat into actually coding time. We are short staffed (still to this day) and work with what we have.

VS2015 is a definite move over. Guess I'll have to consider TFS as well as we are running on TFS2010 and only really use it for change tracking.

Re:Change Is Life

[Hognoxious]

In a way I agree. Software developers existed before Al Gore invented the intarwebs, so clearly CackOverload isn't an essential prerequisite.

OTOH, in a way I disagree. Things moved slowly enough then that books, magazines & training courses could keep up.

Re:Change Is Life

[phantomfive]

If a project's documentation isn't up to date, it's a deficient project.

Re:Change Is Life

[jthill]

I'm out of the loop on this one. What $80 are you talking about?

Win10 Home: $119. Win10 Pro: $199. On Pro you get the delay/select. capability.

It's their declared intent to force that choice. Grandma ponies up or some morning she'll be cut off and understand only that it's apparently okay for corporations to lock people out of their computers and demand $80 (or she could wait whatever number of days MS think they can get away with) to unlock them again.. That's literally, as in in concrete and exact detail, the situation Microsoft have openly declared their intent to force on their customers.

Re:Change Is Life

[jthill]

Most users I know were happy to see that icon pop up to find out they would get the next upgrade at no cost.

If the Win10 upgrade notifier is the only thing the stories are about then that's my fault for not digging deeper. Yeah. The upgrade offer is good-guy stuff, I was glad to have it too.

Re:Change Is Life

[Ravaldy]

Where do you get this information. If you install it within the first year it's free for the life of the device:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-US...

Re:Change Is Life

[jthill]

If you have a non-Pro 7/8 install, your free upgrade is (quite reasonably) to the non-pro 10 install. Microsoft wants $99 to upgrade that to Pro 10.

Re:Change Is Life

[Ravaldy]

I think its more than reasonable. You get a free upgrade for what you originally purchased. At least this shuts down the rumors of it not being a free upgrade.

Most home users don't need pro.

Re:Change Is Life

[jthill]

. . .

Except for the ones whose computers don't work properly because of a bad update . . .

How is this different from Microsoft's...

[Anonymous Coward]

typical .NET version? As we've seen from the fact that there just doesn't seem to be any reliable pieces of software available for Windows, it is simply unreliable and has always been. I know the seventy Windows desktops I manage only average about two days of uptime. Microsoft's garbage is just horrific.

Re:How is this different from Microsoft's...

[mlw4428]

You must not be a very good SysAdmin if you can only managed 2 days of uptime. I have Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 boxes with weeks of uptimes. In fact, the only downtimes they've had is to reboot to apply the updates. I do have a Windows 7 box that hasn't had an update (it's off network, attached to some equipment) that hasn't been rebooted in about 7 months. That outage was due to the power going out. .NET has typically been a pretty stable product as well. I believe it to be the best framework out there for development. Nothing else, in my opinion, competes with the completeness and applicability that the framework provides. I think you're just trolling.

Re:How is this different from Microsoft's...

[Anonymous Coward]

You must not be a very good SysAdmin if you can only managed 2 days of uptime

Why blame him for the problems Microsoft created? Yes, a Windows system will survive a week or more if you're not doing anything. If you actually work for a living, then averaging one crash per day is pretty much average. We have a script that does:

systeminfo | find "System Boot Time"

(Aside: as usual Microsoft products are extremely slow. That simply command takes several minutes to run even on an new i7. Microsoft is simply just slow.) On every system every hour so I know exactly how often Microsoft systems crash. For our sales people, they can usually go a week without rebooting. For most of our developers, it's around a day. They use both IntelliJ and Eclipse for our project so they hammer their systems. For our .NET developers that run VisualStudio, rebooting three times a day isn't that uncommon. Windows is not stable if you actually use it. Yes, your grandmother might not have to reboot every day, but technical people do.

Re:How is this different from Microsoft's...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's amazing how fanbois will lie to irrationally attack people that tell the truth. Windows is unreliable. Our cofounders were former architects with Windows 2000. Our main investor was head of development for Windows 95. Our current CSA is the former lead dev on Vista. We have a tremendous amount of Windows knowledge on staff, but with the high load our Windows servers are under, they typically crash at least two times a day. Fortunately we have a nice load balancer in front of them so most customers never know there's a problem, but even the Microsoft devotees I work for admit Windows is unreliable.

Re:How is this different from Microsoft's...

[Anonymous Coward]

only average about two days of uptime

That isn't too bad depending on what you're attempting to do with Windows. If you're editing tiny Word docs or Excel spreadsheet, then yes you should be able to do better. If you, like the team I'm on, are running things like VisualStudio, multi-million line compiles, SQL Server, IIS, etc., then running two days without having Windows crash would be a dream. I reboot Windows at lunch and the end of every day, and Windows still crashes a few more times during the week. It is simply unreliable.

Re:How is this different from Microsoft's...

[Bengie]

I reboot Windows at lunch and the end of every day, and Windows still crashes a few more times during the week. It is simply unreliable.

My works machine gets rebooted about once a month and my home machine can sometimes go longer, depending on what kind of security issues are being fixed on Patch Tuesday. Font driver bug, yeah reboot now, SMB bug, nah, got a firewall, will wait a bit longer.

If Windows is crashing regularly, look at what crapware you have installed or replace the hardware.

Re:How is this different from Microsoft's...

[Anonymous Coward]

You remind me of my senile eighty year-old father who argues that Windows is reliable because it doesn't crash. He only uses it about once a week to check email. Of course, it is reliable. For those of us that actually use a computer, we know that daily reboots with Windows are the norm. Since upgrading VisualStudio, most of us at work are now rebooting two to three times per day. Windows just get too slow to use. It doesn't crash nearly as often as it used it (usually less than five times per week), but it does require rebooting.

Re:How is this different from Microsoft's...

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you guys always mean with this uptime thing? Why does a desktop have to be on for days? Are your office people working in shifts, 24/7? I've never been in a business where they thought it was ok to just leave on the computer when you were done working. Everyone who goes home after work shuts down his PC (and screen and any other device) to safe electricity.
 
Is not turning off computers a typical American thing maybe? Or are the people in our country/region just a bunch of penny pinchers?

Re:How is this different from Microsoft's...

[spongman]

i just ran this on my i5-3570K running win7:

>timecmd "systeminfo | find 'System Boot Time'"
systeminfo | find 'System Boot Time'
Results of execution:

        Exit code 2
        Time of execution 10.121

that's 10 seconds.

i just had to reboot to install about 6-weeks-worth of updates.

it never crashes.

you're doing it wrong.

Re:How is this different from Microsoft's...

[RvLeshrac]

Or they could just "Get-CimInstance -ClassName win32_operatingsystem | select lastbootuptime" (100ms).

Or "wmic os get lastbootuptime" (500ms)

Or, hell, net statistics server / net statistics workstation (200ms) if, for some insane reason, the servers are allowed to Sleep.

I'll never understand "admins" who can't figure out that the screwdriver isn't a power-saw...

Re: How is this different from Microsoft's...

[cyber-vandal]

I use Windows in a Parallels VM and in 4GB (or GiB who the fuck cares) I run Chrome and I with several tabs, Outlook, Word, 3 or 4 instances of VS2013 and all sorts of other miscellaneous stuff and don't have any problems with crashing. What hardware are you running your Windows on?

Re: How is this different from Microsoft's...

[cyber-vandal]

Why are you running SQL Server and IIS on a Dev machine out of interest?

Re: How is this different from Microsoft's...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why wouldn't you? We have about four dozen developers, and we all do. How else are they going to develop a web app that uses a database?

Of course, we have to reboot constantly because Windows is such a piece of garbage. It sucks wasting half of your day rebooting and trying to get back to where you were before the typical Microsoft problem interrupted you. Yes, Windows will run for days without crashing...if you're not doing anything with it.

Re: How is this different from Microsoft's...

[cyber-vandal]

You could run it on a separate server or a few separate servers instead of consuming the resources of several dev machines. SQL Server isn't exactly lightweight and you're running other RAM intensive processes by the sounds of things.

Re: How is this different from Microsoft's...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why in the hell would you run IIS on another server instead of just running it locally? Are you going to copy your entire app over to another server every time you compile? No. You run IIS locally just like every other damn Microsoft dev. The GP is correct that you typically run things locally. And, that is why he is correct that Windows crashes constantly. Putting it under any sort of load makes it crash constantly. If I had to guess, the developers working under me spend nearly a third of their time waiting on Windows to reboot and getting VisualStudio and the rest of their environment running.

Re: How is this different from Microsoft's...

[Billly Gates]

It is installed by default in VS

Re: How is this different from Microsoft's...

[cyber-vandal]

Agreed on IIS although Web deploy takes no more time than building it locally but I wouldn't run SQL Server locally unless it's a small DB. What I'm getting at is that I have never had any problems with crashes while developing on Windows so I'm just surprised to hear of such bad experiences. Don't peg me as a Microsoft fanboy; I might work with their stuff but I curse them daily.

Re: How is this different from Microsoft's...

[MemeRot]

Why not? I run a 'datacenter on a vm' type of vm. SQL server, MySQL, postgresql, rabbitMQ, Couchbase, IIS, visual studio, elasticSearch/kibana, and tomcat and eclipse for the java app another team maintains. Runs fine with 6.5 gb of ram

Re:How is this different from Microsoft's...

[LordWabbit2]

Agreed, I reboot about every two weeks or so at work, at home it was longer - but since we now have load shedding our lovely power utility reboots my home PC's a lot more often. The fact that their devs are using IntelliJ and Eclipse screams "we don't like Microsoft" so they probably reboot out of reflex. For the .Net devs the only time I had to reboot that many times was when I was writing drivers in test mode. WTF are you doing? (Or doing badly in this case)

Just don't use the latest and not-so-greatest

[Anonymous Coward]

> this means developers must make the difficult choice between using the latest tools or risking crippling bugs such as this one.

Not so difficult. Just don't use the latest and not-so-greatest stuff.

Que 1000 "waaaaah, I wanna to use teh new shiney!!11!!" replies....

Re:Just don't use the latest and not-so-greatest

[Anonymous Coward]

It's spelled, "cue", as in, "to cue up a record", not as in "form a queue at the register".

Que is another language altogether.

Re:Just don't use the latest and not-so-greatest

[Anonymous Coward]

Now for the bonus question, which of the vowels in queue are silent?

Re:Just don't use the latest and not-so-greatest

[Anonymous Coward]

This relates to the article recently about "security experts" versus "common peons" or however the difference of opinion was phrased.

Always downloading the newest may protect you from a majority of infiltration pathways, but it all-to-often also accidentally destroys basic functionality. During the 24 hours before new vulnerabilities are discovered, you are marginally safer than those who did not patch, but you also cannot actually use whatever feature you just upgraded.

Re:Just don't use the latest and not-so-greatest

[Anonymous Coward]

All of them. Just say the first letter and you'll be good.

Re:Just don't use the latest and not-so-greatest

[tompaulco]

> this means developers must make the difficult choice between using the latest tools or risking crippling bugs such as this one.

Not so difficult. Just don't use the latest and not-so-greatest stuff.

Que 1000 "waaaaah, I wanna to use teh new shiney!!11!!" replies....

Agree. How is the choice difficult? It is a tool, it is not the code itself. It is not your project. You could write your project WITHOUT the tool entirely. It is merely the hammer that you use to pound your nails. So the latest one has been "upgraded" with a shiny new "2015" sticker. As it happens, they also removed the claws on this hammer. Your old hammer has a head AND claws, but it has a "2014" sticker on it. Guess what, I'm going with the tool that works over the new shiny.

Joys of going open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Showstopper bug on a much awaited release! Ah, the fruits of jumping on the open source bandwagon...

Bleeding Edge

[pauljuno]

As much as I love Microsoft .Net and the tools. We all know never to use the latest/greatest from Microsoft. I'm using VS.2013 until the first service pack or two are released.

To quote Nelson

[msobkow]

"Ha-ha!"
-- Nelson

Re:To quote Nelson

[plopez]

not "Desperate affairs require desperate measures." ?

APK?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I use my HOSTS file to redirect the original parameters to the called method? I understand this will be very efficient due to HOSTS being evaluated in the kernel.

Take a page from Linus

[Anonymous Coward]

DO NOT BREAK USER SPACE.

Re:Take a page from Linus

[Bengie]

That is in the context of changes, not bugs. Of course bugs break user space.

The bigger issue

[RingDev]

This bug is in the JIT optimizer of the 4.6 framework. For apps you are developing, it's absolutely no problem, you just go into the compiler settings and uncheck the 'optimize' setting.

The problem though, is that the 4.6 framework is an in-place replacement for the 4.5 framework, which was an in-place replacement for the 4.0 framework. And the JIT optimizer is on by default. So if you install the 4.6 framework, it could potentially introduce this bug into any application developed targeting the 4.0, 4.5, or 4.6 framework that is already distributed.

Luckily, it appears as though the issue is a combination of a nullable int that has a bug in the boxing/unboxing of it's operator when calling the .hasValue method. So the actual number of places where this will actually pop up is hopefully quite limited.

That said, MS better get this patch deployed ASAP. Or if you are in a critical hurry, the correction has already been committed to the .Net Git repo, so you can brave a build from that.

-Rick

I don't think hosts have anything to do w/ it

[Anonymous Coward]

See subject & read the article: IF using .NET 4.6 don't turn on optimizations (yet) until they patch it.

APK

P.S.=> That's a "temporary work-around" for it - hosts have nothing to do with this (afaik @ least - & I suspect you're actually just trying to be a trolling pest here, one I've dusted badly on hosts before, & this is some insane butthurt form of effete "retaliation" on YOUR part - utterly useless)... apk

Re:I don't think hosts have anything to do w/ it

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect you're actually just trying to be a trolling pest here

I suspect they are too. You should take it as a compliment. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Optimization

[just_another_sean]

this means developers must make the difficult choice between using the latest tools or risking crippling bugs such as this one.

I don't know much about this but isn't it possible to just reduce the optimization level to avoid this behaviour? Sounds to me just skimming things that this the result of overly aggressive optimization. I know that's not a long term fix but is it a short term option until MS rolls out the patch?

Re:Optimization

[Anonymous Coward]

Part of the problem is that anything .NET 4.0 or newer targetting x64 or anyCPU could get the ryuJIT on a machine with .NET 4.6 installed, and could be affected by this tail call optimization bug. So your already deployed release apps are now broken.

Re:Optimization

[just_another_sean]

Yes, thanks, I read another comment saying the same thing after I posted. I guess I was forgetting the whole replace only aspect of .net now. I don't use it a lot and back in the day you could sanely maintain multiple versions on the same system. So in my mind when reading the summary and skimming the article I was thinking this only referred to people specifically targeting the freshly released 4.6.

Here's hoping for a quick patch release. And, as also pointed out in other comments, if you are able the .Net git repository has the patch available for those who don't want to wait for the official release.

Re: Optimization

[cyber-vandal]

Is this just a code fix or has it been through any regression testing? I'm not sure I'd want to risk it on a production machine. Better to revert to 4.5.

Re: Optimization

[MemeRot]

Yes, as long as you're just playing with this in dev. I'm assuming you're not going to deploy to prod on a week old framework

Manage change, don't avoid it

[QuietLagoon]

Change is always going to occur, and how you manage the change will have a direct correlation upon the success of your projects.

.
Some development tools are more stable than others from one version to the next, others are less stable. Managing the change then requires the developer to put into place the process for determining how to upgrade software tools in a manner consistent with the best outcome for the project.

Clearly, given the number and frequency of serious bugs coming out of Redmond of late, it is beginning to look as if Microsoft's QA team is either out to lunch, or has been laid off.

So any change mitigation strategy involving Microsoft products would probably have as it's #1 item: let new software from Microsoft settle down before using.

If the nature of parameters is... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

HTML based stringtype data, or better, filtered more so there's less on intake to finalization of intended data state integrity? Possibly - Yes, such as hostnames, yes, locally on a webserver (hardware) for serving a site & what not also.

You're letting ME be creative here so, possibly - latencies to disk MIGHT matter though, so,SSD @ the very least but better on hardware SSD (Gigabyte IRAM is what I use here, 4gb) for temp ops systemwide, pagefile, webbrowser cache, hosts file location, print spooler, %TEMP% ops, + %COMSPEC% location & yes, data I work with & of course, hosts itself.

Dedicated ramdisk in local system RAM? EVEN BETTER (faster too).

I'd do these parameters to it to insure tcpip.sys really concentrates on hosts to supplement it + loading it from @ LEAST SSD (for possible reloads) etc.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\Tcpip\ServiceProvider]
"Class"=dword:00000008
"HostsPriority"=dword:00000005
"DnsPriority"=dword:00000006
"LocalPriority"=dword:00000007
"NetbtPriority"=dword:00000008
"Name"="TCP/IP"

* It works for making it in RAM of somekind, constantly, doing more with less (or, the same, just doing it faster by not doing stuff it doesn't need to be, on things it does need to be doing = less CPU overheads in string processing too by filtered datasets).

I do most of that here except serving up a site: I'm the ghost in the machine & can't be seen, I'm NOT the body of it (internet machine from here @ least - I prefer "inviso-power" from DEFENDER - I'm no webmaster).. I'm it's soul.

APK

P.S.=> I am being nice in this post, thought about it, & there's how I'd apply it (I do as I post this in fact)... apk

Mod Experiment

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting Anon testing to see if the troll mod to your post is undone. If it is, you're right. If it's not, I'll post a reply to this confirming such.

That can't be right

[Greyfox]

We're using .net on our production server, and since we implemented the new optimizer our system's been running super-fast! There's almost no load on the CPU anymore, leaving plenty for our Team Fortress server! That seems pretty optimum to me!

app level corruption?

[Billly Gates]

I just installed 8.1 with VS 2015 this weekend.

Is this serious enough where I need to re-image as things like my Intel RST raid driver all depend on 4.5 runtimes or does this only hit code being compiled?

Re: app level corruption?

[MemeRot]

It affects the jit compiler, so could affect things like code with generics. I have no idea if that's the kind of code in a graphics driver, but I'd hope everything there would be designed to avoid jit compilation.

Quality is optional

[MoarSauce123]

I am not a developer, but if a few days after release are enough to find such a significant bug then it makes me wonder which quality processes Microsoft has in place and if anyone in Redmond even bothers using their own stuff for at least some test projects. So what's the plan for software companies these days? Fire everyone in quality assurance and hire more project managers who set arbitrary release dates and force rushed releases? Oh yay!