@Jonathan Holland said:
Is this a joke?
Here is one programmer who has never had any issue with Microsoft tools, and I'm someone who came from a backround of GCC and Makefiles, not VisualBasic.
I'm assuming you have never ever touched C#, or used any .NET CLR language at that matter.
I've had my own set of problems with .NET. The first subset is installing the framework:
There's this ".NET runtime 1.1 SP1" my Windows never seems to be able to install. I've checked the log files in the usual places, nothing helps. I would check the web for solutions (unfortunately, this is the way to go with most of MS' application error messages) but this is not a machine I use for .NET development.
More recently, I've come across a problem installing the 3.0 framework. Actually, it was a colleague who tried the install, which, according to him, failed more or less silently (with an obscure error message, I'm guessing). Anyway, he went on to try removing all the frameworks and reinstalling them. Neither 2.0 nor 3.0 would install. This is where I came in, checking the log files and monitoring registry usage, etc. to find out how and where they failed. Manually trying to fix the successive install problems turned out to be too much work. Web searches came up with nothing. We ended up discarding the machine (and the hosting service, for other reasons).
The other subset is about .NET localization issues.
I have to read a long article before I can even begin to understand how .NET approaches localization settings, but there seems to be some counter-intuitive approaches. For example, the developer's regional settings seem to effect the target application's runtime settings. It may very well be a case of the application using default settings, and the framework grabbing the defaults from the runtime user's control panel settings, but no amount of hacking on my part or that of my colleague's (who is a long time .NET developer) made this particular application ignore the control panel settings and just run the way we coded it.
I realize the these issues arise because of lack of knowledge on my part, but the fact that they could have been avoided in the first place, with better-guided thinking is really annoying. Microsoft products (for the most part) integrate tightly among themselves, and occasionally present you with an intricate web that is impossible to get out of without some specific piece of knowledge. I hate wasting time trying to search around for that specific piece.