Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Visual Studio 'NOT N-TIER READY'

While surfing my usual list of blogs I found an entry that I almost fell out of seat, not because of the content was great but due to the fact an honest Microsoft Manager MAY exist. Milind Lele a VS data manager wrote "... code we generate in Visual Studio 2005 is not N-Tier ready....". Isn't that what I been stating since I started my blog. Perhaps he reads DOTBLOAT? I appreciate Lele's honesty perhaps other Microsoft Managers and VPS should stop the spin and take a lesson from Lele.

Microsoft today was fined 1.3 billion dollars by the EU, this judgement should erase any doubt regarding Microsoft's business practices. Not even Microsoft's dream team of attorneys could save Microsoft from the brunt of the EU fine.

There is nothing wrong with Microsoft being a Monopoly as long as they fulfill their ethical responsibilities, which is exactly the problem with Microsoft. The means they are employing to keep their dominate status is immoral, unethical and in my opinion illegal. Microsoft treatment of the VB and VFP community is a perfect example, they killed these languages so we will use Visual Studio and .BLOAT. Microsoft's actions are like playing Marco Polo with Helen Keller then bragging they won. Isn't it long past due for the US Department of Justice to get involved as well?

.Mark

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Microsoft's New Legal Troubles

Class Action Lawsuit Gets the Go Ahead
According to CNN a Class action suit against Microsoft gets greenlight. Suit says labeling of some PCs as "Windows Vista Capable" was misleading because many could not run all of Vista's features.

The same could be said about Microsoft's Claim Visual Studio is a Rapid Application Development. Anyone know a good class action attorney?

EU Doing It's Job
The EU has opened two new investigations into Microsoft's abusive dominant practices. More importantly .NET is part of this investigation, an except of the story is listed below along with the link.

".NET. A programming language used by Microsoft to build its software. The EU investigation will try to verify if this code is made in a way that prevents competitors from developing their own languages freely. Java is one of the most famous alternatives to .NET and is developed by Sun Microsystems. "

http://www.euractiv.com/en/infosociety/eu-opens-new-antitrust-probe-microsoft/article-169543

I'm urging all developers, especially Visual FoxPro and Visual Basic, to contact their government representatives and various government agencies with regards to Microsoft's decision to stop development of Visual FoxPro and Visual Basic programming langauges and to emphasis in the communication the negative economical impact Microsoft's actions has on not only developers but third party VB and VFP vendors along with our customers with Visual Basic and Visual FoxPro applications. Microsoft's actions are an obscene massacre of their ethical responsibility to the Visual FoxPro and Visual Basic communities and businesses with Visual Basic and Visual Foxpro applications. With any luck the EU or US Government will get involved in Microsoft's seemingly abuse of power.

.Mark

Thursday, February 21, 2008

DOTBLOAT IS BACK!

I guess I upset someone at Microsoft or one of their cheerleaders as my blog was hacked and deleted. So fear not DOTBLOAT is back defending the rights of developers against the Microsoft Monopoly -- joining the protest of the abandonment of Visual Foxpro and Visual Basic Communities by the Microsoft rich and shameless - and lastly speaking up against the detestable act of outsourcing American jobs to India. The links to the Microsoft Execs are listed on this blog, let them know your frustrations with .NET and we wants our RAD development tools back!

In destroying my content they fed my passion.

.Mark

Some interesting blog posts about Microsoft

"Personnel decisions excluded, I'm not sure Microsoft has made a sound business decision related to VFP since they acquired it, unless the decision from day one was simply to kill the market. In that case, my hat is off to Microsoft. They can declare "mission accomplished" in the VFP market place in much the same way George Bush did in Iraq and with equal credibility. In reality, what's done is done and the reason - or lack thereof - behind the decision isn't all that important. I've signed the petition at MasFoxPro.com and think anyone with any interest in VFP should, but I don't expect anything to come of it. I'd love to be wrong. What frosts me the most about the whole thing is the absolute BS we've been fed about VFP not fitting into .NET. I've had several conversations with Microsoft folk about making VFP part of .NET and they would always come back with silly arguments about "how would you compile …" If there were any merit to those arguments then in reality what they were saying is that VFP is more capable than .NET and if so, what kind of a "business decision" is being made here? Maybe I'm just being too harsh and those guys at Microsoft just aren't that sharp after all. Maybe even with all of their vast resources the folks at Microsoft just can't figure this stuff out, yet a tiny little company like eTechnologia.net can.Ok, ranting aside, the truth is it would've been more difficult to make VFP a .NET language back in the 90's because .NET wasn't as capable then and Microsoft was hell bent against dynamic languages. But now? Microsoft is investing in creating versions of Python and Ruby for .NET and of course already has Jscript. If these dynamic languages can be developed for .NET, there's no reason VFP can't be ported to .NET. The new DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) for .NET should make this relatively easy. The marketplace has made Microsoft take notice of dynamic languages and as a result, a VFP.NET would take considerably less effort than it would've in the 90s.Now, ask yourself this, if Microsoft is making business decisions about VFP, don't you think there should be some logic applied across the board? Look at the VFP, Ruby and Python markets. Which market offers millions of lines of code, thousands of developers, hundreds of large customers and hundreds of vertical market applications? Now ask yourself, where's the business decision here?" - F1 Technologies Web Blog

"If you spend the money to upgrade to VB.NET, well, you just spent a lot of money to stand still. And companies don't like to spend a lot of money to stand still, so while you're spending the money, it probably makes sense to consider the alternatives that you can port to that won't put you at the mercy of a single vendor and won't be as likely to change arbitrarily in the future. So as soon as people with large code bases start hearing that they're going to have to work to port their apps from VB to VB.NET with WinForms, and then they start hearing that WinForms isn't really the future, the future is really this Avalon thing nobody has yet, they start wondering whether it isn't time to find another development platform." - Joel on Software