Sorry to get my favorite geek peeps so stirred, but my initial cheap/sarcastic shot seems to have stirred something.
M$ has built itself/made billions following Henry Ford’s model of planned obsolescence:
Forgive me if I leave out something, but…
Once it was DOS versions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and all its interim children, then Windows 1, 2, 3, 3.1, NT, NT 3.1, 95, NT 4, 98, Windows 4, the five different flavors of 2000, Me, lucky 13 versions of XP, server 2003, and on the horizon (pun TOTALLY intended) are Vista and Longhorn, and, somewhere out there are “Fiji” and “Vienna” -- then let’s not forget the miracle of Visual Basic/Studio 1, 2, 3, 4, 4.5, 6, .NET 2K3, 2K5…
Don’t get me wrong; I’m all about quick, fast, and easy, and constant improvement, BUT:
Every database/application I’m on requires backwards compatibility. I can’t make changes to databases that result in a loss of accumulated data. I can’t take away functionality of existing applications; I can only “enhance,” or add, or migrate. My clients aren’t looking for rewrites to meet current technology; they don’t want to spend money to be “neat & cool” or “cutting edge” or even “trailing edge;” they want to spend money on building on what they already have. That, I thought, was what dot net was supposed to provide. Obviously, not.
CFOs still seem to rule CIOs; and IT has never been a cash-cow.
We were sold on how .NET was going to relieve us from DLL hell, and it has. As long as all your users, like Henry Ford’s first customers, want "black," you're in great shape. If, though, you have a wide range of customers crossing a broad branch of departments in multiple divisions or subsidiaries who are all looking for black, blue, red, green, neon yellow.... well, apparently, DLL hell has been replaced with Framework hell.
IMHO, we’ve been sold a bill of goods.
To say that Framework 1.1 isn’t going away is as naïve as saying that classic VB version whatever will always be supported. Reality isn’t a TV show.
Every time M$ comes up with a new game plan, I’m scrambling trying to figure a workaround to make what’s old work with what’s new; absolutely no different from the old days (and I’m talking VB 2).
So in ten years, how many frameworks will be installed on all my users PCs? How many versions of the same app am I going to have to support?
So, yeah, Rick (don’t take it personally – I’m having the same argument with more people than just you); I am thinking about backwards compatibility and re-writing legacy apps as I’m delivering our first dot net app because, unfortunately, new development gets about 20 percent of the budget (in good years) while maintenance really is about 80+ percent of IT where I live.
Forgive me. It was a bad day. It took me much too long to find through n-tiers that you can’t put a string into a SQL 2K stored procedure parameter that expects a smallint.
Nothing but my best wishes to all who aren’t working in India.
< M!ke >