Sometimes I hate Microsoft....

Yes, I know its almost sacrilige to admit this....I get the same reaction from this statement as when I criticize President Bush's "foreign policy" near some staunch Republicans.

But, the truth is...sometimes I truly hate Microsoft...2:20am today was the most recent time I felt this.   After spending 7+ hours coding lastnight on this project I started a couple months ago, I hit MSDN once again to seek some much needed information.  I was seeking documentation on an obscure API for which I was creating wrapper classes...and much to my astonishment, I find  a 100% completed "sample app" that happens to be EXACTLY what I have been working on......lets just say that I was pissed!

Why was I pissed at Microsoft for handing me the solution on a platter? 

Because the damn "sample code" was based upon an API that was poorly documented, and had taken me weeks to discern the exact behavior so I could write an adequate wrapper... and because I was 90% done with my solution when they published this....and because I wanted to finish my app, and share it with the world as my ultimate achievement of learning the requiresite COM-interop tricks, like Marshal.ReleaseComObject(), and implementing IDisposable effectively.....and just because!!

Ok ok ok ok.....I am thankful for all that Microsoft has wrought, and for all that is in the .NET Framework; the BCL, FCL, MSIL, and C#....but why oh why can't they suck like they used to?  Why do they have to start actually giving us what we want or need, thus preventing ME from writing some damn code that I can sell to the thousands of people who dont want to suffer the pain I went through?!?!?  Why oh why!?!

Okay....I'm feeling sorry for myself...but now I know how George Foreman felt when Mohammed Ali kept laying against the ropes letting him wear himself out, before coming in with the knock-out blow....

*sigh* Oh well, I guess I should thank Microsoft for making my day-job possible....

2 Comments

  • Care to let us know what the sample is so we can check it out? ;-)

  • The API I was wrapping was the Visual SourceSafe automation interface...





    If you follow this link, you will notice that all the rest of the code samples are 5 years old. I thought I was safe creating a fully managed-code VSS Explorer using WinForms, but it looks like Tom Winters (Mr. "I have been doing this since 1995") beat me to it.





    I will say, that my code was similar in ways, but I truly dislike his use of global variables, and the lack of overloads in his VSS API wrapper...but the WinForms app is pretty damn nice, almost a dead ringer for the original app.





    Enjoy....





    Lance

Comments have been disabled for this content.