Microsoft? No thanks.

I cannot help but wonder why ANYONE, especially a developer, would stay loyal to Microsoft!

I've written about Inline::Java recently. This week, I had the DIS-pleasure of recompiling it on a Windows platform. The last time I compiled it, I got lucky and the whole process only took me about a day. The actual compiling of the module's parts that need to use C only takes about 20 seconds - it is getting everything that you need to compile on Windows that takes the other several hours. When I finally figured out what I needed, and gave up trying to use freely available compilers, I was able to snag a copy of Visual C++ 6.x...

This week, I wasn't so lucky. I ended up not being able to use the copy that I had before, so I went looking around and found the development tools needed on Microsoft's site. Between the SDK's and tools needed (just to compile a small DLL), I ended up downloading and installing over 500Mb of files!!! The final DLL's that I made, all three of them, are 31kb TOTAL!

And, when I say that I wasn't lucky, it was not because I had to download so much crap onto my system to make this work. No, with the "new improved" Visual C compilers, Microsoft decided to change how DLL's are handled.

Needless to say, I had to spend (waste) several hours searching for answers and reading posts until I came across the way to make things work. There are many solutions out on the web, but since I was creating no executable and was not using an installer package, they would not work. I finally found a solution at http://www.grimes.demon.co.uk/workshops/fusWSThirteen.htm - the author did a great job explaining the issues, and pointing out the just plain shoddy way that things were implemented by Microsoft.

Argh! All I needed was a couple VERY small DLL's so that Perl could talk to Java.

This whole experience has left me with a renewed vigor for my feelings about Microsoft. It also leaves me wondering how any developer could stay loyal?

I am going to stick with developing on a platform that does not tell me what I want, and how I should do it.

I think I'll go take a shower, this whole experience has left me feeling dirty.

Posted by Brent Michalski at 03:43 PM  Permalink

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