Home > IT Blogs > Custom Application Development >

Custom Application Development:

Vista

Nov 12 2008   5:25PM GMT

The Vista Story



Posted by: Joe Coley
Vista, Custom software development, Vista Update Problem

During the height of my recent upset with Vista, and a visit to my chiropractor, I discovered an article in the October issue of MaximumPC about what went wrong with Vista’s launch — I found it to be very interesting and thought I’d share the link with you.  The on-line article, “What Went Wrong With Vista” can be read here.

It seems that there has been an expectation that Vista will see a service pack 2 in the coming months before Windows 7 is released — it would be nice if it managed to fix the recurring issue I’ve had with the infamous infinite loop problem reoccuring.  Also in my exploring I noticed a recent article on Windows 7 that some may find an interesting read - link to it from here.  Apparently one person thinks “This time Microsoft gets it right”.  Interesting.

One might wonder why in a blog on Custom Application Development that I would be writing about Windows so often, but the answer is simple — it seems that we just can’t get away from it.  As a custom developer it is always necessary to keep aware of the latest and greatest — even if it isn’t in our immediate future, like it or not it will be part of our future if we plan on staying around doing custom applications.  I am very glad that early on I chose to work with Vista since by doing so I was acquainted with it and prepared (as much as possible anyway), for the inevitable “issues” that I would be dealing with from customers as they floated into Vista systems.

AddThis Social Bookmark Button     0 Comments     RSS Feed     Email a friend

Nov 11 2008   9:24PM GMT

Wasted Time - Vista Update Loop



Posted by: Joe Coley
Vista, Vista Update Problem

I’ll try hard to not have this post be a rant!  It’ll take everything in my power, however :-) — since I just can’t understand why such an operation like Microsoft, who, with all their resources can’t seem to get things right the first time, second time, or even later than that!

I’m very clear about the times that my applications fail to meet expectations - those are times generally when I’ve been told to just get something going — and I’ve yielded to putting something up with “minimal” testing.  Heck, just last week I had a customer say to me “Testing, that shouldn’t take long!  I guess you can have it ready tomorrow - right?”  As a customer with no technical background this customer didn’t understand that the change being requested, a simple field addition, would affect some 75% of the screens of the program, about 90% of the reports, and other such “details”.

Testing does take time — variations of environments are difficult to identify and test for it is true.  However, I have a problem with issues that are fixed only to return later - whether it be Microsoft or myself I have a problem with it.  My Vista laptop running Vista Ultimate (…the best Vista right?  Ultimate? Must be the best! — NOT!).  I’ve had the dreaded “Configuring updates: stage 3 of 3 - 0% complete” infinite loop problem return after months of apparently successful updates.  It’s about as ugly a problem as it gets, but the good news (…if one can call it that) is that the system generally can be recovered.  Just follow this link to Microsoft  for a solution should you be so unfortunate as to experience this.

AddThis Social Bookmark Button     0 Comments     RSS Feed     Email a friend