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.

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.

I was fortunate. I only lost about an hour in my struggle to find the answer to take corrective action. However, others were not so lucky, many losing countless hours before recovering — or not — their system. My investigation to this point indicates that while this has happened on an occasional basis for some, Microsoft has been apparently quiet regarding this problem. This was an update that I expected to work absolutely perfectly since a fellow developer friend of mine said he never liked Vista until he had installed service pack one.

It seems that on August 12 of this year VMare issued an update which caused issues regarding the licensing. The problem prompted an open letter to VMware customers from VMware’s president (…see letter). This appears to be a fine example of software quality assurance going wrong — just how this embarrassing situation occurred is certainly under investigation by VMware.

As I see it, these two examples of updates that failed are very different. In the case of the VMware issue a fix was readily found, as the issue was the result of a programming error. A quick fix of the error and the problem was resolved.

As for the Microsoft issue. I see the problem as somewhat different in that while the problem has occurred for some, there are many for whom it has not occurred. This represents a much more difficult issue to resolve. As a result of the very nature of personal PCs, testing for this error becomes much more of an issue. I can almost forgive Microsoft for not having a solution to it.

Yes, I’ve had perhaps more than my share of failed updates. I find that I am much more upset with programming or testing errors than with errors which occur as the result of network or hardware issues which I cannot duplicate. Regardless of the cause, there is no such thing as a good failed update.