Nope. At work we have a similar setup.exe file. The setup.exe is a bootstrapper that installs prerequisites first, then runs the ClickOnce installer which is separate.
A lot of people in the comments here miss the context: this was written by Microsoft ecosystem developers.
Some of the items on the list specifically target Microsoft MVPs and Regional Directors, the shots at "snacks" and "T-shirts" aim at Microsoft community events, and the rest target standard corporate development dysfunction.
If there's one positive takeaway from this post, it's the bit of the end that warns you to treat your 501 teammates well.
If you haven't even seen Windows 8, please don't comment on it. It's clear from even a quick look at Windows 8 what awkward transition between "tablet" and "desktop" he's talking about.
I blame XAML, and I'm justified. Some of my teammates here have changed Visual Studio to open XAML files with the XML editor, which means
* Visual Studio no longer crashes all the time, and
* they lose all XAML intellisense.
I choose to keep the XAML editor for its usefulness, but I run Task Manager (well, Process Explorer) open in the tray at all times to monitor my CPU. If your CPU spikes while you're doing nothing, it's a good sign that Visual Studio may crash.
And as everyone else says, it's rock-solid while doing web development or anything not involving XAML.
I've worked as the IT guy in a hospital, and have talked to our "finance guy", and he says the same thing--outpatient surgeries and childbirths pay for Medicare (in)patients and the ER.
And yes, there is inefficiency unrelated to Medicare, and yes, I've seen the anecdote about how doctors who own an MRI machine refer patients to get MRIs six times more frequently.
But Medicare underpaying, alongside what I remember hearing was a "bad payor mix" from ER patients, hurts.
If you're truly curious about how healthcare works, follow this blog http://histalk2.com/ and get a flavor for what's concerning IT people (which oftentimes is money).
The 'official toolkit' Metro is XAML + (C++ or .NET or MSHTML5). I've been told by a (true) Silverlight/WPF expert that the Win8 XAML most resembles the Silverlight API.
Silverlight used to be promoted as:
* Flex/Flash compete
* Public web compete (I never recommended it for such)
* line-of-business (not publicly available) apps
* (recent) Windows Phone 7
Silverlight is now promoted as:
* line-of-business apps
* Windows Phone 7, but maybe Win Phone 8 will look more like the Win8 Metro XAML (I don't think they've said anything yet)
Metro is now promoted for:
* Win8 tablet apps
* Win8 native apps(? who cares I guess?)
* possibly Win Phone 8 apps
I don't know what apps you write, so I don't know what your specific roadmap may look like. I've leaned toward recommending web apps over "client" apps for .NET devs the past few years, and will heavily lean that way going forward. ASP.NET MVC skills translate easily to open source/competing web frameworks. WPF or Silverlight developers can't say the same thing.
If from a developer's viewpoint, XAML looks identical to Silverlight, and there are the same number of people working on XAML for the Windows team as there used to be working on Silverlight for DevDiv, does it matter?
But I bet you're feeling betrayed. I understand. I felt a little betrayed a few frameworks ago. Post-betrayal, I stick to focusing on transferable skills and JIT learn the rest of .NET. I'm on a WPF project now, have not studied WPF deeply.
My advice: if you have any say in the matter, try to work with ASP.NET MVC as opposed to the .NET alternatives, so your skills transfer.
Footnote: I don't know how many worked on Silverlight/WPF/WP7 versus how many work on XAML now. I assume XAML will march on. But no one will care unless/until the Windows tablet is successful.
I assumed that XAML was the silverlight team (why duplicate effort) and if silverligth is gone how much core knowledge stays in XAML?
Personally I stuck to C++ and moved MFC->wx->Qt !
.Net is interesting for the way it allows things like Ironpython and F# in as first class languages and wpf is fun to play with, but if you can't write something like Office or photoshop in it then it's just a toy.
Hopefully he doesn't mean it just for employees. The Hacker News community has a bent towards "startup = happiness" which I disagree with, but all things considered, is better than the screddit "eSports is important, and it's important to practice Starcraft" bent.
A lot of us are indeed skeptical. MS has a history of doing focused marketing. The ongoing BUILD conference is currently marketing Win8/WinRT.
A past push that sticks out to me most is the "3 pillars of Longhorn (Vista)". The vast majority of "the 3 pillars (WPF/WCF/WinFS/InfoCard)" are now useless.
We should all remember Vista/Longhorn as something that had an equal amount of marketing, but failed horribly. Anyone remember the Windows Vista UI Guidelines? A search box and back button in every application? The sidebar? Have a graphic designer design your application's UI in XAML (oops, they're still trying to push that one)? Maybe Windows 8's new stuff won't fail, but we can't tell at this point. This is also the same thing I say about Windows Phone, Azure and even something as heavily supported as the Entity Framework. You just never know when funding will be cut or if the product will die.
For me, with all this in mind, I do the bare minimum just-in-time learning to keep up with the day job, especially as it comes to frameworks and new product pushes. Fundamentals such as OO concepts or any kind of universal, timeless concepts, I'll study. But I won't bother with buying the newest WinRT book when it comes out because hey, why bother. Even if I do study up on one of these topics, I'll do it knowing that the platform may die at any moment. I'm sure WebOS folk or niche phone developers (Symbian OS?) know the feeling.
The vast majority of .NET developers effectively do the same regarding learning Microsoft frameworks, only they're more quiet or less honest about how little proactive studying they do, and usually won't own up to the truth. All .NET developers are 'behind the curve', at least as the curve is re-defined every new marketing push.
I don't know how best to moderate or otherwise encourage better HN participation (or how to improve forums, or mailing lists, or tweet streams, or whatever they invent or rename tomorrow), but I have a thought.
Can we apply a "who cares?" ethos/filter to our comments? I.e., if I am about to post a comment, before I do so I ask myself "who cares about this comment?" If the answer is Probably Nobody, then I don't post it. Simple, right?
I do this all the time. I probably write and delete five comments for every comment I post here.
A second question to ask the question is, is my comment adding anything to the discussion that isn't already glaringly obvious? If it's obvious, but I want to nitpick or clarify...maybe just sit on it for a while and see if the urge to comment fades?
With smaller communities, we don't have to apply such harsh filters because hey, who cares, there's 10 of us. We can hash it out amongst us. But with a huge community like HN, if 9999 out of 10000 subscribers resist the urge to comment but just one does, that makes what, 50 comments? 500 nowadays? 5000?
What I'm saying is, I think HN comments would be a great deal better off if everyone just sat back and said "hey, do we really need yet another armchair CEO quarterbacking on Monday (I'm not going to bother getting those idioms right) about Steve Jobs' legacy and the future of Apple, from the wizened perspective of another college student (or in my case, .NET dev)?" Even I'm following the Book of Graham and disagreeing properly and writing well-formed sentences and generally making my points clearly, am I just adding noise? Does it matter if anyone reads my comment?
HN would be better if everyone just, just resisted the urge to comment and let the real experts talk. Most of us already do, but there's just too many of us now for "most of us" to be good enough.
