I'm a great fan of Microsoft technology. I'm a sucker too for new stuff. Microsoft have had a purple patch of late with the release of VS2010, MVC 2.0, .Net 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0.
I also am a great fan of cloud computing. Scientio's site has been hosted on Microsoft Azure for over a year, and after a lot of aggro we've got the hang of it.
The one real problem has been the fact that the various elements, RIA services, Visual Studio, etc have not kept up with each other during beta, so we had endless problems of A not working with B, and C not working with D. After a lot of struggling you get everything to hang together, and then a new version of one of them comes along, and it all starts again.
So now, all of them are released, Silverlight a week late, and RIA services is reasonably stable, so we want to run the new site we've built on Azure.
Unfortunately Azure won't run .Net 4.0, and Microsoft won't promise when it will, except it'll be within 90 days of the RTM. So we're back where we started again...
2 comments:
Hey Andy,
I feel your pain. But it's not like the productteams aren't talking to eachother, as a matter of fact they talk a lot about alignment and are consciously taking dependencies on each other.
As with any project you have to take dependencies on certain technology, even if it is from the same company. In addition to this compatibility testing needs to take place when new versions of these dependencies are released. If you don't do this it would be hard - maybe even impossible - to release anything at all.
That is the reason why you see time pass by for the different teams to release updates. That is not a Microsoft specific problem, it is closely related to how software works.
The cloud provides us with great benefits in this regard as it enables us to actually roll out updates at a higher frequency without depending on the rollout strategy of individuals and companies.
So I feel confident to say that this will improve over time.
In my opinion 90 days to release an update on Azure that supports .NET 4.0 isn't all that much, is it?
Regards,
Dennis Mulder
Microsoft Corporation
Thanks for your comment Dennis,
But 90 days is a long time. I don’t know what is involved in upgrading the azure servers, but clearly if you want Azure to be at the core of what Microsoft does in the future it can't be left so far behind everything else. I've now got a couple of site upgrades parked until Azure supports .Net 4.0.
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