Enterprise open source Toolkit

Story: Linux firms rubbish Microsoft's customer win

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Really? In my experience I encounter often people who sell words for a nickle and a dime and once the contract is signed it turns out to be a world of strings attached.

The easy to install with little to nothing technical requirements and no negative impact whatsoever new custom-made software solution turns out to need all sorts of additional patches, extra hardware, extra licences, redesigns, tuning, tweaking, concessions, additional work and what not.

Somehow the overbuild development environment back at the workshop doesn't quite resembles the production environment in use at the customer site.
Also, it's rather rule then exception for the average developer to totally overlook aspects like AAA, redundancy requirements, load balancing, anti-virus, firewalls, diagnostics, automated backups, recovery, patch management, change management, resource management, pre-warning systems, management systems, base lining and a whole range of other aspects that are common in IT land but just not within his/her job description.

No, .NET doesn't "take care of that". Nor does anything else build around, on top, sideways, or whatever on it. Actually worse because the basis of .NET doesn't allow for much flexibility. It's either their way or the high way so to speak. Broken third-party application? Get an update! Yeah right, pay for an upgrade and do a complete change project you mean. Rewrite half your system documentation and procedures and so on. But at least it'll be easier for the developer to maintain the code. Wow, wouldn't it be cheaper and quicker to simply swap out the developer? Oh, and guys? Within two years from now you can do this all over again because Microsoft is rewriting all sorts of core parts in various products of theirs and to make the most use out of that your third-parties will need to rewrite the lot again leading to yet another cascade effect. Ka-ching!

Also, the usual response when the new program doesn't work as expected is requests to turn off anti-virus or firewalls, devote a dedicated server to it, grand it overexcessive rights, allow the developer to gain complete access to the troubled system in question for "monitoring" purposes, upgrade the WAN links, install additional Microsoft components all over the place, re-activate Microsoft components that were de-activated for good reasons and so forth. In short, let it spin out of control but just meet the deadline.

Point the above out and there are developers that turn emotional and claim that unreasonable demands are forced upon them. Yeah, right. Worked fine until they showed up and all we're pointing out is to not turn your production environment into someone elses test and learning facility. If you can't deliver what's being asked then simply say so and we can move on. Just don't expect me to turn a good working production environment into something some developer thinks he understands and at least feels comfortable with.

You see? Different experiences, different opinions.

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