If you enjoy Microsoft PR material, you may find this “Get the facts” page somewhat interesting. For those of us who really deal with MS and Open Source stuff day by day, please just don’t laugh too loud.

My CV says I’m a “.NET blah blah blah”, and I’ve spent most of my professional life using and deploying MS technology. But you know what? I’ve had too many headaches with it. There’s always a gotcha; you cannot rely in their technology to do things more complicated that what the “getting started” demos say at first glance. Their APIs are often not completely implemented, and you cannot modify them if needed. You have to find workarounds to do things that you need, because their support website says that they won’t fix that problem until the next service pack, or worse, until the next version. And so on.

For example, in .NET 2.0 you can serialize DataTable instances into XML natively; nice. You can then use them (even if it’s not the best practice) as the result of a web service call. Cool. But did you know that the WSDL.EXE utility included in .NET 2.0 does not handle DataTable as return type for a web service? This is not documented either (at least I haven’t found it), so that the proxy generated by WSDL.EXE is completely flawed and you don’t know why your application does not work… until you Google on it. And since you cannot change it nor fix it, you are stuck to find another alternative.

They have a great contradiction between their approach to first-time users and hardcore development. There’s a mismatch; it just does not work the way they say it should. Continue reading →