Category: Rants

Over the past few weeks, Microsoft has provided plenty of juicy, new software for us developers: Vista Beta 1, WinFx Beta 1 RC 1. They’ve also announced quite a few name changes. Longhorn became Windows Vista. Avalon became Windows Presentation Foundation. Indigo became Windows Communication Framework.

I don’t know yet how I feel about the name Windows Vista, but it at least has some character to it. But Windows Presentation Foundation? Windows Communication Framework? Who wants to use those products? Why did some of the most exciting new software to come out of the Borg hive have to get boring-ass names? Did developers complain that Avalon and Indigo didn’t sound professional?

It makes me wonder what Word, Excel or Outlook would have been called if they were released today: Microsoft Document Editor Framework, Microsoft Data Table Manager, and Microsoft Electronic Mail Personal Organizer. The whole thing would be sold as the Microsoft Knowledge Worker Productivity Suite, rather than just Office. Would it dominate the market so thoroughly if it had used my clunky suggestions back when there were actual competitors? Couldn’t PowerPoint be renamed to Windows Presentation Foundation?

Furthermore, what “market segment“ are the Windows Presentation Foundation and Windows Communication Framework aimed at that renaming them would be thought necessary? I would think developers would be the ones to use them. Developers use products with names like NetBeans, Resharper and Watir; programming languages called Python, Perl, Java and Ruby. What would you rather use, dear reader: Windows Communication Framework or Indigo? Think of all the time, typing and paper saved if we were to go back to Avalon and Indigo? All those RDs, MVPs, and speakers at the PDC could save valuable seconds of their lecture time, so they can tell us how great the technology is rather than waste time saying “Windows Presentation Foundation.” Those giant bricks that tech publishers call books will be that much thinner if the Window Communication Framework was changed back to Indigo.

We should know what’s really going to happen during those talks, and in those books. We may have Ruby and Perl, but we also have XML, SVG, WMI, ASP, VB and AJAX. So Windows Presentation Foundation and Windows Communication Framework will become WPF and WCF, respectively. We don’t need more three-letter acronyms. In fact, Microsoft may not want those abbreviations. WPF and WCF: don’t they sound like organizations that dope-smoking granolas will throw rocks at cops for, like the WTO? Or maybe they sound like something the US Army is searching for in the far reaches of Iraq? Can a company like Microsoft afford those connotations?

Avalon and Indigo exist to make our developer lives easier. They allow us to write elegant code. Let’s make them keep the elegant names.

Who’s with me?

Update: Larry Osterman, venerable Microsoft old-timer, posts about Microsoft’s product naming. And I thought Windows Presenation Framework was bad. Sheesh!

Update 2: Adam Nathan, creator of pinvoke.net, chimes in on the whole WPF/WCF debate. Check the first comment: someone’s copying me 🙂

This weekend, my father had a computer problem. Since there’s a rule about computer nerds being help desk support for everyone they know, he asked me to help him. (To be fair, though, I did build the machine for him. Nor  did I complain: he makes me dinner just about every week, and he’s my dad.) Windows would stop loading after a little while, then the machine would reboot.

I’m not sure what happened, but running chkdsk a couple times fixed the disk errors. If there’s a problem with booting, that’s one of the first things I’ll do. I love chkdsk! It’s solved a number of problems for me in the past.

When was the last time you checked your disk for errors?

Disk problems are always traumatic: a cpu, a videocard, RAM are all replaceable if they break, but a disk isn’t; a disk has valuable data on it: pictures, video, documents, spreadsheets, music… I always get a little nervous dealing with disk issues. That and BIOS settings.

When was the last time you backed up your data?

Running chkdsk finally made it bootable, but it looked like some parts of the registry were reset, and some system libraries went missing. So then I did a System Restore. God bless System Restore! Just about everything went back to normal after System Restore. There were only a few things to fix after that: Outlook.pst was corrupt (no problem: there’s a tool to fix that, but let me know where the tool is in the damn dialog! I shouldn’t have to search my hard drive to find the tool. But it’s ok, Microsoft, you gave me chkdsk and System Restore, so you’re off the hook… this time.) and Norton Antivirus was going insane with stupid-ass dialogs every minute.

Only one app to reinstall: not bad. So I uninstall, I get an error. [Something I screwed up when I made the machine was keeping his old drive in the machine, so the new disk got assigned F:. I didn’t notice until Windows was totally installed, but by then it was too late. However, everything has worked just fine. Everything except for Norton Antivirus. I had to be called in to install the damn thing when he first bought it. I had to use subst.exe to do it.] I tell the uninstaller to ignore the error. I restart. I reinstall, using the hack discussed in the aside. I restart. Still gives me the stupid-ass dialogs. I give up trying to solve it myself and go to Symantec’s support page. The message was something to the effect of, “I can’t my Instant Messenger virus scanning service.” The first thing on their support page is to disable the service, so I open up “the Integrator“. Oh wait, something’s wrong: can’t even load the f’ing gui. (I’m guessing The Integrator is what the programmers call their main window, because that’s what shows up on the error dialog. And it’s an appropriate name: there’s like 50 executables to this piece of shit app.)

What’s their solution for that? You guessed it: uninstall. But I have to remove every Symantec product. So I start removing: 2 reboots to do that. Finally, we’re clean of Symantec products. I was tempted to leave it at that, but my father wants the peace of mind of an antivirus, so I carry on. I install Norton Antivirus…again. I reboot…again. I update it…again. I get the stupid-ass dialog…again. This time the Integrator loads, though, so I disable the shit-ass IM detection service and stop following the steps after that.

The really bad thing about this is Norton expects normal people to be capable of this. Granted: this is an extraordinary situation, but the uninstall should uninstall everything. And a reinstall should be able to fix the problem. Also, you should be able to install the damn thing on a non-standard drive letter. Bitches.

Raise your hand if you can’t wait for Microsoft to write an antivirus.

Norton Antivirus, if you were a person, I’d kick you in the nuts. Really hard.