Trouble For Microsoft Developers With the Windows Store 232
An anonymous reader writes "This blog post from an un-happy Microsoft developer highlights many of the problems that developers are having with submitting to the new Windows store. His app, that won 2 App X challenges from Microsoft, has been rejected 6 times over 2 months with no clear indications as to the cause. This is even after going through a rigorous early-certification process. With Windows RT relying solely on apps from the store, and there being just over 7,000 apps total, Microsoft could have a big problem here."
only 7000 apps? (Score:5, Funny)
that's only like 3 per RT user?
the horror
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that's only like 3 per RT user?
Unless the pirates steal a couple of thousands, in which case it'd be even less.
Re:only 7000 apps? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I have the same problem with Google's Chrome App Store, NetFlix, Walmart, the local mall, my closet, the list goes on.
You know what seems to work? Targeted advertising. I give them information about me - in return they tell me about things I might like (at least those items somebody pays to get shown to me).
Recommendation engines also work but often show me unpopular things and I still have to give my info out.
Apple uses "Genius" results. Google uses your profile if you're logged in. Netflix has its famous
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The Mac App store is a disgrace. It's extremely hard to find things and there are so many products that are slimmed down to do rules. For example, one cannot buy a disk utility that has all the features of the standalone product due to various security rules. Crippled versions of antivirus software, drive genius, etc are present.
Similarly, most games do not contain the network play features that a similar retail product or game on steam would have. They still charge nearly the same price for them though
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In general Amazon is anti privacy and Apple is pro privacy. Since they are in competition with Google it is to both Apple and Microsoft's advantages to emphasize the fact that they are not in the advertising business and don't sell customer information. If they were doing themselves the same sort of things Google and advertisers who buy data from Google do, it would be harder to make the case.
Re:only 7000 apps? (Score:5, Informative)
If by 80% you mean 90%, and by "never been downloaded", you mean "downloaded every month", you're spot on!
http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/12/ios-app-store-boasts-700k-apps-90-downloaded-every-month/
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Simple: not all apps earn enough to cover the annual fee. On the upside, developers aren't restricted to publishing just one app.
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On the upside, developers aren't restricted to publishing just one app.
I thought the developer fee was limited to a specific number of applications (five?), beyond which point each application carried an extra annual fee. Or maybe that was just the Windows Phone 7 store.
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I don't own a Mac, so I've never even tried to develop for the iOS store or OS X store. However, I did look into the WP7 store. There was a (brief) time, ending almost two years ago, when you were limited to five *free* app submissions per annual fee. Paid apps didn't have this restriction, because MS would get a cut of the purchase price. The limit was quickly lifted to something like 100 app - high enough that even somebody who wanted to flood the market with junk would have to work pretty hard to hit the
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Fuck app stores without regards for their flavor!
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80% of Apple apps has never been downloaded, less then %1 earned more the $1000...
And how many have been competently advertised? There is more to business than writing a program and making a website for it.
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"Easy to find" doesn't mean everybody knows to look for it.
I don't browse the Steam store looking for games with an interesting title and cover image. I hear about a game that seems interesting and use Steam to buy it.
An app store doesn't make people want your app. It just makes things simpler for people that know what they want.
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I think you mean 80% of apps uploaded to the windows Store have not been downloaded...because they're stuck in the acceptance loop and not passed. See what the blogger said the Microsoft engineer said about thousands of apps being stuck, that's why it took so long for his app to fail each time he uploaded it - the servers are maxed out with a huge backlog of failures.
Microsoft has a huge chance to alienate developers... and are embracing it wholeheartedly.
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An app store does not eliminate the need for marketing. Seriously, you can't get far in the world wihtout some form of advertising. "Release it and they will com
Re:only 7000 apps? (Score:4, Funny)
"preying on retards has always been profitable."
Is that how Microsoft initially came to dominate?
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Hum, I guess you make a point. Nevertheless, I like the term "cattle" better. Cattle is not necessary retard. It can have a lot of potential although not aware of it.
Re:only 7000 apps? (Score:5, Funny)
The difference is that cattle don't have a sense of taste even though they may taste good.
Re:only 7000 apps? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, there is nothing about OSX or iOS that is remotely interesting or useful, and it's all just pretty enclosures making them $40B a year in profit. You are so right and all of Apple's engineers are incompetent!
Implementing the first iPhone was about 1% ID, 5% hardware, and the rest software by resources. And whatever you think of it personally, it absolutely redefined the mobile industry and has been so ridiculously successful it made Apple the most valuable company in the world. Fools, indeed.
"could have a big problem" (Score:5, Insightful)
Uhm. The OS is released and there's major dumb-fuckery going on in their online store, the ONLY place you can buy apps from for certain versions of the new OS.
That's not a "could have a big problem" thing.
That's a "HAS a big problem" thing.
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I advise you to now swallow a few grains of salt.
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MS has an intel based tab due for delivery in 2 month and apps for it can be side-loaded. Businesses will probably suck on these, unless winders 8 proves to be too much of a pain in the arse.
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You mean like The Beatles after Kurt Cobain? People under the age of 25 have this peculiar habit of assigning anything that's not the automatic topic of conversation to niche status. Such as the internal combustion engine in the era of alternative energy. Gasoline is pretty niche these days. And this is almost true: it will never again be
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Am I saying you won't be using a PC when you head into work tomorrow? Nope. Was that what I was suggesting...at all? Nope
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I do not think it is clear how much the new smart devices are cannibalizing PC sales. They seem to be but I do not think there are any really good studies yet. Once we know that, we can see how much PCs will be taken down a peg....or not. In the PC world, MS will still dominate by hook or, more likely, by crook. What scares them is a new product category based on computing devices but so far devoid of their malware.
Re:"could have a big problem" (Score:5, Interesting)
Why do you think that another mobile failure will marginalize MS? None of the previous ones did. Are you under the impression that everybody's going to throw away their PC and start using a tablet? That's not what's happening. PC sales are stagnant because the market's saturated. Tablet sales are booming because it's new use case that users are just beginning to move to. One is not being replaced by the other.
It's true that this is going to hurt MS. But they'll still collect a tithe for every non-Mac PC sold, and they'll still sell a lot of server licenses. As these markets saturate, they will cease to make MS uber-profitable, but these markets are still big, and will remain so — as will Microsoft.
Re:"could have a big problem" (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you under the impression that everybody's going to throw away their PC and start using a tablet?
Nope, but I ain't gonna buy any PC/Laptop/Tablet/Smartphone with Win8 either.
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but once profits start to drop, Microsoft might be profitable but investors will start to walk away, and the share price will drop, and that will make people panic, and then Microsoft executives (who have millions of shares and will see the red) will start to do crazy things.
Look at Nokia for an example - symbian and feature phones are hugely profitable, yet the CEO says "they're sh*t" and next thing you know, they're not selling anything and are heading for ecven more layoffs and probably a takeover from M
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I see this tablet/phone foray as one of Microsoft's last rolls of the dice. If this doesn't work then they'll be marginalized sooner rather than later. I know its been 'heralded' for too long, but we are actually seeing a shift in the primary use of computers. PCs, like it or not are fast heading towards niche status.
I advise you to now swallow a few grains of salt.
Uh yeah...no. This is just a vaguely redressed "The PC is dying." argument.
The PC has been "dying" for the last 30+ years. It's harder to kill than my grandmother (had a bunch of major strokes back in the mid-80's and a host of doctors over the next 15 years told her she didn't have 5 years left, she outlived all of them and didn't die until late 2011).
PCs aren't heading towards niche ANYTHING.
As a primary productivity platform, with one in front of just about everybody on the planet, there's no longer ro
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Ah but the growing markets (China, India, Africa, South America) are not buying PCs but ARE buying Smart Phones and Tablets.
The pie is getting bigger every day and PCs are not keeping up.
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Ah but the growing markets (China, India, Africa, South America) are not buying PCs but ARE buying Smart Phones and Tablets.
The pie is getting bigger every day and PCs are not keeping up.
Honestly. Smart phones and tablets are essentially media "consumption" devices.
Not everyone needs the full functionality a desktop or laptop PC gives them.
That's fine. But it doesn't mean these devices are going to kill the PC. They're simply going to push out their own market niche, with some overlap.
Re:"could have a big problem" (Score:5, Funny)
That's a "HAS a big problem" thing.
Problem, n.: A feature. -- The New Ballmer Dictionary
Re:"could have a big problem" (Score:4, Informative)
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Well, there's the whole "No plan survives contact with the enemy." thing going on.
They can do all sorts of studies and modelling and focus group testing and STILL have stuff get broke all to hell by the general populace.
And, organized or not, there's always the possibility that the development and implementation teams quite simply didn't fully grasp the product they were trying to deliver nor the processes required to deliver it in a usable format.
So you get things like "Your apps is great! It's stellar!
Re:"could have a big problem" (Score:5, Interesting)
For those who prefer metric, that's about 195.6 cm. He's well above 99th percentile for height. Big, too. Kind of an imposing-looking guy, in fact.
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The bigger they come, the harder they get stabbed.
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Maybe he's commenting on specific anatomical areas.
Though how he'd know this for a fact raises some fairly creepy notions.
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Quality over quantity any time.
However too little quantity is not good - both Apple and Google have about 100 time more apps in their stores... MS has a long way to go.
And somehow I hope they make it. Not that I care much about MS as such, it'd be great to have a third viable competitor in this market. And MS Is pretty much the only company that I can think of that could pull that off.
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Meh, this is all part of the plan!
A few people will buy the Surface and they'll say "My God! Tablets are just awful! I vow to stick with PCs and never look at anything else ever!" Problem solved.
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Uhm. The OS is released and there's major dumb-fuckery going on in their online store, the ONLY place you can buy apps from for certain versions of the new OS.
That's not a "could have a big problem" thing.
That's a "HAS a big problem" thing.
Are people scooping up Windows 8?
Sideloading is actually possible, even on RT (Score:2)
It's not exactly hugely encouraged for arbitrary apps - it's supposedly for dev/test and for organization-specific internal apps - but any Windows 8 or Windows RT device can sideload "Metro"-style apps just fine. They don't make it easy; you have to use the command line (Powershell, specifically) for both the "developer unlock" and for installing the apps (at least, that's the easiest way that I've found), but it doesn't cost anything.
I don't have any idea how this guy would respond to a suggestion that he
Actually doesn't really matter to it (Score:2, Interesting)
The Surface was dead before it ever launched. The reason is that there is no tablet market, there's an iPad market.
Most people have no use for tablets. There are niche uses (the in medicine) but by and large there just isn't a real use for tablets. People are not going to be able to get rid of their computers because tablets are lousy for content creation, even basic content like writing an e-mail or forum post. However they aren't portable like a smartphone so you don't take it with you all the time. They
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I've yet to meet someone that has dumped their smartphone or computer for their tablet and as such they really don't need it.
I've yet to meet someone who has dumped their smartphone or computer for their toaster, guess they don't need that either.
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They try to fill a niche where your smartphone isn't large enough for what you need, but your laptop isn't portable enough. There is almost none of that in a normal person's life.
I guess you use your laptop on the sofa, but my wife and I much prefer using an iPad on the sofa and at the kitchen table. Basically it is for ergonomics. People don't sit a book on their knees to read, they tend to hold a book up a foot or two away from their face, so you can have a "big view on a small screen". Laptops still usually need a desk, and even there people want stands for the laptop just to get the screen higher. Maybe your eyesight doesn't need that, maybe you're thin and can work leaning forw
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That usage you have there IS a niche. Not as in "Very few people would use it" but as in "A small part of the use case of that class of device (computer)".
I hate to break it to you, but most people spend most of their time on computers doing very simple stuff: web browsing, Facebook, email, chat, simple games. Since all of this can be done on a tablet, and often more conveniently, people are buying tablets. For the occasional instance where they have to write up a real document in Word, they still have th
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The Surface was dead before it ever launched. The reason is that there is no tablet market, there's an iPad market.
I don't see that as being the case. There is a tablet market, it's just that the iPad was the first tablet not to suck, so it got first-mover advantage on top of the cachet of the Apple brand name. Now that we're starting to see decent, and less expensive, tablets from other vendors (Nexus 7), sales are starting to pick up.
Most people have no use for tablets. There are niche uses (the in med
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Yeah, looking at the whole app approval failure, it seems the problem is that they are trying too hard to copy Apple.
Re:"could have a big problem" (Score:4, Insightful)
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It'll live 18-36 months and die horribly.
Like just about every non-x86 platform Microsoft has made a foray into.
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Clearly this is Apple's fault (Score:4, Funny)
First they reject apps on their own store, now they're rejecting apps on Microsoft's store! When will the insanity end?
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Well, MS already copied everything else from Apple. This shouldn't come as a surprise.
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de nae wonder. The soundness of the policy will no doubt benefact the benefactors.
And leave the users feeling benefact.
Existing Functionality. (Score:4, Funny)
I tried to submit and app called the Windows Store but it was rejected because it duplicated the existing functionality of the Apple App Store.
Developers (Score:5, Funny)
Developers! Developers! Developers!
Developers?
[sound of crickets]
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They're all working on Android and iOS already!
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This blog post from an un-happy Microsoft developer highlights
Developers! Developers! Developers!
Developers?
[sound of crickets]
Are there any happy Microsoft developers?
[sound of crickets]
I really tried to care... (Score:5, Funny)
Is post-geek a label? As in, one who used to pay attention to the excessive details of digging deep into how something works, but now has graduated into the realization that one can do whatever one needs to do with just about any tools or platform or system and no longer has a need to scrutinize so strongly because one's skills are good enough to weather any circumstances regardless of the technological changes?
Re:I really tried to care... (Score:5, Insightful)
In between those I strongly prefer Google's terms.
First of all the Play Store has little virus issues. No idea on numbers, but it's not that I hear often about viruses in apps. Certainly the more popular apps are generally safe. And Apples app store is also not 100% clean, the vetting process is far from perfect.
I don't use third-party stores, but I have installed software directly from an app vendor's site. And have installed my own apps directly on my phone, without any issues. Having these possibilities is great. Being limited to a single store, and not being able to easily install apps in any other way, that just sucks.
Even if the Play Store started vetting their apps, then still not much lost as you're not limited to that store. There are alternatives. Unfortunately MS decides to go the Apple way - forgetting how the openness of Windows is part of what made the platform so ubiquitous.
Re:I really tried to care... (Score:5, Funny)
Is post-geek a label? As in, one who used to pay attention to the excessive details of digging deep into how something works, but now has graduated into the realization that one can do whatever one needs to do with just about any tools or platform or system and no longer has a need to scrutinize so strongly because one's skills are good enough to weather any circumstances regardless of the technological changes?
Not everyone's skills are good enough.
But TWX (665546), you're not alone.
There is hope and there is help: Ask Slashdot: Rectifying Nerd Arrogance? [slashdot.org]
Re:I really tried to care... (Score:5, Insightful)
You aren't post-geek, you've just graduated past the larval stage. :P
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Is post-geek a label? As in, one who used to pay attention to the excessive details of digging deep into how something works, but now has graduated into the realization that one can do whatever one needs to do with just about any tools or platform or system and no longer has a need to scrutinize so strongly because one's skills are good enough to weather any circumstances regardless of the technological changes?
No, it's called maturity. It can happen as early as your late 20s, but typically it takes until the mid-30s to manifest. Other symptoms include being in bed by midnight, not being as good as you remember at first-person shooter games, and drinking coffee with a reasonable amount of sugar and creamer rather than dumping the lot into every cup and having a quarter-inch of sludge at the bottom.
Re:I really tried to care... (Score:4, Funny)
No, it's called maturity. It can happen as early as your late 20s, but typically it takes until the mid-30s to manifest. Other symptoms include being in bed by midnight, not being as good as you remember at first-person shooter games
Please stop stalking me.
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"post geek" - Interesting. But in my own case it is more like "too old and too cranky to put up with time-wasting crap any more".
Re:I really tried to care... (Score:4, Insightful)
Is post-geek a label? As in, one who used to pay attention to the excessive details of digging deep into how something works, but now has graduated into the realization that one can do whatever one needs to do with just about any tools or platform or system and no longer has a need to scrutinize so strongly because one's skills are good enough to weather any circumstances regardless of the technological changes?
Indeed, if you're more obsessed with your tools than with your work, you might want to reconsider your priorities. Still, doesn't mean you have to be content with inferior tools. Just realize that in the end what matters is that they allow you to work more productively and deliver better quality; if your search for a productivity boosting tool results in not getting anything done, you're doing it wrong.
"Fix security at any cost." (Score:5, Insightful)
Most computer users don't want a Wild West computer experience. They want a safe, functional one where the computer interface is as inobtrusive as possible. They want as little burden on their consciousness as possible, so they can focus on what they want to use the computer to do in the first place.
When you have an audience like that, expect tradeoffs. Less flexibility, more stability. Fewer options, more consistency. And now, the days of downloading random bits of code are over.
For 90% of the users out there, this will be a great experience. The rest will dual-boot...
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I dispute that. Once they get mildly comfortable they hear about things they can do and WANT to do them at any cost. That's when installing X software comes in. If you can assure them that every type of "X software" will be available in their app stores, I guess they won't have a problem. But if the app is somehow there but out of reach, I think you
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More often than not, the common user will get much more distressed when he sees an application that does something he wants and does not run in his machine than he would get by a buggy program.
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Did you miss the "as little burden on their consciousness as possible" part?
Is this app really necessary? (Score:3)
"Swipe or scroll through a continuous collage of all your photos, dynamically generated as you browse. The layout is different every time, bringing your attention to new photos each time you browse a folder."
Nobody is going to miss that.
MS succeded (Score:2)
Re:MS succeded (Score:5, Informative)
Mind you, unlike on iOS, Microsoft permits app sideloading (even on ARM devices), with no extra costs or limits that I've seen yet.
Open Powershell as Admin
Enter the command: Show-WindowsDeveloperLicenseRegistration
Enter your Windows Live credentials
Download and sideload apps to your heart's content.
Goddamn "evangelists" (Score:5, Interesting)
How apt: belief based development.
Back in the mid 90s, I worked at a games company where we were struggling to get the performance of Direct3D Retained Mode (anyone else remember that?) up to anywhere near Glide levels on Voodoo hardware. It was "escalated" until some DirectX "evangelist" rocked up at our office to "assist."
His "assistance" consisted of looking out of the window and telling us that we must be doing something wrong, because his developers assured him that D3DRM should perform better than anything that we could roll ourselves.
"Look," we said, "here's the same app, showing the same scene, and the framerate of the D3DRM version is half that of Glide."
But he wouldn't look. He literally wouldn't look at the screens. He wouldn't even acknowledge the problem. Just kept going on about how we must be mis-using it, because he had been assured.
Needless to say, we dropped D3DRM, as did everyone else, and it died in a corner, alone and unloved. But it did give us a valuable insight into the developer and "evangelist" culture at Microsoft. I think all Windows developers learn it eventually, which is why Microsoft need a constant influx of bright eyed, bushy tailed young suckers who'll fall for the line that they only hurt us because they love us so much.
Not just app store - MS developer key nightmare (Score:2, Interesting)
Its not just the app store that is the problem. I was about to purchase a MSDN subscription, and took a peek at the current situation with respect to license keys and installation of developer operating systems, and couldn't believe how much effort MS must have expended in creating such a confusing and unmanageable mess. They wont get my money. It is much more expedient to NOT develop for Windows. I will continue developing for various mobile platforms, and Linux, and even IOS, but MS has made everything
Have MS forgotten what a stack trace is? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why the hell aren't Microsoft sending stack traces of crashes back to developers? Are they so incompetent that they've forgotten how software is developed?
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Why the hell aren't Microsoft sending stack traces of crashes back to developers? Are they so incompetent that they've forgotten how software is developed?
I'm not sure any of the certification processes across the various devices do that. Unhandled crashes in production do get sent back, for example, on Windows Phone applications. Given that even standard windows applications will do that, too, if you're using windows error reporting, I'm sure the modern apps do, too. That said, a stacktrace in a crash report without any context isn't very useful, anyway.
You actually do get pretty good reports back about the certification process and what is failing, but if t
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You actually do get pretty good reports back about the certification process and what is failing, but if the failure is a generic "the application crashed", Microsoft isn't your QA department. Its not the job of the application verifiers to figure out how you might be logging, or if you crashed and YOU showed the error, or if it dumped back to the OS as an unhandled error. They're not a free QA outsourcing organization.
Not giving any kind of indication of how it crashed, or even what environment it's being run under, doesn't seem like a good report to me. How are you supposed to fix a crash issue when you've never been able to replicate it and have no idea what setup it's being run on?
As MS seem to run the application under some kind of automated test suite it shouldn't be too hard for them to catch the error with an automated debugger, generate a quick stack trace report and send that back to the dev with the spec of the
Solution: Go Around Microsoft (Score:2)
This seems like a reoccuring theme.... (Score:2)
This seems like a reoccuring theme....
Another account of the issues with the Windows Phone app store is also mentioned by a Developer working for Ceton (though the posts are from his personal blog...)
Blog post detailing the problem: http://www.motzwrit.es/post/33309406053/a-broken-process [motzwrit.es]
Initial thread discussing delays in the process: http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=3093 [thegreenbutton.tv]
Typical MS... (Score:2)
FTFA (Score:2)
Bob? Microsoft Bob? You met Microsoft Bob in a science museum? I think we might be on to something here...
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... on the mystical Debian island where all the computers are free and none of them work quite right...
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You have a point there, but let's see our options:
1 - software that is free (as in I can improve it if I need to), even if buggy, and usually made with passion;
2 - software that restricts our actions as much as it can get with, usually just for the sake of money.
I've been choosing 1 almost exclusively for more than a decade and I feel happy about it, despite the occasional frustration with bugs.
The second option is a reflection of our greed-oriented society, with all its DMCA, SOPA, PIPA, DRM, WGA, TPM, EUF
Re:this guy is an idiot (Score:5, Interesting)
No, pretty sure *you* are the idiot here. If you'd actually RTFA, instead of whatever brief skim you took, you'd have seen that the guy ran WACK every time... and that it always ran clean on his system. He eventually got a failure out of it by running his VM's performance down to the Win8 mimum specs, but even after fixing that he continued getting unexplained errors from the certification process that didn't show up on his local system.
Also, WACK failed to catch a very simple and obvious thing - a piece of dev/test code that he'd left in a constructor, which will crash the app when run if installed from the store - that it clearly should have. That's exactly the kind of thing that static analysis should have found.
I'm rather shocked by Microsoft's failures, here. Usually, they're very good with dev tools and communication. Not this time, it seems. You'd think they'd have learned from the problems Apple had... it almost feels like they're trying to repeat Apple's mistakes too.
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Nothing suspends correctly (Score:2)
- Performance: Make sure that your app suspends correctly.
If an application that uses code provided by Microsoft to save a single string doesn't "suspend correctly", then what application does "suspend correctly"?
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No loops, no recursion, just a return statement. If you're a coder and truly have no clue whether your program halts or not, you have no business wri
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There's a side story here, right?
Perhaps the main reason that Steve "me-too!" Ballmer is copying Apple is because he has seen them do something that has proven to be very profitable and decided that it would be a good way to try and turn-around Microsoft's ailing fortunes
Yeah, they could copy Apple's graphical desktop UI, and rename their product from 'DOS' to 'Windows'..
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Actually, the softies are pretty OK people. [blogspot.de] Unlike us, users, they see the screw-ups developing literally in slow motion, resulting in sub par end products and services delivered. (What requires rather high pain tolerance threshold on their part. Few manage to survive there.)
It's the career management and sales who are total [censored], killing all the good from the inside.