[d0]

I know this is getting a lot of fanfare but let us apply four major costly problems I'm having with the CLR/Framework at the moment:

1. Microsoft.Build.Tasks (the bit that has been screwing with me all day) contains static sealed classes with nothing in them. I thought this was a reference source rather than a source of empty interfaces and empty implementations? Still having to resort to reflector to find out what is going on. Problem not solved.

2. So, ReaderWriterLockSlim has a bug in it with respect to low CPU allocation in virtual machines where 20 concurrent threads accessing a locked object at the point of write cause the spin lock in the implementation to thrash and up blows a race condition taking out the process. I can actually see where the bug is now. Where do I submit this bug, bear in mind I can actually recreate it? I phoned up our MSDN rep - they said raise it on Connect. There isn't a place for it on Connect. Phone up generic paid support, three levels of technical staff bounce me around for a week. as a PAID UP GOLD PARTNER, this sucks. If you open your source, track bugs openly too. Problem not solved.

3. This is only the core framework. We really need the entire lot including all dependencies and external tools. There aren't any symbols on symbol server or this for VSTO or Sharepoint for example? What we do get is another black box somewhere in the system that we can't inspect or poke inside even though it's a wrapper for a COM API or a product API. Problem not solved.

4. Does Rosyln/next MSBuild support parallel compilation? Being tied to a single compilation core on a VS2013 build means we have 8 core Xeons sitting there doing nothing. Our only hope of speeding this up is cranking up to high end i7 to get one core with crazy integer performance. 20 minute sit down compiles are too much these days. http://xkcd.com/303/

I understand this is progress and Roslyn is cool and all that, but what does it deliver for every day users of the CLR/Framework? It doesn't really make our day much easier. In fact stuff that really improves developers' lives has stopped appearing completely and instead we get tedious reengineering projects and new features designed only to lock us further into the system (VS online+sign in anyone?)

Also how does this compare to say LLVM/Clang?

I imagine this semantic compilation stuff will make some static analysis stuff easier and stamp on the toes of Coverity etc but that's about it.

Edit: sorry if this is purely a content-free rant and unpopular but after 12 years of this crap from Microsoft, I want to see new wheels, not the same ones reinvented and remarketed. Developers are lapping up this crap constantly as if it's as good as it gets. We need some REAL CHANGE towards openness and consistency and to ask the community and users what they want rather than telling us what we need.

[shadowwolf007]

I'm not sure if you're meaning something else, but is /M or /MP not the direction for you? Though C# compiles can be pretty long, my experience is it's usually File I/O and ancillary tasks that take up the majority of the time spent building. Even our primary product which is an absolutely enormous webapp with tons of projects takes only 11 minutes to fully compile and about 5 of that is just shuffling files around.

To take from another conversation, msbuild is very powerful but it's not very usable at all. So much tribal knowledge and secret handshakes you can't learn unless you have a contact in devdiv.

Beyond that, I've opened 3 incidents with Microsoft in the past and they've been nothing short of amazing. One guy even busted out an assembler and stepped through my code to identify that our issue was actually a deliberately closed accidental exploitation path. Enormously frustrating at the time, but he even provided a workaround for us but, like you say, it took several months.

To be specifically productive though: I feel like Roselyn does provide lots of value to developers in terms of what VS plugins can do. There are infinity re-implementations of the MS Compiler out there in terms of plugins and analysis tools. Would be nice to have everyone at least speaking the same language. I think the other thing this initiative does is put the license out there with permissiveness and clarity. Mono can feel comfortable lifting the concepts and integrating it in to their own without worrying about being sued now. This is all great things that they are making available their compiler as a tool and non-platform limited licensing. But - it's only a step it's not the end-game.

What are things you think really improve developers' lives that microsoft used to build they don't build now?

[keithwarren]

So you have found some esoteric issues that are likely encountered by less than .01% of developers and this is somehow 12 years of crap from Microsoft?

I find it funny (not really) that somehow this floats up as the top comment when most developers have no clue what he is talking about but since this is HN and someone is saying how bad Microsoft is then lets upvote. Microsoft killed my pappy and all (ht to shanselman) so I must do everything I can to make sure no one else dares like them.

[bad_user]

So, instead of addressing his points, you instead chose to make fun of it, criticize HN and invoke a marketing piece to somehow prove your stance on the matter. Nice going.

Note that I find Roslyn an interesting project and it's always a WTF for me whenever I touch .NET that I'm not able to easily view/step through the source code of everything I use, including the standard library, so for those suffering, this article is actually good news - and I'm fed up with negative and uninformed opinions on anything interesting, especially on my current platform of choice that's very trendy to bash lately, which I won't name because it would defeat the purpose - because it's much easier to provide uninformed, non-constructive criticism then it is to build stuff, plus we tend to treat our favorites as sports teams with us behaving like cheerleaders, am I right or what?

But for the uninformed reader, such as myself, comments such as yours just add to the noise, I mean WTF?

[d0]

This perhaps 0.01% of the problems I've encountered for reference.

I work in other ecosystems as well and there's just not as much crap to deal with by several orders of magnitude.

[_stephan]

Your support experience sounds really bad.

I'd file the bug here: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio (which despite the name is also the right place to report library issues)

[d0]

It's always been bad. I'm the chief technical contact for a system with 50 developers and about 11,500 users. We've raised 20 cases which we couldn't work around and had one officially released solution (bug in IE11). We either have to work around or push a registry fix at great cost to thousands of users worldwide as an out of band patch that we package ourself.

For example there was a regression in ClickOnce with download prompting between IE8 and IE9 due ot the download bar throwing away some compatibility settings. Overnight, when IE9 became mandatory in Windows Update, we had 2000 users down. We got all the users to roll back to IE8. It took 6 months for a registry fix to be sent out to us from a 3rd line support executive after being on the phone daily about it. This is still not fixed in IE11. We've rewritten all our ClickOnce launch points to work around the regression. This took one developer 2 months of work. The regression appeared in the RTM IE9, not the previews.

As for that being the correct place, it's obviously not as the issue was raised there, marked private and closed as not reproducible despite test cases being issued. Not a single contact back from Microsoft bar "closing as can't reproduce". Our rep suggested contacting another support team. Even they aren't helpful.

I need a new job, writing C on Unix...

[ximeng]

If you browse through connect there's some really unhelpful responses from Microsoft and many people trying very hard to report problems in the most helpful possible way without getting a response. The idea is good but execution is weak.

[noblethrasher]

Regarding #4, Mads Torgersen, the C# PM, intimated that the Roslyn compiler is slower than the C++ one, but will take advantage of more cores.

Source: http://vimeo.com/84677184 (07:55)

[silon3]

The c# build system (assemblies) is completely mis-designed for performance. I wish .net assembly modules were supported for separate compilation and link step.

[shanselman]

2. This is on .NET 4? Send me the repro.

3. Yes, we're adding more libraries.

4. Have you tried using /maxcpucount on MSBuild to enable parallel compilation?

[amaks]

It's hard to disagree with what you've said, especially after Phoenix fiasco. Also, it's quite a shame that opening bugs for open source software requires following through on Connect.

[kenjackson]

What happened in Phoenix?

[runfaster2000]

If you've got a problem with ReaderWriterLockSlim, email me (check my profile). I'll get it to the right people.

[jongalloway2]

"Yo .NET Reference Source Release, I’m really happy for you, Imma let you finish but I have the best self-proclaimed content-free rant of all time. Of all time!"

[jongalloway2]

This was a dumb comment, I'd delete it if I could. Sorry.