EDABlog

I will be returning to eventing/EDA  soon ...

There have been a number of posts lately on Windows Workflows 4s break with the past citing continual change and lack of support being a big problem.

Id like to make a few comments on this. The number one productivity killer in .NET today is undoubtedly new technologies and learning how to implement them well.  While these are without doubt superior to past products eg Remoting /WCF , WIndows Forms / WPF , DataSets/LINQ for Sql people seem to be making the move because the feel its new and hence will be supported longer.

This is completely wrong  thinking.   There are still  solutions today where remoting and Datasets are the most appropriate technical choice and likely the best choice in terms of skill levels.  To this day Microsoft still provides the occasional patches to the system. It is often the case with many systems that exist and are maintained many years after the developers even stop support .. Open Source code for example comes with no guaranteed support at all and many projects die yet still provide useful tools and forums for many years . In comparison Microsoft products have legions of people who can assist and forums are full of work arounds it is far cheaper to apply these to an existing app then rewrte it to take advantage of  some new code Microsoft has written. eg if you want ( Not  my choice) a distributed object system with tightly bound types Remoting and writing your own security is still a better choice than Windows Communication Foundation.

Often in these cases the main driver is political and a hard excuse to change something, people need to be less afraid of using older code /libraries its very common in the non Microsoft world and has trivial implications for software development. Obviously non supported hardware  and shrink wrapped software is a different issue.