

What's holding up .NET 4.5 support on AppHarbor? - dmalenko
http://blog.appharbor.com/2012/08/20/what-s-holding-up-net-4-5-support-on-appharbor

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charliesome
That's one of the more ridiculous bugs I've heard of...

I wonder what the root cause is.

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eckyptang
As a frequent user of the .Net stack, this sort of thing is common and very
annoying indeed.

I'd guess that it's probably using a temp path which is close to the length of
the path limit on Windows and is either not handling it or truncating it.
Either that or it's just shoddy code.

~~~
elarkin
You can generally get around windows' 255 absolute character length limits by
using UNC paths. We had that problem at my last company, where the system
would allow you to write files into a path but not delete them.

There isn't a modern reason for the limit either. NTFS supports longer path
names, as does FAT if I remember correctly. Rather irritating.

~~~
eckyptang
Never tried the UNC hack. Might have a bash at that.

The actual restriction is in the Win32 subsystem which has both C string and
Unicode versions of API calls. Some API is hooked in via the C API which tends
to use TCHAR var[MAX_PATH] as the buffers. It's a royal PITA.

The NT Native API and NTFS don't have such small limits (32k comes to mind).

It's a shame really as NT is a beautiful piece of engineering with a shitty
Win32 subsystem thrown on the top.

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phredaustin
BTW, if you're one of the people waiting for .Net 4.5 on Azure, upvote it here
to get Microsoft's focus on it:
[http://www.mygreatwindowsazureidea.com/forums/34192-windows-...](http://www.mygreatwindowsazureidea.com/forums/34192-windows-
azure-feature-voting/suggestions/2598170-iis8-and-asp-net-4-5-support-in-
azure-platform)

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vyrotek
Dang, that's too bad. This could have been a great opportunity for them. A lot
of people are going stir crazy because Azure doesn't support .Net 4.5 either
yet. I imagine a lot of folks (including myself) quickly checked to see if App
Harbor supported it.

~~~
friism
Rest assured, we'll have it ready very soon - Microsoft bugs notwithstanding.

