And Google whines when people install ad-blockers. It's pathetic.
I was willing to watch ads. But then Google introduced NEVER-ENDING ads, when the program is interrupted frequently and will never return unless you herd it along periodically by clicking Skip. Screw you, Google. I'm cooking, with my hands covered with who knows what, and now I can't watch the program.
This is a weird assertion. In major cities, as far as I know, everyone could receive them. And out in the boonies (rural Indiana, for example) there were ONLY UHF channels.
When were you watching? The US All Channel Receiver Act was passed in 1962. Prior to that UHF stations did struggle in the first decade of UHF TV in the US as few TVs had UHF tuners. The situation improved after that as they became standard and more and more people could actually watch the extra channels.
Oh yeah... every day half the mail I receive at work is flagged as "unsafe," and then the banner that tells you this in Outlook presents a button to "manage safe senders."
So I press it and add (for example) OUR OWN JIRA SERVER to the whitelist... which HAS NO EFFECT. Every goddamned day, every Jira message is flagged as dangerous and has blocked content.
I complained to Microsoft, who made up some pathetic excuse about how that's not what that button does... and how every person at my company should contact OUR IT department to have the senders of every E-mail they receive added to some OTHER whitelist, one at a time. Seriously.
The stupidity level at Microsoft today isn't funny. It's sickening. It's also offensive, wasting paying customers' time to the tune of thousands of man-hours daily (and that's probably just at my company).
I think C# and .Net are objectively better to use than Java or C++.
But the tooling and documentation is kind of a mess. Do you build with the "dotnet" command, or the "msbuild" command? When should you prefer "nuget restore" over "dotnet restore"? Should you put "<RestorePackagesConfig>true</RestorePackagesConfig>" in the .csproj instead? What's the difference between a reference and using Nuget to install a package? What's the difference between "Framework" and "Core"? Why, in 2026, do I still need to tell it not to prefer 32-bit binaries?
It's getting better, but there's still 20 years of documentation, how-to articles, StackOverflow Q&A, blogs, and books telling you to do old, broken, and out of date stuff, and finding good information about the specific version you're using can be difficult.
Admittedly, my perspective is skewed because I had never used C# and .Net before jumping in to a large .Net Framework project with hundreds of sub-projects developed over 15-20 years.
I attended one of the evangelist roadshows Microsoft put on when they announced .Net, back in the late '90s. We were developing Windows applications and using an SQL Server/ASP back-end.
We walked out of there saying WTF WAS all that? It was terribly communicated. The departing attendees were shaking their heads in bafflement.
I'm impressed that it has stood the test of time and seems to be well-done; I've never had occasion to use it.
Thinking back, you're probably correct, but it seems like they where actively trying to create something good back then. That might just be me only seeing the good parts, with .Net and SQLServer. Azure was never good, and we've know why for over a decade, their working conditions suck and people don't stay long, resulting things being held together by duct tape.
I do think some things in Microsoft ecosystem are salvageable, they just aren't trendy. The Windows kernel can still work, .Net and their C++ runtime, Win32 / Winforms, ActiveDirectory, Exchange (on-prem) and Office are all still fixable and will last Microsoft a long time. It's just boring, and Microsoft apparently won't do it, because: No subscription.
I was willing to watch ads. But then Google introduced NEVER-ENDING ads, when the program is interrupted frequently and will never return unless you herd it along periodically by clicking Skip. Screw you, Google. I'm cooking, with my hands covered with who knows what, and now I can't watch the program.
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