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Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

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Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#31

Post by andyferris »

okanat wrote: post #25
smaudet wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. Some things go deep, true. However most businesses don't use most of Microsoft products - even the ones that do, the usage of the more complicated products is far more minuscule than imagined by e.g. CFOs, etc. The real thing keeping many "in the fold" as it were would be authentication services. Which are overcomplicated and probably easier to manage without...

It really depends on the size of the business. With smaller businesses it is easy to use alternatives. However any business beyond 1000 employees will give in to shareholder pressure and adopt distrust as its core value. Microsoft Active Directory has excellent tooling for middle-management-heavy businesses. For better or for worse it provides the most integrated solution to reduce a desktop PC to a perfect thing for…

Out of curiosity, how hard would it be to copy Active Directory in an open source project (like how Excel is copied by LibreOffice)?

Like if orgs need this capability why is there no good open source solution?

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#32

Post by throwaway_2121 »

firesteelrain wrote: post #16
slantaclaus wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also haven't read the article but apparently reading the comments the article has to do with Trump-era policies affecting Microsoft

Yeah, I skimmed the article too, but didn’t see much on Trump’s policies directly impacting Microsoft. From what I gather, the bigger challenges for businesses are more about the tech ecosystem Microsoft has built. It's hard to just swap out core services like AD without huge disruptions.

> Yeah, I skimmed the article too, but didn’t see much on Trump’s policies directly impacting Microsoft.

The first paragraph links to an article about how the International Criminal Court ’s chief prosecutor has lost access to his email.

This has caused some governments to worry. What if MS was ordered to block access to their software because the US wanted to apply pressure?

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#34

Post by cyberax »

jiggawatts wrote: post #30
gerdesj wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world technology situations. There's a reason every AAA game engine depends on it in some way." I'm not interested in AAA games engines writing and nor is most of the world. If that is it, then you have damned MS with (very) faint praise.

To paint a picture: I’ve worked with Microsoft technologies almost exclusively for decades but recently I was forced to pick up some Node.js, Docker, and Linux tooling for a specific app. I can’t express in words what a giant step backwards it is from ASP.NET and Visual Studio. It’s like bashing things with open source rocks after working in a rocket manufacturing facility festooned with Kuka robots. It’s just… end-t…

I tried developing an MS .NET app and it's indescribably bad. The deployment story is non-existent, monitoring, tracing, alarming is barely there. You have to work with MS libraries that are on life-support with glaring bugs still present.

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#35

Post by jongjong »

I can't understand why people are still using proprietary software like Windows or OSX when superior free software exists. It's a testament to the hidden monopolizing forces which exists in our society.

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#36

Post by cyberax »

firesteelrain wrote: post #13
smaudet wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. Some things go deep, true. However most businesses don't use most of Microsoft products - even the ones that do, the usage of the more complicated products is far more minuscule than imagined by e.g. CFOs, etc. The real thing keeping many "in the fold" as it were would be authentication services. Which are overcomplicated and probably easier to manage without...

Right, it’s stuff like Active Directory and how everything’s tied together. Once you’re using that for auth, it’s really tough to back out without a lot of effort. We’ve looked into FreeIPA and similar options, but honestly, nothing really holds a candle to Active Directory yet.

AD is one of the few good MS projects. But you can use it with Macs and Linux just fine!

Just keep a couple of Windows servers running AD, and migrate everything else.

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#37

Post by gerdesj »

privatelypublic wrote: post #29
gerdesj wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world technology situations. There's a reason every AAA game engine depends on it in some way." I'm not interested in AAA games engines writing and nor is most of the world. If that is it, then you have damned MS with (very) faint praise.

I think you misunderstand- game engines are complex beasts and visual studio and/or .Net (in any of its incarnations) have the best debugging workflow I've seen. Typescript is also Microsoft. So is ONNX.

"I think you misunderstand- game engines are complex beasts and visual studio and/or .Net (in any of its incarnations) have the best debugging workflow I've seen."

I think you misunderstand: the market, ie the number of people who actually care about developing game engines, is tiny.

How many games developers do you know as a subset of the people you know of?

OP only managed to find a niche product area for MS to shine in and maintain traction - the moat thing. Nothing else apparently.

I for one would not miss MS one jot. I wasted so much time with things like autoexec.bat and config.sys back in the day. I got good at it - Novell gave me a T shirt on Cool Solutions for a boot floppy image that managed to try several popular NIC drivers (3c595, 3c905, 3c509, ne1000 and a few others) and get you to a network connection for imaging or whatever. Later on I get to ignore SFC /SCANNOW answers to searches. Do you remember WINS? What about the horror of time sync? The PDC emulator FSMO role is basically a NT domain controller. AD was a bodge from day one, tacked onto ...

Sorry, got carried away there.

Again, Typescript is cared about by whom and what on earth is ONNX?

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#38

Post by th0ma5 »

jiggawatts wrote: post #30
gerdesj wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world technology situations. There's a reason every AAA game engine depends on it in some way." I'm not interested in AAA games engines writing and nor is most of the world. If that is it, then you have damned MS with (very) faint praise.

To paint a picture: I’ve worked with Microsoft technologies almost exclusively for decades but recently I was forced to pick up some Node.js, Docker, and Linux tooling for a specific app. I can’t express in words what a giant step backwards it is from ASP.NET and Visual Studio. It’s like bashing things with open source rocks after working in a rocket manufacturing facility festooned with Kuka robots. It’s just… end-t…

I have a lot of respect for organizations that get a lot done with Microsoft technologies. I think your perspective could be thought of as the benefits of vertical integration and vendor lock in. These do help people get things done!

In the academic and open source world those things are fought against because you don't want to be at the mercy of the software developer in the context of certain rights.

I think for every negative you mention on either side a positive could be found on either side. And like many things on the net, you're not wrong but not necessarily talking about the same kinds of things.

My remaining complaints about Microsoft are the inflexibility of their solutions that command abstractions that just don't work for many organizations, and the general viral nature of software sales in general of which they are one of many with similar issues, however Oracle is the worst of course.

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#39

Post by jiggawatts »

cyberax wrote: post #34
jiggawatts wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To paint a picture: I’ve worked with Microsoft technologies almost exclusively for decades but recently I was forced to pick up some Node.js, Docker, and Linux tooling for a specific app. I can’t express in words what a giant step backwards it is from ASP.NET and Visual Studio. It’s like bashing things with open source rocks after working in a rocket manufacturing facility festooned with Kuka robots. It’s just… end-t…

I tried developing an MS .NET app and it's indescribably bad. The deployment story is non-existent, monitoring, tracing, alarming is barely there. You have to work with MS libraries that are on life-support with glaring bugs still present.

Unless you found yourself in some bizarre dark corner of a huge ecosystem of products, that's just not true.

Deployments are just "file copy". You don't even need Docker, because Windows isn't Linux, it has stable user-land APIs so apps are portable.

Not to mention that the dotnet sdk can create container images directly without even needing Docker installed: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/containers/sdk...

There are pre-built Linux and Windows ASP.NET base docker images: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/host-and-deplo...

Visual Studio's ASP.NET templates all have a literal checkbox for "Docker support" which is all it takes to have a hot-reload debugging/editing experience.

The dotnet runtime has very good Docker support, including automatic memory usage tuning to prevent it getting killed by Kubernetes or whatever.

The underlying "App Host" below ASP.NET has fantastic support for layered configuration, which by default supports environment variables, command line parameters, named environment configuration files, and "user secrets" in IDEs. All of it is strongly typed and supports runtime refresh instead of Linux style "restart the process and interrupt user file uploads to get a new config". There's plugins for Key Vault, AWS KMS, App Configuration, feature flags, and on-and-on.

Open Telemetry is fully supported and now the default: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/diagnostics/ob...

Everything in ASP.NET uses the standard built-in ILogger interface, so wiring up any kind of audit logging or custom observability is a piece of cake: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.exten...

The really fancy logging uses the high-performance ActivitySource APIs, which are used for lower-level tracing of dependencies and the like. Again, these are standardised throughout not just Microsoft libraries but most third-party packages too: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.diagnost...

Aspire.NET can orchestrate multiple cloud emulators, multiple apps, Node.js front-end apps, and wire up the whole thing with Open Telemetry and a free local trace viewer (with span support) with zero config: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/aspire/fundamentals...

Windows GUI App deployments use standardised installer packages (MSI) that have simple devops pipeline tooling: https://github.com/wixtoolset Now... name the one package format that you can use to distribute client apps to all Linux distros!

When you run "dotnet build", the result is built, unlike Node.js where you end up with 150K tiny little files that need to be rebuilt again "in production" because oh-my-god it's a scripting language with C code blended in randomly, so it doesn't... actually... build. I just had the fun of trying to figure out why PM2 doesn't like musl or running under non-root user accounts, why starting a Node.js app takes frigging minutes whereas ASP.NET starts in milliseconds, and on and on.

Re: Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

#40

Post by firesteelrain »

mnadkvlb wrote: post #26
AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AD and Domain Servers are like a cancer that will grow metastases around your org, costing user and client cals all over the place, even for every desk phone if you're not careful. The only winning move is never to play their game in the first place.

genuinely interested, what are the alternatives ? i know ping/forgerock and some old ibm stuff. what is state of the art today that compares to ActiveDirectory (not talking azureAd - or whatever they call it these days) ?

Samba4 is the closest you can get. It is not as nice as ActiveDirectory.
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