Witheringtree » Microsoft

96336 Minutes

David Freerksen — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 02:02:01 +0000

Only 66 more days before Entourage automatically checks for more email…

Silverlight Fail (Again)

David Freerksen — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 02:14:18 +0000

About 7 months ago wrote about a Silverlight fail. I have another one for you:

What’s funny about this error message is I never installed Siverlight. How can it expire if it’s not installed? By the way, Silverlight is a FREE plugin. How does it expire to begin with?

I did a little bit of online research, and apparently it goes deeper than this. I clicked on ‘No’ when I saw the message so I can’t vouch for this. But the link that is in the error message, you can’t copy that link. So you have to type it in the address bar of the browser manually. Once you get to the page, you get the same error message and can’t update Silverlight. You have to go to the Silverlight page instead of the Silverlight update page.

So good job, Microsoft. Not doing so good when it comes to contending with Flash.

1114 Minutes

David Freerksen — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 17:03:57 +0000

Entourage has only 18 hours 56 minutes until the next scheduled check for new emails!

Silverlight Fail

David Freerksen — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 15:34:26 +0000

Before Microsoft released Silverlight, it was dubbed the “Flash Killer.” We all know that never even came close to happening. Most of the sites that switched over to Silverlight, eventually switched back to Flash.

If Microsoft wants people to take Silverlight seriously, they need to pay attention to the small details in order to draw people over. Case in point:

At work on Friday I was downloading all kinds of software so I cold make some custom SharePoint webparts. I ended up downloading close to 2Gb worth of software only to find out in the end that I needed to be on Windows Server 2003 or better to instal what I needed. So that was a little irritating but beside the point.

When I went to the SharePoint section on the Microsoft site I saw something strange. The SharePoint site was using Silverlight and had to load in the Silverlight file. It had a percent that was being loaded. That number was 4294967295%. Of course I laughed. I even took a screenshot of it.

Then I thought maybe the developer messed up and that was displaying the size of the file in bytes. But then that would mean that each of the files was about 400Mb. I’m also not sure why the navigation bar and the content area are both displaying the same number either.

Visual Studio Express Download Fail

David Freerksen — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 15:33:10 +0000

At work we use SharePoint for our site. Not by my choice though. I think it’s a bloated program that barely works the way it is supposed to. Well, today I decided to download Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 so that I could create webparts. Creating webparts involves me creating a .dll file and a couple other files that are basically XML formatted.

Since I can’t install Visual Studio on the Mac, I jumped over to my PC to download and install it. I got on the Microsoft site and clicked on the link to download the Express version. Broken link. Fine, I’ll download the trial. It’s good for 30 days and I won’t be using it for any more time that that. I clicked on the link to download it. Broken. I tried for 10 minutes to find a link that worked. All of them were broken links. I can’t download Visual Studio 2008 anywhere on the Microsoft site!

So I got irritated and jumped back over to my Mac. I decided to give it a shot on the Mac site just for fun. The exact same link that I clicked on to download it when I was on the PC I got a 404 error. On the Mac side, the download went through. It’s downloading on the Mac right now.

Then I thought that maybe in the time that I went from the PC to the Mac the link came back up. So I jumped back over to the PC to try to download it. The links are broken still. Apparently the only way I can download Visual Studio is if I am on a Mac.

Congratulations, Microsoft on a site well built.