The other thread was getting a little long so I've started my own.
I, too, have experienced unhandled exceptions, mainly with the beta and was never able to repeat the steps that resulted in them.
I am running Windows XP on a Pentium III with 512K RAM and many, many background programs. I've got instant messenging, fax and phone answering programs, weather updating, calendar programs, one-touch scanning, etc. I have programs hang on a regular basis, Microsoft Word among them. I click on those Microsoft messages: "your program has shut down and we'd like to collect data and ship it to our technical dept." regularly. If I did a clean install of XP and didn't load all those extra background programs I bet 99% of my problems wouldn't happen.
Any software that ships to the general marketplace is going to have a shakedown period when it is run on machines combining permutations of hardware, software, drivers, memory and spilled coffee in the keyboard that no developer can anticipate, much less mitigate.
Every time Microsoft ships a new windows, the consulting pundits at Gartner, Meta and Giga warn early adopters to wait beyond version 1.0.
But, fortunately, many people want to gain in productivity what the new features provide them even at the expense of some technical problems in the early going.
Nobody should expect to port a mission critical application to Version 5 the day it ships and run flawlessly. It doesn't happen with any software released in a non-controlled environment and software releases often fail in a controlled environment (i.e, 1000 machines where you know the configuration up-front in some corporate office).
I do online banking with a large international bank with a red umbrella protecting its image. For months, they've been promoting a new improved online banking experience. Two weeks ago I tried to log on (browser based client system) and the new interface was there - unannounced. It was a colossal failure. I could not login for 2 days 99% per cent of the time and when I could I could not get a correct page to display (my financial data, no less!). On the third day, I logged in and the old interface was restored. In the corner of the screen was a brief apology because the bank understood that "some customers experienced some problems recently but now everything was ok"! No mention of the failed upgrade, but the "coming soon" promos were back.
Spend your time figuring out how to use the new features of Version 5 in your work and plan a staged roll-out of your upgraded work. By the time you've got your new release of your own applications planned and coded and ready for your own release, these bugs will be a dim memory.
I, too, have experienced unhandled exceptions, mainly with the beta and was never able to repeat the steps that resulted in them.
I am running Windows XP on a Pentium III with 512K RAM and many, many background programs. I've got instant messenging, fax and phone answering programs, weather updating, calendar programs, one-touch scanning, etc. I have programs hang on a regular basis, Microsoft Word among them. I click on those Microsoft messages: "your program has shut down and we'd like to collect data and ship it to our technical dept." regularly. If I did a clean install of XP and didn't load all those extra background programs I bet 99% of my problems wouldn't happen.
Any software that ships to the general marketplace is going to have a shakedown period when it is run on machines combining permutations of hardware, software, drivers, memory and spilled coffee in the keyboard that no developer can anticipate, much less mitigate.
Every time Microsoft ships a new windows, the consulting pundits at Gartner, Meta and Giga warn early adopters to wait beyond version 1.0.
But, fortunately, many people want to gain in productivity what the new features provide them even at the expense of some technical problems in the early going.
Nobody should expect to port a mission critical application to Version 5 the day it ships and run flawlessly. It doesn't happen with any software released in a non-controlled environment and software releases often fail in a controlled environment (i.e, 1000 machines where you know the configuration up-front in some corporate office).
I do online banking with a large international bank with a red umbrella protecting its image. For months, they've been promoting a new improved online banking experience. Two weeks ago I tried to log on (browser based client system) and the new interface was there - unannounced. It was a colossal failure. I could not login for 2 days 99% per cent of the time and when I could I could not get a correct page to display (my financial data, no less!). On the third day, I logged in and the old interface was restored. In the corner of the screen was a brief apology because the bank understood that "some customers experienced some problems recently but now everything was ok"! No mention of the failed upgrade, but the "coming soon" promos were back.
Spend your time figuring out how to use the new features of Version 5 in your work and plan a staged roll-out of your upgraded work. By the time you've got your new release of your own applications planned and coded and ready for your own release, these bugs will be a dim memory.
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