Hate is such a strong word.

Author: Girish Bajaj

Theres a place in my heart, and I know that it is HATE.

For the past week, Ive been struggling with a error in ALL my asp.net applications. I dont remember the error, but the result is that my asp worker process quits preemtively. So i debug this problem for days and find out that an IE security patch is the cause of the problem. Microsoft in their infinite brilliant glory didnt think that a IE patch would cause a server side development box to crash all the time.

Well, Ive gone thru hell and back. There are tons of ppl out there whose apps are failing because Microsoft decided to replace a shared DLL which was being used by ASP.NET and IE and never thought of testing it.

If you go on the net, there are 20 different ways to solve this problem... which includes reinstalling IIS, .NET framework and VS.NET 2003. Suffice to say that it took me 3 days to go thru all the 20 different ways of fixing the error. NONE of them worked. Surprised? Please dont be.

Finally I decided to call up MS support. Guess what - did it HELP? NO. You know, MS support is just a whole load of shit. I called one person and at the end of 5 hrs... YES 5 freaking HOURS... i had 3 micorosft experts on the phone with me trying to debug the problem. Once what was a functional computer (Except for asp.net) turned into a useless BOX which would not load any application and gave me 10 different errors on boot. They screwed up my computer even more than it already was!!

At the end of the 8th hour - one of the guys says. Girish I have some bad news. I knew it was coming. I told him bye and shut the phone.

For the past 2 days, Ive been reinstalling my computer and getting everything back to where it was.

IM NOT HAPPY with MS right now.

But i know it will pass... and eventually I'll become the same old puppy dog running around its giant master.

Microsoft, what have you done to me?! I hate you. But I still cant live without you.