Your experience of Microsoft's Developer Community

[barnum1]

Hi,

shout out to Visual Studio users who report problems to Microsoft's Developer Community.
Is it just me, or are others experiencing an appalling lack of support?
(And that Visual Studio has become extremely buggy last years?)

One thing is that Microsoft very quickly gets back to the user to ask him to reproduce the bug with some tool.
(This often does not work because bugs are often intermittent.)
I experience that Microsoft puts the responsibility on the (paying!) customer to find out what has gone wrong.

One other thing is that they do not reply to questions in comments.
E.g. I have reported an issue that's been under consideration for months.
I have asked about any progress in comments, but I haven't got any reply.

Ok, sorry for the rant, but I cannot continue a product that is so buggy and with so poor support.

 

[Skydiver]

The problem is that in the past, Microsoft used to collect all kinds of telemetry about software crashes and issues. This let them identify trends in problems and put priority on fixing those. Additionally, the telemetry would often provide the callstack, as well as enough information about the steps to reproduce the problem. When I used to work for the Evil Empire, my teammates and I would get those logs from the testers and/or product support teams when they've identified a trending issue, or when product support has had to escalate a ticket up to engineering. (No I wasn't working for DevDiv, but DevDiv was doing the same thing my product group was doing.) People complained that MS was spying on them because of the telemetry.

So MS cut back on the telemetry, as well as, required opt-in. Most people do not opt-in. So now MS has to effectively rely on users to report and reproduce the problem. The much smaller test resources that MS has compared to the past also doesn't help -- less time to try to reproduce the problem in house. The downside of this reactive approach is that basically each new report is like starting from scratch, and having to work with the user to get the needed information.

In my experience, VS 2019 and up have been less buggy than past versions. Give VS2005 or VS2008 a spin sometime. The only complaints I've seen about the newer builds of VS have been trying to use VS to develop WinForms using .NET Core instead of .NET Framework. Considering that WinForms was supposed to die, but was rescued, it's amazing that it even works.

 

[barnum1]

Thanks for your reply.

Telemetry may be useful, but I feel lke Microsoft doesn't even try to reproduce the reported issues.

And the communication is awful.

It may very well be that Microsoft has cut down on testing. I have the notion that their users are their beta testers.

 

[Skydiver]

I have the notion that their users are their beta testers.

I feel the same way. Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint Online, and Power Apps make me want to throw my computer out the window... My co-worker thinks we are actual alpha (not beta) testers.

 

[barnum1]

I agree, alpha testers is true.

 

[cjard]

trying to use VS to develop WinForms using .NET Core

You're a braver person than I..

I feel lke Microsoft doesn't even try to reproduce the reported issue

I reported an issue (when typing tags into a Razor page using multiple cursors, the autocomplete of the closing tag on the red cursor causes all the other blue cursors to disappear which does limit the usefulness of multi cursor editing somewhat), and included a workaround (type the closing tag first).

They wrote back telling me to try typing the closing tag first; if you feel like they don't try to reproduce, I feel like they don't even read the bug reports in the first place!


Eventually they said they'd look at it, then the stale bot closed the issue for lack of interest - amusing

 

[barnum1]

Yes, I have given up Microsoft Developer Community. No help to get there.