Thanks MSDN Team!
One of the best things about Microsoft is that despite it's middling management, it really does have a lot of great people there. After MiniMicrosoft linked to my Visual Studio rant, I was contacted by some people who helped me track down the problem, and asked for some constructive advice on how to improve the documentation. This wasn't just a PR stunt... this was people who really want to improve the product.
I've known a few documentation writers at Microsoft, and bumped into one this weekend. I've been honestly impressed by almost all of them... I honestly don't even know why they stay at their jobs (and some of them haven't). The 'user-education' teams at MS are horribly understaffed, and typically spending a huge amount of time dealing with ridiculous busy work (updating old documentation to new file formats, dealing with buggy, unfinished new tools, etc). Like much of the rest of Microsoft, I think the documentation teams are suffering from middle management that is more interested in building empires and getting a raise than bulding good documentation.
So what was the problem that caused MSDN to crash for me? Embarasingly, I had acquires some malware. I honestly have no idea how I managed to pick up this particular evilness. I'm generally careful about what I install, and believe it or not.. I have never had a virus infection on any of my machines. I know when this hit me, because I noticed something using CPU on my machine and had killed that process and run Windows Defender which had supposedly found and removed the infection. What I found most interesting was that Microsoft actually has 2 malware clean-up tools! Apparently there is also something called Windows Live Safety Center. I don't get what the difference is... It appears that Windows Live Safety Center actually removed whatever it was that had infected my machine. phew. Much as part of me wants to clean my machine, it is embarasing that I feel the need to reinstall the OS on a machine I've only had for 3-4 months. I'll just keep praying for some benevolent deity to drop a lovely 2nd-generation intel Mac laptop... one that won't roast my lap. I still think that a Mac laptop with good PC virtualization would be my ideal platform.
I've known a few documentation writers at Microsoft, and bumped into one this weekend. I've been honestly impressed by almost all of them... I honestly don't even know why they stay at their jobs (and some of them haven't). The 'user-education' teams at MS are horribly understaffed, and typically spending a huge amount of time dealing with ridiculous busy work (updating old documentation to new file formats, dealing with buggy, unfinished new tools, etc). Like much of the rest of Microsoft, I think the documentation teams are suffering from middle management that is more interested in building empires and getting a raise than bulding good documentation.
So what was the problem that caused MSDN to crash for me? Embarasingly, I had acquires some malware. I honestly have no idea how I managed to pick up this particular evilness. I'm generally careful about what I install, and believe it or not.. I have never had a virus infection on any of my machines. I know when this hit me, because I noticed something using CPU on my machine and had killed that process and run Windows Defender which had supposedly found and removed the infection. What I found most interesting was that Microsoft actually has 2 malware clean-up tools! Apparently there is also something called Windows Live Safety Center. I don't get what the difference is... It appears that Windows Live Safety Center actually removed whatever it was that had infected my machine. phew. Much as part of me wants to clean my machine, it is embarasing that I feel the need to reinstall the OS on a machine I've only had for 3-4 months. I'll just keep praying for some benevolent deity to drop a lovely 2nd-generation intel Mac laptop... one that won't roast my lap. I still think that a Mac laptop with good PC virtualization would be my ideal platform.
posted by derek at 10:08 AM
3 Comments:
YOU shouldn't be embarassed. microsoft should be. for building software that gets infected even when being handled by intelligent people.
...and to add insult to injury, demand money (live care) to remove the malware that got into the system through errors in IE or other security holes...
...ok, just looked. live sec center is free at the moment. but i read about a future price tag of >50$ / year
Following tries to explain the diff between Defender and Live services but I am still at loss. http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/about/productcomparisons.mspx
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