Saturday, June 13, 2009

Microsoft releases May 2009 AJAX Control Tookit -- and wastes everyone's time

So I googled for an HTML editor to see what's out there and I found out that Microsoft released an updated AJAX Control Toolkit that includes an HTMLEditor. Sounds like just what I needed! I could go for FCKEditor which I've used before but an HTML Editor supported by Microsoft sounds pretty good, right? Wrong!

As I was on my way to downloading the new release, the first few comments I saw were
Poor because have bugs :( Please fix this bug for next release

dated just today, Sunday June 14th.

Here's some more complaints:
Don't you people test this stuff. I am so sick of debugging your code. My managers look at the little samples expecting it to do that and doesn't realize it don't quite work like the sample in a real world application. Again, I am soooooo sick of spending hours in the forum and google to find some OFF THE WALL FIX to make it work in a real world situation. Test your code...I do.

Release build will crash VS 2008...

How about an installer? How about some instructions on upgrading from prior versions? There are a lot of nuts and bolts to this stuff and a readme that says, "just copy and go" just AIN'T ENOUGH! My system is almost completely screwed to the wall, following installation "instructions" like that.


Following the entire slew of complaints was this post:
We posted a minor update to the AJAX Control Toolkit to address several of the issues described below including the issue concerning performing a build in Release mode.


Needless to say, it sounds like I should hold off on the ASP.NET Ajax update until Microsoft gets their act together on this package. Who the hell wants to spend hours debugging Microsoft's code and have nothing to show for it? I sure don't!

Here's the Codeplex link for more details:
AJAX Control Toolkit May 2009 Release Reviews

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