One Job to Do

My PC will confound me several times a day, every day. It’s not just me, either.

Today I had trouble installing .NET 3.0. Recently I’ve also had problems with Explorer freezing, the Outlook notify icon stays visible even when I have no unread email, and occasionally double-clicking a file only opens the application and not the file. Grrr.

These are all things that should just work (though I hear not even Apple are doing so well in this area recently…). These are tools, appliances, they have one job to do and I expect them to do it. SVN was recently a problem for me. The settings for Tortoise SVN to integrate with Araxis Merge didn’t seem to be giving the correct results, and only after many hours of poring over various files and reading various TSVN webpages did I find that it was just confusing filenames causing my problems, and that everything was working perfectly.

I’ve installed and almost as quickly uninstalled Resharper, too. I’m really disappointed about this, but the 20-minute performance hit opening one of my solutions (before I got bored and killed the process) was too much to bear for the additional refactoring tools. I was looking forward to catching up to where I was 4 years ago on Eclipse, too. Turns out I’m not the only one.

These often aren’t actually problems with the tools as much as the environment they’re in. Other people say it works on their machine.

So this has turned into a rant, and I’m not the only one who’s been through it I’m sure. I’m at a point where I’d like to re-install Windows, but seriously – that’s a lot of work. I get upset too easily.  The really worrying thing is that there are probably lots of people out there thinking the same thing about software I’ve written…