Questions tagged [microsoft]

Microsoft is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington that develops, manufactures, licenses and supports a wide range of products and services related to computing. Microsoft is known for producing the Windows Operating System, Microsoft Office suite, Xbox gaming system among other product lines.

Microsoft is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington that develops, manufactures, licenses and supports a wide range of products and services related to computing. Microsoft is known for producing the Windows Operating System, Microsoft Office suite, Xbox gaming system among other product lines.

Microsoft is often abbreviated MS.

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Why does Microsoft have such a bad reputation with the people involved in open source?

Are there any particular incidents which are responsible for the low reputation Microsoft (and Bill Gates) has in the eyes of the open source community? Microsoft is clearly not the only proprietary company. Companies like Apple have done a lot…
Pulkit Sinha
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Can a developer get a discount for Microsoft products?

If I would start to focus on the .NET platform and be self-employed, then I probably would like to have some Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2010 licenses just for the development environment and for testing, and then a few licenses…
Jonas
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WPF vs. WinForms - a Delphi programmer's perspective?

I have read most of the major threads on WPF vs. WinForms and I find myself stuck in the unfortunate ambivalence you can fall into when deciding between the tried and true previous tech (Winforms), and it's successor (WPF). I am a veteran Delphi…
Robert Oschler
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Why do so few large websites run a Microsoft stack?

Off the top of my head, I can think of a handful of large sites which utilize the Microsoft stack Microsoft.com Dell MySpace PlentyOfFish StackOverflow Hotmail, Bing, WindowsLive However, based on observation, nearly all of the top 500 sites seem…
realworldcoder
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What does this statement about C# and Java being half of a language mean?

In the article: Why POCO, there is this sentence: Maciej Sobczak puts it well: “I just don’t like when somebody gives me half of the language and tells me that it’s for my own protection”. I don't understand what he means, even though C# is owned…
123iamking
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Qt's future in the light of Nokia-Microsoft partnership

In case you missed it, a lot has happened in the last two day that could potentially impact the Qt framework, for the worse. :-( It will impact the mobile sector in several and probably not currently acknowledged ways, for sure. It started yesterday…
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Microsoft Public License vs MIT?

I'm working with a new plugin (flexbox), and I ran into the MS-PL license, which I had not run into before. In the past, I've used mainly MIT and Apache licensed projects, so I have no idea what the main differences are with this one. Here's a link…
streetlight
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INI files or Registry or personal files?

I want to save the configuration of my project which includes Screen size Screen position Folder paths Users settings and so on. The standard places where you can save these are configuration values are: Registry INI files Personal files (like…
Shirish11
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What does an MSDN subscription offer?

I'm curious because I notice that the Ultimate subscription costs $12,000... for one year (after that, it's $3,800 to renew). Looking at the subscription chart, you do get quite a bit of software that is normally expensive by itself. Is the package…
Corey
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What is the term for IntelliSense in a non-Microsoft world?

When talking about IDE software or about what a programming language allows you to do or not at the source level, I often use the word IntelliSense, which has a precise meaning in the Microsoft world, but is inappropriate when talking to people who…
Arseni Mourzenko
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Does Microsoft really offer "support"?

One of the arguments against using Open Source is that there is no "support". However, do big vendors (e.g. Microsoft) really offer "support" of any kind? I'm sure there is some sort of 4-figure-per-hour "paid support" option out there, but is…
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What made BASIC profitable?

In the 1970s, a man called Bill Gates developed an interpreter for BASIC: the Altair BASIC. Per my understanding, he was able to persuade the guy in charge of a microcomputer company to include the interpreter program on every microcomputer he sold,…
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Why did Microsoft abandon IronRuby and IronPython?

Several years ago, Microsoft announced that Ruby and Python were coming to .net. The projects were called IronRuby and IronPython, respectively. Microsoft said that the projects would be built on top of the .net DLR. WIKIpedia indicates that for…
Vivian River
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Why does Microsoft charge a fortune for its developer tools?

Microsoft charges thousands of dollars for most versions of Visual Studio. Compare this with companies like Apple and Google and with organizations like GNU and Eclipse that give away developer tools for free, it makes me wonder where the difference…
Kyle Cronin
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How long was Microsoft working on .NET before they released it?

With the whole CLI, CTS, CLS, etc., not only did they release a powerful platform/infrastructure, but they released all the specs that describe it etc. It supports potentially infinite myriad languages, platforms, etc. This seems like an insane…
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