by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2011/05/09 14:01 +00:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2011/05/09/10162156.aspx
Back in the of July last year I wrote They're going the wrong way, talking about a bug in IDN support that was a regression in SharePoint 2010.
When one digs a little deeper, it turns out that this was due to it picking up a dependency on WCF (Windows Communication Foundation), which didn't support IDN,
And the buck stopped there.
For public disclosure purposes, at least.
I mean, at the level where customers ask questions about
Why'dΒ you break my πΊπππ, Microsoft?
it is easy to consume the fact that SharePoint (a very high profile product) took a dependency of WCF (another very high profile product) which didn't support IDN.
But the secret truth is that WCF owes just about everything in its feature set to the strengths of the various components that it facilitates the communication between.
Unfortunately for WCF in this case, it also owes to those components its weaknesses.
And this was one of them.
But the pieces of managed code like System.Uri that it depends on (and to whom much of the eventual trouble can be attributed to) are really too low level to take the blame. So the buck had to stop before that.
You know, for the public.
The conversation after that isn't about PR or buck passing, it is about fixing the problem and pushing the people blocking solutions to get them on the right track.
Okay, maybe there is a little buck passing involved, but it is generally more solution oriented.
it does set up a lot of expectations from customers for the next version, obviously. And the blocking teams in the next version, who will be very much on the hook if they repeat the mistakes of their predecessors.
But those are issues that are a few pay grades above me.
Not the trying to get it fixed part, but the deciding the overall message once we're done, you know?
in the end, I'll just be the who talks about the cool new situation (or if it all goes to πΊπππ again, the publicly consumable villain of the situation next time around - though if the dice roll brings up WCF again I might get a little more detailed since I feel like they've done their time!)....