| It was 7 years from XP to Vista - and 9 years to Windows 7. Now it has just been 5 years since Windows 7 and apparently it's already completely outdated. It's only 2 years since Windows 8.0, and it's already out! If this is the way Microsoft is going, then it's a huge change for anybody dealing with enterprise. I used to be able to develop on the same system using the same techs as my customers - now I may sit on Windows 8.1, but I can't use any new shiny features as my customers are still on Windows 7. Many of them just upgraded. Sure, this may be the way others are doing it. It may be the new normal. But I still think Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot big time regarding anything related to businesses. In this case I'm actively researching an OCR solution. Tesseract is annoying compared to a nicely integrated .NET solution. But I'm not able to choose the solution from Microsoft. It will be at least 5 years until our customers have upgraded again, and by then - well, we're probably not going to switch OCR tech. Instead we will be relying on third parties, open source projects - things that are not tied as much to Microsoft or the .NET ecosystem. I didn't mind being tightly tied to MS tech, I often preferred it as it was easier and worked great - but in this case I don't even have a choice. Basically I just wish Microsoft would stay Microsoft instead of trying to be Apple. --
And regarding following MSDN. I develop WPF/C#, and I don't follow anything at all. I don't care about hype or news. I care about solid techs that are mature and sticking around for a long time. Most of the stuff being announced will significantly change or be cancelled anyway. When a product has stuck around for 3 versions and is having a pretty good following, then I might be interested. If my customers are actually able to run it of course. |
Up until this post you didn't have it (the Microsoft OCR library) anywhere. You're still free as ever to develop using all the non-RT technologies (Windows Forms, WPF, Silverlight, WF, WCF and so on). All of it's officially supported.
And all said and done, Microsoft is doing no more or less than any other tech company. They release new stuff. And sometimes a new release is constrained in some way, like when an iPhone app is released by some startup that doesn't bother with an Android or Windows Phone equivalent. They may come eventually, or not...