[stephengillie]

I'm hardly your target audience, but I just left a .NET shop. Devs had trouble using TFS and all of the new tools (like New Relic) because the majority of their web app was written in VB. Due to bad design decisions, like circular DLLs, the application won't even compile properly in TFS. They're in the middle of replacing it with a ground-up .NET 4 rewrite.

And architecture choices, like creating a home-grown module for URL rewrites - and then later, when the URL Rewrite module was released with IIS8, choosing to continue using the home-grown module instead of the MS official module.

The same shop had a data import application, to ingest and ETL data from hundreds of sources. Likewise, they were heavily hamstrung in that most of the ETL was written in the depreciated DTS format, not something any modern SSIS can work with.

So...I guess my only answer is one you probably aren't really interested in - what's held back devs in my space has been old, depreciated code that nobody makes tools for anymore.

[brendanp]

I'm interested in everything!

In this case, what delayed updating the web app to a more modern architecture? Company culture? Lack of resources?

It does seem like pipelines need not just to be maintained, but also continuously improved, in order to avoid being left behind by the rest of the tool ecosystem.

[stephengillie]

Company culture was a huge part of it - lack of owner interest, previous architect apathy, intense micromanagement, ticket/maintenance focus encouraged small targeted fixes instead of necessary rewrites, circular DLLs heavily complicated development.

And brain drain - not many developers (or engineers or anyone else) willingly stay in environments like this. So the people who have spent years learning the application and how to maintain it find other work, and are replaced by people who have to analyze the system anew.

---

A little more targeted:

- TFS 2013 has AD integration, but it works in the dumbest way possible - you can't just add someone to an AD security group and they get TFS permissions, nope you have to go into TFS and find their AD account and add them.

- It's difficult to debug websites on IE8 because it doesn't have modern debugging tools. Would it be possible at all to have a browser release with the IE8 engine and the IE11 debugging tools? (I'm currently working at a job with an IE8 dependency on a web app, so I understand why it's still around.)

- Sharepoint Online is a decent document repository, and TFS is a decent document repository - both have their advantages and disadvantages. But they in no way integrate. This caused major issues when I was providing Ops documentation from a Sharepoint Online site, trying to work with Devs putting their documentation in our local TFS. (Working with either in Jira is beyond painful)

---

Unrelated, I wish WDS and WSUS were more integrated - when I push an image from WDS, I want it to have all security patches slipstreamed in from WSUS. Instead, I deploy an image with one and use the other to patch it.