Is it just me, or is upgrading to Win2k3 more painful than it has to be?
In the latest of a series of moves that appear to be designed to get as many decision-makers as possible to want to find an alternative to MS products, we've been moving a lot of our websites from Win2k Server to Win2k3 Servers. The nicest thing I can say is that the move sucked less than "Memoirs of Geisha." Only most of our pages and some of our apps broke. It seems like backwards compatibility is no longer a concern, and those of us that have to use these server packages are the ones that suffer. Because of this, we've hesititated on .NET 2.0 and SQL 2k5, as well as Commerce Server 2003. There is a good chance that we will eventually use CS2003 (but only because we have to), but there is a zero percent chance of us using CS2006, should it arrive.
I wonder whether I'm just getting jaded by aggressive, destructive business practices now that I'm in a more senior role or whether Microsoft products have always been this developer-unfriendly and I was just too low-level to notice (I suspect it's the former). Our company has spent, I think, 600 hours in the past few months exclusively on moving 2 websites to Windows 2003 Server. Six-hundred hours. That time would have been better spent watching "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" 296 times (I'm including an extra 8 hours for beer runs and discussions of Michelle Yeoh's Awesomeness).