MS Developer Support
Given some of the things that have been said by Roy and Alex, I wanted to chime in regarding a very recent development support experience. I was having a problem with debugging a set of VB6 components running under COM+ on Windows 2003. I had searched with google. I searched the MS knowledge base. I searched newsgroups and I never found anything that was helpful. I finally broke down and called MS Developer Support at the begining of December. It ended up that the problem was a bug that had been discovered in September, 2003. I was the second person to report the bug. While MS did not have a full fix for the comsvcs.dll file at that time, the person I worked with (Lalitha Gomathinayagam) was able to provide me a work-around. While working through this, she also assisted me with a similar problem in debugging those objects within Terminal Server on Windows 2000. FYI, we never could get it to work, but she was helpful and provided me with continual assistance way beyond what I would have considered as necessary. The bottom line is that she went out of the way to help and I fully appreciate it.
This is interesting to me because I have often tried to do some development on Linux. Each time I get into some problem, I find no one in the Linux community is able to help. Do I think that the Linux development community is somehow bad? No, they are not. They are just no intune with what developers need. They are two busy building the platform to talk with the folks trying to build solutions on their platform. MS seems to have it closer to right in my book.
Wally