Windows 8 is Costing You Money

Your Money is Being Sucked Down a Hole

I have a client that I have designed a desktop app for.  It's a Winforms app designed in Visual Studio 2010 and uses the barely functional DataGridView object to edit data.  It's been working forever in Windows XP, Vista, and 7.  Though as stated, the DataGridView gives constant headaches.  Now the boss has upgraded his tablet to Win 8 and the app has stopped functioning once again, crashing while trying to automatically calculate column widths during a paint event.

This function of the DataGridView has been spotty at best even on the other versions of Windows, and I have had to code around problems with it before.  Basically, the thing is just a nightmare to configure and use. I constantly find myself writing 200 lines of code to get the damn thing to stop crashing, when in my humble opinion, the damned thing ought to just work out of the box.  Now, I can see there might be problems if I were trying to shoehorn grids into grids, or streaming media into 20,000 rows of data... but really I am doing nothing out of the ordinary here.

Now I have to stop ongoing development, and retrofit this whole app (at the client's expense) to an operating system that - say it with me - ought to just work out of the box!

Meanwhile the client is wondering if I am really all that sharp, because Microsoft muffed up their OS with backward compatibility problems.  Thanks, Microsoft!
...

---

Bryan Valencia is a contributing editor and founder of Visual Studio Journey.  He owns and operates Software Services, a web design and hosting company in Manteca, California.