Response Chain
Best and Worst Developer Support
A sampling of letters from the developer community.
If you're a top-level Microsoft partner with MSDN membership, the support you get from Microsoft is amazing, immediate, open and very detailed. It's also expensive. For developers that are not top-level partners but have MSDN membership, the support is excellent, detailed and extremely expensive. For developers that are not partners and are not MSDN members, Microsoft support is limited. However, even then, tons of support is readily available. There are Microsoft-supported forums, independent forums, technical blogs and developer Web sites galore. In general, the development community available through these resources is nothing short of awesome.
The absolute worst developer support experience comes from Adobe. Try finding programming support for the object model for their LiveCycle forms designer. What little information you can find is useless for anything beyond copying one of their example forms. For building your own, you could be more cost effective developing from scratch using .NET, or almost any other platform.
As for the absolute best developer support, don't even get me started on Borland in the good old days. I still remember Zack Urlocker and David Intersimone bringing the entire source code for the first release of Delphi into a room full of developers and putting it on the local network for us to peruse. By the way, nearly all of Delphi at that time -- at least 90 percent, by my rough estimate -- was written in Delphi. Developer support, from Philly down, was fundamental to Borland and they were the best there was.
Dave Dyer, Ph.D.
Consultant
Houston, Texas