Skip to main content

Why pay for MS hotfixes?

I happened to go through Chaz blog yesterday night. One of the post which made me think is "Why pay for MS hotfixes?".

Extract from chaz blog entry:

Okay, I don't want this to be an MS bashing session. But I ran into a problem where I believe a hotfix will resolve a problem I am having in a .Net 1.1 application. The problem is around a bug in certain kinds of serialization/deserialization in the .Net 1.1 framework SP1. The MS Knowledge Base article says there is a hotfix, but I have to go through support to obtain it. If MS knows there is a bug in the .Net framework and has a hotfix, then why do I have to pay $99 for e-mail support to obtain the fix?Is there a legitimate reason? Again I am not looking to bash Microsoft.

I feel he has a real valid point. May be I am missing something! So I am hoping to hear some (valid) response from Microsoft ppl on this.
Labels:

Comments

Tejas said…
Interesting, I will see what Microsoftie's have to say about this.
10:27 AM, May 04, 2006
Anonymous said…
You call local support, but you dont have to pay for getting a hotfix. A hotfix usually is a fix that has not been thru a full QA cycle and so is not available publicly. All hotfixs are free AFAIK.
10:33 AM, May 04, 2006
Unknown said…
I believe hotfixes were available on MS Support site before so what changed suddenly in terms of testing the hotfixes? i have faced this issue too once before. My laptop has 2 GB and trying to hibernate gives and API errors. Digging deep, I found out that there is a hotfix, but the kb instead of providing the download asked to get it from support. This is most unusual.
11:09 AM, May 04, 2006
Anonymous said…
The hotfixes released by MS are in bulletins and released every IInd tuesday of every month. These hotfixes are free and MS provide tools(MBSA, WUS, SUS etc.) to detect and install them. There are many other vendors who provide the automated enterprise solutions to scan and deploy these hotfixes. I am working on one such tool to deploy these patches.

Refer www.patchquest.com for more details. Also checkout http://secure.patchquest.com for the vulnerability database.

Nilam
11:35 AM, May 04, 2006
Anonymous said…
Just to be clear... The hotfix may be free of charge, but I would have to pay $99 up front to contact support via e-mail. According to the KB article and confirmed by an MSDN concierge, the only way to obtain this hotfix is through support. This isn't a general release hotfix. It is only for the specific issue noted in the KB.
8:54 PM, May 04, 2006
Anonymous said…
The $99 is refunded when they confirm that your problem is legitimate.
3:37 AM, May 05, 2006
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

[Non Tech] Want to know the recipe for Omelette :)

Fed up with Bread - Jam and Curd Rice, today i wanted to eat Omelette. Interesting part is I wanted to cook it myself :) So in the first picture you see all the items which are needed for preparing an Omelette. When I had a closer look at the eggs I see that almost all the eggs are broken. But believe me when I bought it couple of days back it was in perfect condition! I was wondering whether the eggs have become rotten or pretty old to consume! I tried taking an egg and break it but couldn't break it at all :) Since I have kept in the freezer all the eggs have frozen and looked like a iron ball :) After trying for few minutes of trying i removed the shell of the egg and then kept that iron ball :) into a bowl and placed it within Oven. I heated it for 1 minute and checked. It melted only to a limit. So i just set it for another 2 minutes and checked it later. It has melted but the part of the egg white has become a Omelette :( I didn't leave it there. I took the bowl out of ...
8 comments
Read more

AWS fatal error: An error occurred (400) when calling the HeadObject operation: Bad Request

While using AWS and trying to copy a file from a S3 bucket to my EC2 instance ended up with this error message. Command Used: aws s3 cp s3://mybucketname/myfilename.html /var/www/html/ Error: fatal error: An error occurred (400) when calling the HeadObject operation: Bad Request The error goes off if we add the region information to the command statement. I am using Asia Pacific (Mumbai) so used ap-south-1 as the region name. Modified Command: aws s3 cp s3://mybucketname/myfilename.html /var/www/html/ --region ap-south-1
Post a Comment
Read more

Script table as - ALTER TO is greyed out - SQL SERVER

One of my office colleague recently asked me why we are not able to generate ALTER Table script from SSMS. If we right click on the table and choose "Script Table As"  ALTER To option would be disabled or Greyed out. Is it a bug? No it isn't a bug. ALTER To is there to be used for generating modified script of Stored Procedure, Functions, Views, Triggers etc., and NOT for Tables. For generating ALTER Table script there is an work around. Right click on the table, choose "Modify" and enter into the design mode. Make what ever changes you want to make and WITHOUT saving it right click anywhere on the top half of the window (above Column properties) and choose "Generate Change Script". Please be advised that SQL Server would drop actually create a new table with modifications, move the data from the old table into it and then drop the old table. Sounds simple but assume you have a very large table for which you want to do this! Then it woul...
2 comments
Read more