He admitted that it was a bug, and that they were making an effort to fix it.
To tell the truth, after reading all the bad news about VB 4.0, I was not that dismayed that I wasn't able to use 4.0, which is what I told him. I mentioned the reports on USENET that had 4.0 far slower than 3.0 in every particular, even when the 32-bit version was used.
He said that VB 4 16-bit was faster in some things, and slower in others; the 32-bit version was said to be universally faster. I must say that I'm rather skeptical about that claim. He claims that torpedoing the old VBX technology and replacing it with OCXs was necessary to upgrade to the 32-bit technology, but at the same time he admitted that 16-bit users would notice few, if any, concrete advantages.
I commented about the terrifyingly poor reliability of the Microsoft web server, and the seeming indifference Microsoft had to its proper maintenance. As evidence, I offered What's new in Visual Basic 4.0 for Windows?, which includes the following verbatim text:
If it were my server, someone would have been fired or at least reprimanded severely for that incident, and yet stuff like that is disturbingly easy to find on Microsoft's server.
I told the Microsoft rep that, as a single-person operation with about one billionth their resources, I would never let something like that happen to my web server.
Furthermore, I said, I would run my web server using a Silicon Graphics CHALLENGE® Server before tolerating the dismal performance they get from their Windows NT system. He responded by noting that Microsoft is one of the most popular sites on the web; I replied by saying that Netscape and SGI get near 100% reliability out of their CHALLENGE® servers, and they get plenty of traffic, believe me.
I said that I knew they wanted to run Windows NT just because it was their product, and I didn't blame them for it, but "This is really giving Windows NT Advanced Server a black eye."
He had to admit that this was so. He promised to tell his superiors about the errors (described above) in the VB FAQ page, so we'll see if it gets fixed. As of 5:57 this evening (I talked to him around 11:00 this morning), it had not been.
Still, I have to give him credit for being very nice, intelligent and fun to talk to, things I don't normally associate with Microsoft people. His main comment in defense of his company and its practices is that Bill Gates et al have done more than any other company to push computer hardware and software prices down low enough to make his "computer on every desk" vision a reality.
Perhaps, although it is an interesting coincidence that today's Wall Street Journal carries a story saying that people are spending more, not less, on their PCs; features are being loaded on them like crazy. Why? To accomodate Windows95 and other Microsoft® programs, of course!