I feel bad for the MS devs, but from a consumer perspective, this is how it works:
It's 2010. If you start a television production company today, you won't come out with a black and white CRT using the excuse "has everyone forgotten that Panasonic didn't support color HD TVs at first?"
You have a point, though I would liken this lack of a feature to something more like "this blu ray player can't connect to the internet via WPA2." It's not entirely essential to its operation, and an upgrade could be around the corner.
[Hacker News bug report: I had to come to treeface's comment page to reply to this message. I wasn't allowed to on the main thread]
Most likely it was the time it took you to go to his comments page that made the difference. When comment threads reach a certain level of activity, the HN software starts putting a delay before you can reply. I believe it's meant to curb useless chatter and flamewars.
I meant I feel bad for them because they're expected to crank out an Android/iOS competitor in an unreasonably short period of time. For some of them, this is probably the crowning achievement of their programming careers, yet people like us are sitting around complaining because they don't have a feature that took iOS developers quite a long time to bring to market.
I certainly don't feel bad for them in a general sense. They're probably paid pretty well and I would imagine they have an otherwise great working environment.
Gotcha, that's cool. Sorry, I miss-read your comment.
I just think it's time we start to view C# with a bit more respect/understanding. It's a great language and Anders Hejlsberg doesn't get enough credit for what he's done (and is doing) as C# continues to evolve; ditto Miguel and the Mono team..
MS devs deserve sympathy for the shortsightedness of their managers, who thought that Windows Mobile was good enough for a market that they didn't know was competitive. Micorsoft's developers may have been handed an awfully short timeline for Windows Phone 7, but the company as a whole had plenty of warning.
It's 2010. If you start a television production company today, you won't come out with a black and white CRT using the excuse "has everyone forgotten that Panasonic didn't support color HD TVs at first?"