Oopsie, Visual Studio License expired, so the build server stopped working

RonSijm@programming.dev to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 406 points –

Oh no, not just my build server, Microsofts build server... Everyones' Azure build server - (if you're building on windows)

90

Imagine your compiler performing a license check.

It's not using just the compiler. This agent is configured to use the full version of Visual Studio for some reason, and building through that, which requires a license. You can build via the msbuild system, which doesn't require a license.

It gets worse if you use Microsoft D365 AX products. Then you have to provision an entire Build server for builds which has to run Visual Studio 2019 on Windows 10. To do a build you run a pipeline in Azure DevOps, which runs the compiler in a full Visual Studio 2019 environment, which has to run on a special Azure virtual environment running Windows 10 hosted by Microsoft. It's so fragile.

typical Azure. duct tape and bubble gum holding everything together

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There are companies selling a relabeled GCC with the O flags behind the license check.

pretty sure it's been a thing since even before free compilers

People forget that compilers used to be commonly proprietary and commercially licensed. Heck, I'm born on the 90s and knew that 😂

So so glad free and open source software took over though

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Like ransom ware

Oh God I HAVE TO PAY? LITERALLY SLAVERY

How about, I don't know, not yanking the cord (or setting things up so the cord is yanked automatically) and pursuing the payment later?

But then that could mean that someone might - even temporarily - get something for nothing, and they can't be seen to promote anything even remotely similar to that.

Perhaps this tiny company are so close to the knife edge that they can't afford to allow it to happen. Must have constant revenue stream or else close up sho... wait, Micro-who?

don’t give me hope like that

Imagine paying money for software designed to sabotage your business if you miss a license payment.

Your business also relies on licenses I bet.

i am thinking this issue description is implying that EVERYONE using the windows build image was broken. MS probably had a hard coded license in the build image which expired. idk, could be reading it wrong

Uh... what do you think we do when a client doesn't pay us for a while? We yank their access. That's how services work, you get a few warnings that you really need to pay or you'll lose access and then, well, you lose access.

Oh you mean like every commercial FoSS OS which will force you to wait or not receive certain security updates unless you are on a subscription?

What are you talking about?

Sounds like Ubuntu pro maybe?

That's what I was also thinking about but it wasn't that related to the comment before that one

You'll have to be more specific on the confusion.

I just want an example of the thing you are talking about in the comment

I swear to the gods, proprietary software is going to be the end of civilization...

As a sysadmin, fuck certificates. They are the bane of my existence. I vote we abolish certs and go Irish honor system!

certificates fucking destroy everything in my work for an hour once every year because of expiry

You are supposed to be tracking when they expire and then renew/replace them before they expire.

You are supposed to be tracking when they expire and then renew/replace them before they expire.

I've been told that, as well, but I'm not sure I see it... Seems like a lot of effort... (This is sarcasm. Or is it just too much honesty?)

Certs have existed a long time, are never implemented correctly, and the expiration cycle that is supposed to bolster security just causes pain as a result.

Certs should just be redesigned to have a kill switch. CRLs were supposed to handle that, but are rarely implemented or implemented correctly.

Certs are also used in so many places where they may not be suited to the task, but because they exist, they've become the de-facto standard.

A temporal expiration system seems flawed from the beginning anyway. What, you don't trust your system anymore just because time has passed? Time is always passing. Are we all secretly racist against clocks now?

Are you talking licenses or certificates? Because if certificates are not automated that's not a problem with certificates but with administration.

Why are text editors cloud services now?

IDEs have had subscriptions for ages. The build server is a cloud service because local machines can be slow to compile and not everyone has an on-site build server.

Microsoft Hosted Agents have an expired Visual Studio license.

Is it like, Microsoft has to renew licence with Microsoft?

Or are they pushing for an upgrade?

i imagine MS just hard coded a random license key into the build image and it expired. the issue doesn't say exactly tho

I don't get the appeal of azure because of things like this.

annoying how much they try to push it

Moving to the cloud is a business decision not a technical one.

Csuite sees us spending Capex 200K on a server or 2 and several thousand opex per year to maintain it.

Cloud takes that 200K Capex and move it to Opex with significant markup markup.

From a technical pov we st it as a waste but business will business itself into cost overruns

But they promised we could save a ton of money with their monitoring dashboards we won't look at until suddenly we get a bill that is 5x what they promised!

Lifting and shifting an existing monolithic architecture to the cloud with zero modernization changes will result in a higher cost than leaving it in a data center.

Converting the application to use as much serverless and microservice-based technology as possible is where the cloud ROI is.

For a lot of things, that means pretty much re-architecting and re-coding an entire application / system pretty much from scratch.

The company I work for loves Azure. If it's not available as an Azure service it won't be used (except for uptime kuma). Some time ago there was a global Azure outage and we could do literally nothing. All tasks and code were on Azure Devops and all communication went through Teams and Outlook.

The webhook integration has also recently been removed from Teams so uptime kuma also didn't work for like a week until it was fixed by using Azure's automation service.

If you look at it as generic could provider it's not good, but if you look at it as making m$ run they're software instead of you it's awesome because most m$ software is not fun to run

Isn’t that an IDE? Why would a build server need that? Sigh.

For using msbuild or vsbuild to build C projects.

Can be installed standalone but it's typically just easier to install the full VS suite because on a shared runner it's better to include the entire kitchen.

For C, I use Makefiles. The Microsoft ecosystem sounds like a nightmare.

They started at Java's build system and set a course for Hell.

Maven works without an IDE. (And so does ant if you’re going back that far.)

And really early Java we used Makefiles.

Anyway all of that worked without an IDE.

Hey hey hey, put some respect on Java, we don't need certificates to compile our shit.

Fron what I gather, visual studio is a horrible monolith that also contains C/C++/C++++ build stuff.

I'm not familiar with the service, can someone explain? Like, are all pipelines on Azure affected? Or is it some internal stuff where a company relying on paid tech forgot to pay for it?

No, not some internal company, just Microsoft being Microsoft. So all Windows pipelines. They also have Linux based pipelines so not completely all pipelines.

But given that a lot of people build dotnet stuff on Azure, the 'windows-latest' image is usually the default. So a lot of pipelines

I am not sure if Martin would appreciate his name this clear on the lemmyverse.

Yea, too many people won't realize that they are just the on-call person fixing it.

I didn't even know VS Code was something you could pay for.

Also, are you using Discord bots for work?

Edit: Nope and nope.

As is tradition with MS and their complicated naming policies Visual Studio is not VS Code.

Also, VS Code is mid, not even working correctly and definitely not OOB on Linux in my experience, and VS just does not support Linux at all. And is shit anyway.

VS's built-in .NET debugger is top tier, though. Especially the ability to edit code while it is running.

Rider can do code replacement too and has worked much better in my experience

It would be much better if it stopped missing the version of the code you are working on and locking while starting multithreaded code.

If you want twenty minutes of rage-filled ranting, ask me about vscode-server sometime.

How much would that be in Libraries Of Congress if written down?

No and no and no. Works fine even on arm64 Linux. And is not shit in the least.

I can only recommend ZED

EDIT: no love for ZED?

Hmmm, the front page looks like they're trying to sell a LLM code generator with additional QOL to businesses, and not a developer focused IDE or extensible text editor.

Definitely not something that catches my interest as a developer. Though, I haven't tried it, so these are just initial impressions from reading their landing page.

Edit: also, why down vote the above? It appears perfectly relevant to the discussion. If you disagree, why not make a comment about it instead?

It's really good and open source. I used sublime & atom before and it's pretty much the same experience.

Is it also because it's made for mac first?

Hadn't actually noticed it was Mac first before you mentioned it, but no, if it works for Mac, then it likely also works for Linux (and that's what counts, right?).

Contrary to my previous statement, I've actually tried downloading Zed. The first thing I noticed was the "sign in" in the top right corner. Feels rather unsightly, but no biggie. It appears to redirect to GitHub authorization, after which it fails with a "OAuthCallback"-error. Might be my fault, can't remember if I've disabled or limited unnecessary functionality in GitHub.

The design feels slick and most options are hidden away or represented by only a small icon with tooltips. It appears that no advanced settings page exists, as nearly everything is handled in JSON (initially thought that a visual settings page must have been hidden away deep down somewhere, but that appears to be wrong).

Coop programming seems to be a big feature, but I'll skip that as it appears to need setup.

Also, the LLM part is not nearly as prominent as their front page makes it out to be, rather feels like an option than a prominent or forced feature, so that's really nice.

The included extensions (nice to have them as they're no given) appear to focus on themes and syntax, can't find any cross-development nor compilation related extensions which is just fine. Compilation is best handled in the terminal anyway.

Overall it feels pretty solid, definitely different from the first impressions of their page. Might be even better with more diverse extensions, though, I haven't looked at the internet for unlisted extensions, and I'm not sure how old the project is (the extensions might just not be made yet).

There's also no pop-ups, start pages with all kinds of featured content, nor settings or buttons that grab your attention away from your work (except the login button, perhaps. I would like to see what it looks like once logged in).

I'm probably missing most features as my GitHub integration fails, but I'm overall positively surprised.

It has an integrated Terminal, which works good - made my work with sass on the server a little easier.

Glad you're linking it. It never stopped to surprise me with it's simplicity and absence of forced features.

Also nightime coding friendly:

PS: When logged in - you just see your profile pic at the right top, but i still have to integrate a project - until now i'm nothing more than logged in. I Discovered ZED just a few weeks ago.

I still wonder why they decided to write their own UI framework from scratch.

Visual Studio and VS Code are two separate products, I'm afraid. Visual Studio is a .NET IDE and build tool, as opposed to VS Code which is essentially an extensible text editor.

Edit: also the screenshot looks like it might be from Slack?

The great thing about Slack is how easy it is to make automations. I guess this one just reads RSS feeds.

At my work we have automations notifying us about production errors for example.

If I have a nickel for everytime someone said "The cloud never goes down".

I'd have a lot of nickels and would spend my time doing something I like a lot more than working 🤑.

Next Up
Windows Server license on MS Windows Activation server has expired...

It's like none of you have experienced an outage before

Something something Eggs, something something baskets...

🤷‍♂️ run your own 4 nines service to complete. Nothing is preventing you. People choose this shit because running services is hard and expensive.