'We had some painful experiences with C and C++, and when Microsoft came out with .NET, we said, "Yes! That is what we want."'

--Miguel de Icaza

Summary: Microsoft software is quickly becoming synonymous with crashes as any piece of software developed with Microsoft's tools, not just the underlying platform, crashes chronically

LESS than an hour ago we noted that the corporate media had finally realised that Vista 10 crashes a lot (we knew about it for quite a while because people from Microsoft told us).

Now that very severe .NET bugs are coming to the surface (as only some of the source code is being revealed) a friend of Microsoft reveals that not only .NET is unstable; any application developed with the "just-released .NET 4.6 runtime" is basically breaking, so badly in fact that there are chronic crashes. To quote Microsoft's friend, Tim Anderson:

A critical bug in the optimizer in the just-released .NET 4.6 runtime could break and crash production applications, we're warned.

"The methods you call can get different parameter values than you passed in," says Nick Craver – software developer and system administrator for Stack Exchange, home of the popular programming support site Stack Overflow – in a post today.

This is what we have come to expect. It's just Microsoft 'quality'. With bugs like these, many applications could be compiled to include involuntary back doors. Microsoft now hopes to inject code into BSD/GNU compilers. These projects, in turn, should be principled and strict enough reject Microsoft's shoddy code. When it comes to compilers, there is an increased security risk too, as our recent articles about Visual Studio explained [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], especially this article. You cannot build secure and robust software on a flaky and insecure (often by design) foundation. ⬆

"Our products just aren't engineered for security."

--Brian Valentine, Microsoft executive

Update (30/7/2015): Microsoft now acknowledges but downplays the issue.