If Microsoft had stuck with "embrace and extend" (rather than embrace and distend), it wouldn't have been a problem. I was (attempting) to write desktop Java during the MS/Sun wars, and it was beyond annoying. MS had a habit of slightly altering the behavior or syntax of things.
You were usually OK (but annoyed) if you developed using the Sun VM and then ported (yes, it was a port) to MS. If you started on MS, it was a horrid process to get to Sun's VM.
What really sucked was, as part of the embrace, their tools were the best tools at the time (compiler, debugger, vm). The "extend" part was even OK (sometimes it was handy to have easy COM access). It just sucked when the distend part came.
(Just don't ask about the time my company was partnering with Microsoft on a project and I built the software using Netscape's foundation classes. Stupid little dot on their scroll bars...)
Because you couldn't use them due to Microsoft distending the language. You weren't guaranteed what you build using VisualJ++ would actually working on another VM. When using anything that did code generation (which a lot of AWT tools did), you ran into this possibility.
You were usually OK (but annoyed) if you developed using the Sun VM and then ported (yes, it was a port) to MS. If you started on MS, it was a horrid process to get to Sun's VM.
What really sucked was, as part of the embrace, their tools were the best tools at the time (compiler, debugger, vm). The "extend" part was even OK (sometimes it was handy to have easy COM access). It just sucked when the distend part came.
(Just don't ask about the time my company was partnering with Microsoft on a project and I built the software using Netscape's foundation classes. Stupid little dot on their scroll bars...)