Microsoft causing lost productivity. A rant.
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
The same can be said for a lot of apps from other companies. Adobe Acrobat takes a long time to load itself, even on a dual-core 3.0GHz PC with SATA discs, just so I can view--not edit, just view--a PDF document. Same for Photoshop, just so I can view or edit an image. And what is Firefox doing when I first open it that it takes 30+ seconds before I can browse the internet? It isn't just MS or their products that are bloated and slow.
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I concur about the Help issue mentioned above. This goes not only for Visual Studio but really ANY Microsoft product, even down to Windows itself (such as using Windows Explorer). Try accidentally hitting F1 while navigating Explorer and then enjoy the minute and a half or more of waiting for 'Help' to show up so you can close it. Why not make some sort of universal "OOPS!" key (maybe put it next to the elusive "Any" key) that means you REALIZE you goofed up and fat-fingered a command you typed or clicked the wrong button or accidentally hit an F key and would cancel it? Surely it can't be that terribly hard, now can it? And while we're ranting about the so-called 'Help', how ridiulous is the standard MS Help you get if you hit F1 just in Windows? Or in any Properties for Hardware, hitting the Troubleshoot... button? You get basically as much help as any standard helpless desk phone call..actually, you get less because it walks you through precisely the easiest steps that you PROBABLY already took, hence why you wanted to troubleshoot it. Then when you FINALLY convince it you're not a n00b and get past the obvious, it just tells you to contact Microsoft for more help. I say it should be just as important as getting better-responsive apps (which I do agree with) to put some resources toward a truly helpful Help!
========================= ~Events occur in real time~
AndoTheOptimal wrote:
Why not make some sort of universal "OOPS!" key
But your operation would be finished before the operation could be cancelled and then you would have to wait another minute for the Oops operation to finish!
WarePhreak Programmers are tools to convert caffiene to code.
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You can correct the Windows explorer freeze on network hiccup - you can tell it to darn well *do not * go checking the network shares all the time - some registry setting somewhere, sorry you'll have to google for the exact setting. A long time ago I did that and makes my life so much better!
But I think that's the authors' point... Why should we have to 1) Hope to somehow discover that such a hack exists? 2) Have to go find the hack? 3) Implement the hack on each and every machine we work on?? As I see it, the fact that the hack even exists is MS's admission that they've failed and that their stuff is bloated crap.... Otherwise, why would they even put in a hack like that? And, having put it in, why don't they advertise it... Vista is pathetic in this regard (and far too many other ways...) It has that bloated, resource pig "SearchIndexer" that you can neither turn off nor kill, there's no controls or settings or UI, and working in concert with Windows Explorer etc it's supposed to make navigation easier... Yeah, right, as if... Instead what happens is that even though the SearchIndexer is running continuously in the background, if you happen to "touch" or click the wrong folder in WE (and who can tell, now that the thing is so visually cluttered and busy and poorly laid out), WE **STILL* freezes minutes or even tens of minutes!!!! Doing what??? It's gotten to that point that anymore, anytime I'm navigating and I see the "busy" cursor for more than a few seconds, I go pskill that instance because I know that at least 95% of the time, once WE enters that state it's going to sit there for minutes while doing that, being 100% frozen and chewing up resources like mad. Were that WE were the only such example... Vista itself at times becomes catatonic... VS05 is so buggy on Vista as to be almost unusable... At times on Vista and in response to such heavy-weight tasks as opening a file or switching views/windows, VS05 will start chewing up all available cycles and yet will still go away for minutes or even tens of minutes at a stretch, being completely unresponsive and basically bringing the machine to it's knees.
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Chris, As an MVP, did you not get invited to test drive Office while it was in Alpha/Beta?
"Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it." - Ellen Goodman
"To have a respect for ourselves guides our morals; to have deference for others governs our manners." - Laurence Sterne
I've worked at MS off and on and also participated in unofficial (dogfood) and offical alpha/beta processes. The problem is that 1) MS puts up a strong wall, even to internal voices and alpha/beta testers/adopters 2) Of the relative trickle which does get through, even that is heavily filtered before even being seriously looked at 3) Most perf issues are almost always punted to stabilization *after* alpha/beta in the belief that they'll have time to do perf work in that period. To their credit they often DO spend lots of resources on perf in that period, but unfortunately by then features and bulk code changes are locked out and that means that any perf issue that can't be fixed without a lot of code churn or risk will almost always get shipped 4) Most MS Product/Program execs, managers, devs, and higher level test types almost always have the latest and greatest high powered HW and therefore often don't perceive perf issues the same way the market does once the product ships. I watched and listened as untold hundreds of Vista devs (out of only those I was exposed to) scrambled, begged, pleaded, cajoled, and even spent their own money on high-powered machines and especially video cards during Vista, all the while saying that perf wasn't an issue because customers could just go buy the same HW. Yeah, right, like everyone who wants to or has to adopt Vista needs (or will be allowed to) acquire a dual or quad proc machine with a $500+ video card and huge, fast, expensive HDDs.
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
Where's Borland when you need them?
Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Coming soon: Got a career question? Ask the Attack Chihuahua! www.PracticalUSA.com
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Yes. If I have Outlook running, and I sleep my portable, it is at lesat 3 minutes before I can really use it again after I wake it up -- especially if I leave it sleeping for several hours. It hits the disk _hard_. Looking at the process manager it is clear it is doing lots of paging. I have no idea why every page needs to be touched, and with 2 Gigs and only outlook running why the kernel decided to swap out so much (actually, I guess that might be the way sleep is designed to work)! Actually, also in IE's case, the long pauses almost always come while the disk churns. I hate it. :-) Cheers, Gordon.
"I have no idea why every page needs to be touched" Garbage collection. Is outlook written in .NET? If not, then it still has potential to get worse. http://www.virtualdub.org/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=176[^]
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
Gee Chris, I really don't see these kinds of problems. IE loads fast for me, and clicking on a new tab is near instantaneous (less than 1 second). Word 2007 loads for me in less than 3 seconds. Excel is even faster. Outlook is fast for me (but then i'm not using exchange these days, I do remember Exchange made Outlook a bit slower). If you press the wrong button, how is that Visual Studio's fault? Would you prefer it pop up a dialog asking "Are you sure you wanted to do that?". Some tasks are simply not going to be instantaneous, and if you hit them by accident, it's your fault really. I agree with you about SQL management studio, but then it's an an app written entirely in .NET that uses a *LOT* of reflection and other dynamic data enumeration that will be slow by nature of what it does. Of course I have a machine with 4GB of memory, but memory is freaking cheap. 2GB costs about $75, and a dual core processor will REALLY make things work a lot better. I guess I just don't see why Microsoft should target their professional products at low-end equipment.
-- Where are we going? And why am I in this handbasket?
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Ah, the halcyon days of VC++ 6.0 :((
Visit http://www.notreadytogiveup.com/[^] and do something special today.
Oh please, what selective memory we have. How many of us were complaining about VC6 when it came out? Inellisense took days to pop up, Help was unusable, major problems with the UI... The deal is that hardware caught up with it. That's the problem with ALL microsoft products, they target them for next years hardware, not last years hardware.
-- Where are we going? And why am I in this handbasket?
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Gee Chris, I really don't see these kinds of problems. IE loads fast for me, and clicking on a new tab is near instantaneous (less than 1 second). Word 2007 loads for me in less than 3 seconds. Excel is even faster. Outlook is fast for me (but then i'm not using exchange these days, I do remember Exchange made Outlook a bit slower). If you press the wrong button, how is that Visual Studio's fault? Would you prefer it pop up a dialog asking "Are you sure you wanted to do that?". Some tasks are simply not going to be instantaneous, and if you hit them by accident, it's your fault really. I agree with you about SQL management studio, but then it's an an app written entirely in .NET that uses a *LOT* of reflection and other dynamic data enumeration that will be slow by nature of what it does. Of course I have a machine with 4GB of memory, but memory is freaking cheap. 2GB costs about $75, and a dual core processor will REALLY make things work a lot better. I guess I just don't see why Microsoft should target their professional products at low-end equipment.
-- Where are we going? And why am I in this handbasket?
Erik Funkenbusch wrote:
If you press the wrong button, how is that Visual Studio's fault?
There are operations that, no matter what, are going to take a long, long time to complete. Hitting F1 accidentally, invoking the refactoring system etc. What would be nice would be a small "Loading..." or "Initialising..." dialog with a big bright "Cancel" button.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
Chris Maunder wrote:
IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there.
Chris, Even today morning I thought about the same. Always it's trying to connect something. don't Microsoft know that about:blank is blank webpage eh? or are they seeing any future possibilities of any websites in that name? Just sticking with Safari (sometimes the FLV performance of firefox really sux) and Firefox.
-Sarath. "Great hopes make everything great possible" - Benjamin Franklin
My blog - Sharing My Thoughts, An Article - Understanding Statepattern
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
This is the price of not thinking everything and letting lawyers or HR/PR guys to establish "what's cool". Armies of developers still uses VC6 (me included). Why? As you pointed out - is easy to use. Is somewhat inevitable to be trapped in the junkie philosophy - is little is good, more is better. Well, not quite. I'd prefer Eric Clapton slowhand solos over Yngwie Malmsteen masturbatory endless-frigian-hyperspeed-tapping-shredding guitar solos. But that's just me. Let's hope they won't hit Windows Explorer even more. Imagine you right click a printer and the context menu item will enable/disable if the HTTP query sent by Explorer IContextMenu9 to the vendor website will get a reply with an XML generated from a .NET web service and the XML is UTF-16 (Unicode only, please), which in turn will be passed to WMI which will call an Active Directory authentication and this one needs a signature (SHA 20) which will load CryptoAPI .... You think is not possible? :confused:
Nuclear launch detected
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Chris Maunder wrote:
IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab.
This one does NOT make sense to me. Whenever I use IE7, I get the feeling I'm waiting for a boat to sink. It's a strange feeling. Incidentally, my original bias against Firefox was the time it took to load compared with IE6. Once I finally started using it, I decided that 2-3 second difference wasn't really important to me. Now with IE7, I can gloat that I don't have to wait 20 seconds for the first connection to work, even if it's the about:blank page.
Chris Maunder wrote:
Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause.
This has ALWAYS infuriated me. Why in the WORLD is this application (apparently) single-threaded when EVERYTHING it does can fail or take 2 minutes to time out? WHY??
Chris Maunder wrote:
Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins
My favorite is accidentally hitting F1 when I mean to hit ESC. Great. All I wanted to do was close the Find dialog box. Now, I have to wait 2 minutes for you to FINALLY open Help, only for me to instantly close it again. Yeah. Those are fun. X|
Chris Maunder wrote:
It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze.
One of the reasons I spend (possibly unnecessarily extreme) amounts of time ensuring every app I write is ridiculously responsive. I HATE that non-responsiveness and it confuses users who think the app is broken.
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. - Albert Einstein
Patrick Sears wrote:
my original bias against Firefox was the time it took to load compared with IE6
That's one of FF's Achilles heels; though I can live with slow initial start-up. The other Achilles heel is its memory management - though I've managed to find a more-or-less acceptable workaround for that. Apart from these FF is excellent. In my current work contract I've been using IE 7 for the past few months after previously avoiding it. I also finally installed it at home, though use it rarely. A couple of days ago I decided to install FF at work. I actually have a good excuse for this as the web interface to the app. we're developing needs to be multi-browser. IE7 is an improvement on IE 6 but still not a patch on FF. Plus a number of things just don't seem to work properly, e.g., persistence of Google Account settings.
Patrick Sears wrote:
My favorite is accidentally hitting F1 when I mean to hit ESC. Great. All I wanted to do was close the Find dialog box. Now, I have to wait 2 minutes for you to FINALLY open Help, only for me to instantly close it again.
I actually now mostly use that Google Search macro as an alternative to F1. It's faster and more accurate. Though I've actually mapped it to Alt + F1. I don't ever accidentally press F1 fortunately but could always assign it to the Google macro if I wanted.
Patrick Sears wrote:
I HATE that non-responsiveness and it confuses users who think the app is broken.
Ditto. With VS I've got into the habit of waiting it out as invariably if I continue clicking it will crash or hang. I also hate install programs that appear to freeze but in fact eventually install OK. I know that often you do have to pause the progress bar but some other feedback would be nice otherwise there's no way of telling whether it's just taking a long time or has really hung.
Kevin
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Oh please, what selective memory we have. How many of us were complaining about VC6 when it came out? Inellisense took days to pop up, Help was unusable, major problems with the UI... The deal is that hardware caught up with it. That's the problem with ALL microsoft products, they target them for next years hardware, not last years hardware.
-- Where are we going? And why am I in this handbasket?
Erik Funkenbusch wrote:
How many of us were complaining about VC6 when it came out?
Not me.
Erik Funkenbusch wrote:
Inellisense took days to pop up
It had always been a problem ever since it was introduced. VC 6 was no worse. I nvere used Visual Assist but people here swear it's miles better.
Erik Funkenbusch wrote:
Help was unusable
I never thought so. But it was worse than the Help in VC 5 or 4 (I can't remember which, but one of those versions had the best help so far - it's been progressively worse with each new version of VS since).
Erik Funkenbusch wrote:
major problems with the UI...
Such as? Personally I think VC 6, as an overall product, was one of the best MS has ever produced. I refer here to the IDE rather than the C++ implementation.
Kevin
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Erik Funkenbusch wrote:
How many of us were complaining about VC6 when it came out?
Not me.
Erik Funkenbusch wrote:
Inellisense took days to pop up
It had always been a problem ever since it was introduced. VC 6 was no worse. I nvere used Visual Assist but people here swear it's miles better.
Erik Funkenbusch wrote:
Help was unusable
I never thought so. But it was worse than the Help in VC 5 or 4 (I can't remember which, but one of those versions had the best help so far - it's been progressively worse with each new version of VS since).
Erik Funkenbusch wrote:
major problems with the UI...
Such as? Personally I think VC 6, as an overall product, was one of the best MS has ever produced. I refer here to the IDE rather than the C++ implementation.
Kevin
Lol. Figures. I remember very clearly all the complaints of that time. Remember, it was 1998. 10 years ago. There were just as many complaints then as there are today, except everyone thought VC5 was so much better. VC6 used a lot more memory than earlier versions, HTML Help was super slow, there were various GUI problems, and yes.. Intellisense was considered "unsably slow". Like I said, what made VC6 "the best" was that the hardware caught up with it. In 1998 we were mostly using P200's and 233's with 32MB of memory. VC6 today flies on modern hardware, that's why everyone now thinks it was so much better, but at the time many people thought it sucked. in 10 years time, we'll all be singing the praises of VS2008.
-- Where are we going? And why am I in this handbasket?
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This is the price of not thinking everything and letting lawyers or HR/PR guys to establish "what's cool". Armies of developers still uses VC6 (me included). Why? As you pointed out - is easy to use. Is somewhat inevitable to be trapped in the junkie philosophy - is little is good, more is better. Well, not quite. I'd prefer Eric Clapton slowhand solos over Yngwie Malmsteen masturbatory endless-frigian-hyperspeed-tapping-shredding guitar solos. But that's just me. Let's hope they won't hit Windows Explorer even more. Imagine you right click a printer and the context menu item will enable/disable if the HTTP query sent by Explorer IContextMenu9 to the vendor website will get a reply with an XML generated from a .NET web service and the XML is UTF-16 (Unicode only, please), which in turn will be passed to WMI which will call an Active Directory authentication and this one needs a signature (SHA 20) which will load CryptoAPI .... You think is not possible? :confused:
Nuclear launch detected
Cristian Amarie wrote:
Armies of developers still uses VC6 (me included). Why? As you pointed out - is easy to use.
Actually, i think it's more because there's billions of lines of legacy code that nobody wants to port to the newer, standard conforming compilers. I also think there's armies of lazy programmers that don't want to learn the "new" C++, complete with templates and STL, which often means that those that DO want to use those "newfangled" features are restricted from doing so because the lazy programmers won't know how to maintain it. Also, of course, VC6 was the last version to adequately support MFC with the wizards. Personally, I haven't used the MFC wizards in almost a decade. I found I was far more productive by learning how MFC worked internally and just hand-writing my code. Get "MFC Internals" by Scot Wingo and George Shepherd. Treat it like the bible. You'll be 100% more productive.
-- Where are we going? And why am I in this handbasket?
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Lol. Figures. I remember very clearly all the complaints of that time. Remember, it was 1998. 10 years ago. There were just as many complaints then as there are today, except everyone thought VC5 was so much better. VC6 used a lot more memory than earlier versions, HTML Help was super slow, there were various GUI problems, and yes.. Intellisense was considered "unsably slow". Like I said, what made VC6 "the best" was that the hardware caught up with it. In 1998 we were mostly using P200's and 233's with 32MB of memory. VC6 today flies on modern hardware, that's why everyone now thinks it was so much better, but at the time many people thought it sucked. in 10 years time, we'll all be singing the praises of VS2008.
-- Where are we going? And why am I in this handbasket?
Erik Funkenbusch wrote:
but at the time many people thought it sucked.
No doubt they did, but I didn't. However, it's not just a performance thing but a usability thing and that's got nothing to do with hardware. Help has objectively gotten progressively worse with each new version just based on usability.
Kevin
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Cristian Amarie wrote:
Armies of developers still uses VC6 (me included). Why? As you pointed out - is easy to use.
Actually, i think it's more because there's billions of lines of legacy code that nobody wants to port to the newer, standard conforming compilers. I also think there's armies of lazy programmers that don't want to learn the "new" C++, complete with templates and STL, which often means that those that DO want to use those "newfangled" features are restricted from doing so because the lazy programmers won't know how to maintain it. Also, of course, VC6 was the last version to adequately support MFC with the wizards. Personally, I haven't used the MFC wizards in almost a decade. I found I was far more productive by learning how MFC worked internally and just hand-writing my code. Get "MFC Internals" by Scot Wingo and George Shepherd. Treat it like the bible. You'll be 100% more productive.
-- Where are we going? And why am I in this handbasket?
Erik Funkenbusch wrote:
i think it's more because there's billions of lines of legacy code that nobody wants to port to the newer, standard conforming compilers. I also think there's armies of lazy programmers that don't want to learn the "new" C++, complete with templates and STL, which often means that those that DO want to use those "newfangled" features are restricted from doing so because the lazy programmers won't know how to maintain it.
This is true but it's also true that there are those who do want to use these things but still think VC++ 6 is better as an IDE. Personally, I've not used the .NET IDEs to do C++, I'm focused on .NET these days but I've read no end of complaints specifically about the newer IDEs, not about the improved C++ conformance, etc.
Kevin
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Erik Funkenbusch wrote:
i think it's more because there's billions of lines of legacy code that nobody wants to port to the newer, standard conforming compilers. I also think there's armies of lazy programmers that don't want to learn the "new" C++, complete with templates and STL, which often means that those that DO want to use those "newfangled" features are restricted from doing so because the lazy programmers won't know how to maintain it.
This is true but it's also true that there are those who do want to use these things but still think VC++ 6 is better as an IDE. Personally, I've not used the .NET IDEs to do C++, I'm focused on .NET these days but I've read no end of complaints specifically about the newer IDEs, not about the improved C++ conformance, etc.
Kevin
It is a simple fact they write more bloated software by the day. Remember the days when they said XML is great, never a problem, and preaching I/O is never a bottleneck.. Yeah, right; take a look at it again, you know the aftermath of 'manifesto mania'. There is more productivity lost in Windows they you can ever imagine in many dev and office and simply user setups. A tool to collect these times would be quite handy if it was easy to write an unintrusive one, it would add that counter faster than Google is adding disk space. Countless times does VS.NET and SQL Management Studio crash, heck I've seen .NET apps more unstable than anything else I can remember of. And you know something, it pss me off to wait for that CLR stack walk too! You can feel it, sense it and even spark up a cig before a dialog surfaces on the most modern quad box. It simply doesn't scale on so many fronts and work on Linux is as refreshing as any excitement you can get on PC, it just takes a little bit of time to get used to it.. Machines are incredibly powerful but only with right software all the way; place one slightly complicated networking and AD setup and the entire MS show blows up; much like WCF bloat. So either as an effect of that or just as windows gets bloated and slower with all the patches and SPs, I'd say about 1.5 years and your brand new hardware is unusable and you, yep, upgrade or repave or waste more time cleaning.. And look at what all the ATIs, McAffees, Logitech and many other twts do.. WTF was their Logo program for? They all take it as the norm to run 10 processes, they auto-start anything on its way, some provide crap and darn slow WinForm apps (famous slow GUI of all mandkind) for management and what do you get once you slap an anti-virus on? Junk that page-faults all the time. MS never listened on that front really and the same story is on mobile devices ( even WM 5.0 which was frankly a disaster in so many respects like calendars, alarms, hangs, you name it.. its probably the worst OS ever written ) You watch that sad trend (and countless disciples of blog-followers) rip apart all machines running Silverlight, WPF, LINQ 'as slow as Hibernate' and plenty more..
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But I think that's the authors' point... Why should we have to 1) Hope to somehow discover that such a hack exists? 2) Have to go find the hack? 3) Implement the hack on each and every machine we work on?? As I see it, the fact that the hack even exists is MS's admission that they've failed and that their stuff is bloated crap.... Otherwise, why would they even put in a hack like that? And, having put it in, why don't they advertise it... Vista is pathetic in this regard (and far too many other ways...) It has that bloated, resource pig "SearchIndexer" that you can neither turn off nor kill, there's no controls or settings or UI, and working in concert with Windows Explorer etc it's supposed to make navigation easier... Yeah, right, as if... Instead what happens is that even though the SearchIndexer is running continuously in the background, if you happen to "touch" or click the wrong folder in WE (and who can tell, now that the thing is so visually cluttered and busy and poorly laid out), WE **STILL* freezes minutes or even tens of minutes!!!! Doing what??? It's gotten to that point that anymore, anytime I'm navigating and I see the "busy" cursor for more than a few seconds, I go pskill that instance because I know that at least 95% of the time, once WE enters that state it's going to sit there for minutes while doing that, being 100% frozen and chewing up resources like mad. Were that WE were the only such example... Vista itself at times becomes catatonic... VS05 is so buggy on Vista as to be almost unusable... At times on Vista and in response to such heavy-weight tasks as opening a file or switching views/windows, VS05 will start chewing up all available cycles and yet will still go away for minutes or even tens of minutes at a stretch, being completely unresponsive and basically bringing the machine to it's knees.
So what you are saying is that the developers at Microsoft should anticipate the setup desires and skill level of every user worldwide, write their code to automatically configure every possible setting to satisify the needs of every purpose, include it all in a single package under a single title, operate in every written/spoken language under every culture, all while consuming no resources or requiring the user to think about a single aspect of their own use cases? Users need to decide if they want pure ease of use, security, or whatever and choose the operating system the works for them. Stop bitching, especially if you are a developer. Make your own operating system the meets all your requirements and then market it to the masses. It is not difficult to research how to do the configuration changes if you do not already know and yes you can turn off search indexer and just about every other resource hog that you don't care for in Vista. I have been running Vista since beta1 which barely worked at all and now have Vista Ultimate running on my laptop and never go above 25% ram usage (2gb) and rarely hit the 100% cpu usage with a P4 3.2 machine. Oh and have not had a single issue with VS05 except the initial install which only required service pack being applied and now works like a champ. Take some personal responsibility and initiative and you might find dramatic improvement. Meanwhile, barely computer literate users will have all the functionality they need (and more) and as they learn can change the things that need to be to refine their user experience. I used to hate MS and still prefer Linux sometimes but if you sit back and consider the sheer scope of what Windows is, you have to give credit to MS or you are simply looking for something to rant about.
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Erik Funkenbusch wrote:
but at the time many people thought it sucked.
No doubt they did, but I didn't. However, it's not just a performance thing but a usability thing and that's got nothing to do with hardware. Help has objectively gotten progressively worse with each new version just based on usability.
Kevin
Not that I'm calling you a liar, but let's just say i'm skeptical because so many people seem to have selective memories. Maybe you're not one of them, and great, but overall I think most people seem to forget the past, or misremember it. I've watched so many people claim "Windows 9x is so much better than Windows NT", then those same people claim "Windows 2000 is so much better than XP", then those same people claime "XP was the best MS release, and Vista sucks", seperated by a number of years of course... but for some reason they just don't remember how they felt back in those days. Even my own mother does this. When I tell her stories as a kid, she'll claim they never happened.
-- Where are we going? And why am I in this handbasket?