Microsoft causing lost productivity. A rant.
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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?
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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?
I have to agree there. Windows 9x made me want to scream with the crashes, NT and 2000 were continuously plagued by the BSOD. XP was the first stable version I have used (going all the way back to windows 2.1 I believe or what ever just preceeded 3.11) but it requires a little tweaking to get it just right. Now Vista comes out and tries to address some serious security issues, and has to move a little closer to the Unix side of the world and the same people who scream for resolution of their devestating security issues do nothing but complain about the fix. You can't have security without some form of intrusiveness. It just is not possible.
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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
Chris Maunder wrote:
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.
But would that not then require multi-threaded programming, sucking up resources that we are already ranting about? If you click the close button on the help dialog and it doesnt close, just hit alt+F4 and end program now. Works every time.
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I have to agree there. Windows 9x made me want to scream with the crashes, NT and 2000 were continuously plagued by the BSOD. XP was the first stable version I have used (going all the way back to windows 2.1 I believe or what ever just preceeded 3.11) but it requires a little tweaking to get it just right. Now Vista comes out and tries to address some serious security issues, and has to move a little closer to the Unix side of the world and the same people who scream for resolution of their devestating security issues do nothing but complain about the fix. You can't have security without some form of intrusiveness. It just is not possible.
You have to remember, that each version of Windows was better in most ways than the version before it. In some ways, some considered each new version worse... largely because they required more resources than the last version. Windows 95 was much better than Windows 3.1, but there were people that complained that Windows 95 took 4-8MB when 3.1 worked great in 1 or 2MB. Windows 98 was more stable and better than Windows 95 in many ways, but it needed 32MB which many people complained about. Of course 32MB at the time costed about $500. And so on, and so on... The most complaints have always come from those that "upgraded" without upgrading their platform. Or maybe they did upgrade their platform, but they felt resentful about it. Computing will continue to use up all available resources. As hardware gets faster or bigger, new software will figure out ways to utilize it. I think this is a *GOOD* thing. I mean, back in the P200 days, the idea of continuous voice recognition from almost any speaker without training was all but impossible. Today, Vista comes with such functionality for free. And it works pretty damn well too. Software will always push the bounds of the available hardware. Sometimes it's because of lazy coding, but sometimes it's a tradeoff between better productivity and using more resources. We don't program in assembly today because we don't need to. Maybe the human genome is so complex because god used a framework library ;)
-- Where are we going? And why am I in this handbasket?
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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?
What you say is true in general but there are some genuine issues too. With OSes I preferred XP to 2000 from day one - though I certainly recall lots of people complaining about XP's "Fisher Price" UI. No doubt many still do. It never bothered me. Re: Visual Studio, I do think each new version is better overall, especially for .NET developers, despite performance problems. And even then there tend to be a few usability regressions. However, with VC++ in particular the consensus seems to be that it falls short as an IDE. Hence why MS is promising a major revamp for version 10.
Kevin
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Chris Maunder wrote:
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.
But would that not then require multi-threaded programming, sucking up resources that we are already ranting about? If you click the close button on the help dialog and it doesnt close, just hit alt+F4 and end program now. Works every time.
No. Plenty of hang-time in outlook is caused by network waits. The CPU is doing nothing.
Dave Buhl wrote:
just hit alt+F4 and end program now
Not much of an option if it's Visual Studio or Outlook.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
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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:
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.
Not for me. And the discussion was about *productivity* - specifically about the IDE which is ok, but consumes far more resources (most important, my time). The compiler is indeed far better - but one can also use the 2005 (or Platform SDKs) compiler with 6.0 IDE as well. About the legacy code - it happens to be in such a project for 10 years, with legacy code which was COMPLETELY ported to Visual C++ 2005 while it also compiles on VC6. But when you want to do a simple task such as editing a resource, VC6 comes to rescue. Heck, the development cycle is now like - fix/change/debug quickly in VC6 - add/change resources in VC6 - do the final rebuild and test on VS2005. And this goes on and on.
Erik Funkenbusch wrote:
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.
Touché. There were templates and STL also in 6.0 (ok, I know these from 2005 and - again - the compiler is better). C++, new or old, isn't for lazy programmers anyway. Even 6.0 was too much for them. You pointed exactly on how you can identify these "ticks": templates.
Erik Funkenbusch wrote:
I found I was far more productive by learning how MFC worked internally and just hand-writing my code.
You're not using hand-built EVENTSINK maps with ActiveX's (and remember each and every VTS_xxx arguments for every dispatched event handler), do you?
Erik Funkenbusch wrote:
Get "MFC Internals" by Scot Wingo and George Shepherd. Treat it like the bible. You'll be 100% more productive.
I think reading a book will usually make you smarter/quick/capable on dealing with new problems. Productivity - I think - is mainly related not on what you don't know, but on what you know but can't solve easier. Also me I discovered years ago that a corrupted/malfunctioning class wizard can be improved by manually deleting the .clw file. Unfortunately, that's the kind of thing that consumes most of the time. At least for me.
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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
You spend in your life: A of your time sleeping B of your time working C of your time watching TV . . . and 1 year waiting for Microsoft products to complete a task :laugh: Why don't we get Microsoft source code and put Linux developers to improve it? Life would be good ;P
_class MySignature _{ __public override void toString() __{ ____return "hi ;)"; __} _}
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Chris Maunder wrote:
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.
Can't agree with you more! I just threw some rather expensive hardware at it, and the shit still freezes up. It's not even connecting to the net or anything important. Just bringing up a context menu in windows explorer is a dog sometimes (but the icons sure look pretty :) ).
- S 50 cups of coffee and you know it's on!
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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.
Or else, get a Mac.:cool:
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No. Plenty of hang-time in outlook is caused by network waits. The CPU is doing nothing.
Dave Buhl wrote:
just hit alt+F4 and end program now
Not much of an option if it's Visual Studio or Outlook.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
Chris Maunder wrote:
Not much of an option if it's Visual Studio or Outlook
Nope but if you are complaining about having to wait for something like "Help" to load after accidentally hitting F1 then it works quick and easy. But a lot of time in Outlook the hang time can be traced back to personal folders bulging at the seams with junk that you will never really read again. Each time you open outlook it reads the index of each attached folder. fwiw
