Skip to content
  • Categories
  • Recent
  • Tags
  • Popular
  • World
  • Users
  • Groups
Skins
  • Light
  • Cerulean
  • Cosmo
  • Flatly
  • Journal
  • Litera
  • Lumen
  • Lux
  • Materia
  • Minty
  • Morph
  • Pulse
  • Sandstone
  • Simplex
  • Sketchy
  • Spacelab
  • United
  • Yeti
  • Zephyr
  • Dark
  • Cyborg
  • Darkly
  • Quartz
  • Slate
  • Solar
  • Superhero
  • Vapor

  • Default (No Skin)
  • No Skin
Collapse
Code Project
  1. Home
  2. The Lounge
  3. So where is the new Borland?

So where is the new Borland?

Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved The Lounge
csharpc++delphivisual-studiohelp
93 Posts 44 Posters 2 Views 1 Watching
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as topic
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with topic management privileges can see it.
  • C Offline
    C Offline
    Christopher Duncan
    wrote on last edited by
    #1

    All this talk of MS dev tool lack of quality has me a bit nostalgic for the days when developing for MS technologies wasn't a monopoly. For those of you who haven't studied your IT history, there was once an upstart company named Borland who, back in the days of Pascal and C, developed a killer compiler and IDE, long before MS came along with Visual C++. It was fast. It was full featured. And it was really inexpensive. Turbo Pascal and Turbo C sold for around $89 when the comparable command line MS C compiler was going for $450. Borland made a lot of sales. Takes money to make money, you say? Not so. Philippe Khan, who started this little party, negotiated a full page ad in PC Magazine, around $5k, on 30 day terms when the norm was cash up front. This bought him enough time to make sales, cover his advertising, and hopefully live to fight another day. And he didn't even have the web to help him. Borland made a lot of money. Sure, you can do web development in any language / environment, but there's a huge market out there with MS skills. The same could be said for Windows development. Given the consistently crappy quality in MS tools, release after release, and a huge market of people who would doubtless pay for something better, especially if it was less expensive, my question is this: Where is the new Borland? Back in the day, it was considered a fool's errand to compete with Microsoft but Borland did it successfully using the oldest trick in the book. They offered superior value for less money. Am I really to believe that no one has the talent to write a .NET IDE that could kick Visual Studio's bug ridden posterior? If so, then it's a sad day for the programmer community, to be sure. There's money to be made here. If I wasn't headed for the exits, I might have a go at it myself. But I'd certainly cheer from the sidelines anyone with the talent and the guts to do what's successfully been done before - challenge the MS monopoly on dev tools and in the process not only make a ton of money, but force MS to get back into competing on quality as Borland once did. With no competition, they have no incentive to give us other than the flaky tools we get.

    Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes

    L H J P K 29 Replies Last reply
    0
    • C Christopher Duncan

      All this talk of MS dev tool lack of quality has me a bit nostalgic for the days when developing for MS technologies wasn't a monopoly. For those of you who haven't studied your IT history, there was once an upstart company named Borland who, back in the days of Pascal and C, developed a killer compiler and IDE, long before MS came along with Visual C++. It was fast. It was full featured. And it was really inexpensive. Turbo Pascal and Turbo C sold for around $89 when the comparable command line MS C compiler was going for $450. Borland made a lot of sales. Takes money to make money, you say? Not so. Philippe Khan, who started this little party, negotiated a full page ad in PC Magazine, around $5k, on 30 day terms when the norm was cash up front. This bought him enough time to make sales, cover his advertising, and hopefully live to fight another day. And he didn't even have the web to help him. Borland made a lot of money. Sure, you can do web development in any language / environment, but there's a huge market out there with MS skills. The same could be said for Windows development. Given the consistently crappy quality in MS tools, release after release, and a huge market of people who would doubtless pay for something better, especially if it was less expensive, my question is this: Where is the new Borland? Back in the day, it was considered a fool's errand to compete with Microsoft but Borland did it successfully using the oldest trick in the book. They offered superior value for less money. Am I really to believe that no one has the talent to write a .NET IDE that could kick Visual Studio's bug ridden posterior? If so, then it's a sad day for the programmer community, to be sure. There's money to be made here. If I wasn't headed for the exits, I might have a go at it myself. But I'd certainly cheer from the sidelines anyone with the talent and the guts to do what's successfully been done before - challenge the MS monopoly on dev tools and in the process not only make a ton of money, but force MS to get back into competing on quality as Borland once did. With no competition, they have no incentive to give us other than the flaky tools we get.

      Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes

      L Offline
      L Offline
      Lost User
      wrote on last edited by
      #2

      I was a very happy user of their tools since Turbo C for DOS. They blew it with Borland C++ 5 which had one of the crappiest bug-ridden IDEs I ever had the misfortune to use. Sigh. Apparently all their best people had been moved to the Delphi project in order to try and compete with VB and they left the interns in charge of their flagship C++ product. Back in the day I was *this* close to using OWL instead of MFC as my Windows C++ framework of choice but my boss, who could see the writing on the wall, convinced me to use MFC and my love affair with Borland started to wane. I'm not a .NET guy, but as far as C++ development goes, I think the Qt framework and it's new IDE, Qt Creator, could be worth keeping an eye on. I have yet to use Qt but I am itching for an excuse to get busy with it as by all accounts, it's a great framework - plus you get cross-platform support out of the box. Being able to write a modern C++ GUI and target Linux and the Mac has piqued my interest, especially now the Qt licensing is more relaxed. But, to be fair (again from a C++ POV), if MS fixed the crappy Intellisense bugs in VS2008 and supplied a help system that wasn't shamefully bad, then I'd be quite happy. Visual Assist X has fixed the first problem for me, and Google pretty much takes care of the second, so any competition in this area would have to be pretty special. The Qt framework and multiple OS support *might* be a start. If MS actually listened to developers, that would be something. There are bugs in Visual Studio that have been present since VS2003, and that's just taking the piss. More competition would be welcome, but taking on MS in the .NET world? Who's going to take that risk? They'd need something gold-plated and incredibly reliable to do so and a development like that is no mean feat.

      C S S R 4 Replies Last reply
      0
      • C Christopher Duncan

        All this talk of MS dev tool lack of quality has me a bit nostalgic for the days when developing for MS technologies wasn't a monopoly. For those of you who haven't studied your IT history, there was once an upstart company named Borland who, back in the days of Pascal and C, developed a killer compiler and IDE, long before MS came along with Visual C++. It was fast. It was full featured. And it was really inexpensive. Turbo Pascal and Turbo C sold for around $89 when the comparable command line MS C compiler was going for $450. Borland made a lot of sales. Takes money to make money, you say? Not so. Philippe Khan, who started this little party, negotiated a full page ad in PC Magazine, around $5k, on 30 day terms when the norm was cash up front. This bought him enough time to make sales, cover his advertising, and hopefully live to fight another day. And he didn't even have the web to help him. Borland made a lot of money. Sure, you can do web development in any language / environment, but there's a huge market out there with MS skills. The same could be said for Windows development. Given the consistently crappy quality in MS tools, release after release, and a huge market of people who would doubtless pay for something better, especially if it was less expensive, my question is this: Where is the new Borland? Back in the day, it was considered a fool's errand to compete with Microsoft but Borland did it successfully using the oldest trick in the book. They offered superior value for less money. Am I really to believe that no one has the talent to write a .NET IDE that could kick Visual Studio's bug ridden posterior? If so, then it's a sad day for the programmer community, to be sure. There's money to be made here. If I wasn't headed for the exits, I might have a go at it myself. But I'd certainly cheer from the sidelines anyone with the talent and the guts to do what's successfully been done before - challenge the MS monopoly on dev tools and in the process not only make a ton of money, but force MS to get back into competing on quality as Borland once did. With no competition, they have no incentive to give us other than the flaky tools we get.

        Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes

        H Offline
        H Offline
        Henry Minute
        wrote on last edited by
        #3

        Christopher Duncan wrote:

        But I'd certainly cheer from the sidelines anyone with the talent and the guts to do what's successfully been done before

        You can borrow my spare scarf, and rattle. I'd be using the first choice ones myself!

        Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”

        1 Reply Last reply
        0
        • L Lost User

          I was a very happy user of their tools since Turbo C for DOS. They blew it with Borland C++ 5 which had one of the crappiest bug-ridden IDEs I ever had the misfortune to use. Sigh. Apparently all their best people had been moved to the Delphi project in order to try and compete with VB and they left the interns in charge of their flagship C++ product. Back in the day I was *this* close to using OWL instead of MFC as my Windows C++ framework of choice but my boss, who could see the writing on the wall, convinced me to use MFC and my love affair with Borland started to wane. I'm not a .NET guy, but as far as C++ development goes, I think the Qt framework and it's new IDE, Qt Creator, could be worth keeping an eye on. I have yet to use Qt but I am itching for an excuse to get busy with it as by all accounts, it's a great framework - plus you get cross-platform support out of the box. Being able to write a modern C++ GUI and target Linux and the Mac has piqued my interest, especially now the Qt licensing is more relaxed. But, to be fair (again from a C++ POV), if MS fixed the crappy Intellisense bugs in VS2008 and supplied a help system that wasn't shamefully bad, then I'd be quite happy. Visual Assist X has fixed the first problem for me, and Google pretty much takes care of the second, so any competition in this area would have to be pretty special. The Qt framework and multiple OS support *might* be a start. If MS actually listened to developers, that would be something. There are bugs in Visual Studio that have been present since VS2003, and that's just taking the piss. More competition would be welcome, but taking on MS in the .NET world? Who's going to take that risk? They'd need something gold-plated and incredibly reliable to do so and a development like that is no mean feat.

          C Offline
          C Offline
          Christopher Duncan
          wrote on last edited by
          #4

          Rob Caldecott wrote:

          More competition would be welcome, but taking on MS in the .NET world? Who's going to take that risk? They'd need something gold-plated and incredibly reliable to do so and a development like that is no mean feat.

          A point worth making, and yet, that's rather my point. This is exactly what they said before Borland, who pulled it off nonetheless. I don't know if C/C++ is worth doing since we've become the bastard stepchildren of the development world, but I think a Borldandesque .NET IDE that was high quality and low price would really shake things up. And make a lot of money.

          Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalUSA.com

          J 2 Replies Last reply
          0
          • C Christopher Duncan

            All this talk of MS dev tool lack of quality has me a bit nostalgic for the days when developing for MS technologies wasn't a monopoly. For those of you who haven't studied your IT history, there was once an upstart company named Borland who, back in the days of Pascal and C, developed a killer compiler and IDE, long before MS came along with Visual C++. It was fast. It was full featured. And it was really inexpensive. Turbo Pascal and Turbo C sold for around $89 when the comparable command line MS C compiler was going for $450. Borland made a lot of sales. Takes money to make money, you say? Not so. Philippe Khan, who started this little party, negotiated a full page ad in PC Magazine, around $5k, on 30 day terms when the norm was cash up front. This bought him enough time to make sales, cover his advertising, and hopefully live to fight another day. And he didn't even have the web to help him. Borland made a lot of money. Sure, you can do web development in any language / environment, but there's a huge market out there with MS skills. The same could be said for Windows development. Given the consistently crappy quality in MS tools, release after release, and a huge market of people who would doubtless pay for something better, especially if it was less expensive, my question is this: Where is the new Borland? Back in the day, it was considered a fool's errand to compete with Microsoft but Borland did it successfully using the oldest trick in the book. They offered superior value for less money. Am I really to believe that no one has the talent to write a .NET IDE that could kick Visual Studio's bug ridden posterior? If so, then it's a sad day for the programmer community, to be sure. There's money to be made here. If I wasn't headed for the exits, I might have a go at it myself. But I'd certainly cheer from the sidelines anyone with the talent and the guts to do what's successfully been done before - challenge the MS monopoly on dev tools and in the process not only make a ton of money, but force MS to get back into competing on quality as Borland once did. With no competition, they have no incentive to give us other than the flaky tools we get.

            Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes

            J Offline
            J Offline
            Jim Crafton
            wrote on last edited by
            #5

            Christopher Duncan wrote:

            There's money to be made here

            Here's were we disagree. I think several factors are at work: 1) Microsoft has become so entrenched that few people are even aware of alternatives, or would be even if they existed 2) A large community of developers (and non-developers for that matter) have grown accustomed to getting part of, or even all of, their developer tools for free. Some (the freetard faction) even go so far as to make free tools a social/political stance. 3) The few people who are aware of alternatives almost always support the ideology of point 2, thus creating an endless feedback loop. I personally would love to be making a living developing great developer tools, like IDEs, frameworks, etc. But I have come to the conclusion that in the current market, no one is going to sell dev tools other than Microsoft. And if you think it's bad on Windows, it's FAR worse on other platforms like Apple or linux. The current work I've done on my framework (and admittedly the start I made at an IDE) are made freely available simply because I'd rather see the work made available to people than just disappear altogether.

            ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Oh

            C 1 Reply Last reply
            0
            • C Christopher Duncan

              Rob Caldecott wrote:

              More competition would be welcome, but taking on MS in the .NET world? Who's going to take that risk? They'd need something gold-plated and incredibly reliable to do so and a development like that is no mean feat.

              A point worth making, and yet, that's rather my point. This is exactly what they said before Borland, who pulled it off nonetheless. I don't know if C/C++ is worth doing since we've become the bastard stepchildren of the development world, but I think a Borldandesque .NET IDE that was high quality and low price would really shake things up. And make a lot of money.

              Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalUSA.com

              J Offline
              J Offline
              Jim Crafton
              wrote on last edited by
              #6

              But the entire market was different when Borland started out, unless I'm greatly mistaken. There was not a culture of "it must be free" that permeated everything software related.

              ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Oh

              C 1 Reply Last reply
              0
              • C Christopher Duncan

                Rob Caldecott wrote:

                More competition would be welcome, but taking on MS in the .NET world? Who's going to take that risk? They'd need something gold-plated and incredibly reliable to do so and a development like that is no mean feat.

                A point worth making, and yet, that's rather my point. This is exactly what they said before Borland, who pulled it off nonetheless. I don't know if C/C++ is worth doing since we've become the bastard stepchildren of the development world, but I think a Borldandesque .NET IDE that was high quality and low price would really shake things up. And make a lot of money.

                Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalUSA.com

                J Offline
                J Offline
                Jim Crafton
                wrote on last edited by
                #7

                Christopher Duncan wrote:

                Borldandesque .NET IDE

                Here's another issue. If you make it based on .NET, you're constantly in a position of playing catch up. Look at what happened to Delphi, it was constantly playing catch-up to Microsoft as it introduce new APIs. .NET would make it even worse, since you're writing to *their* language, API, everything. One change and you're potentially completely screwed.

                ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Oh

                D C 2 Replies Last reply
                0
                • L Lost User

                  I was a very happy user of their tools since Turbo C for DOS. They blew it with Borland C++ 5 which had one of the crappiest bug-ridden IDEs I ever had the misfortune to use. Sigh. Apparently all their best people had been moved to the Delphi project in order to try and compete with VB and they left the interns in charge of their flagship C++ product. Back in the day I was *this* close to using OWL instead of MFC as my Windows C++ framework of choice but my boss, who could see the writing on the wall, convinced me to use MFC and my love affair with Borland started to wane. I'm not a .NET guy, but as far as C++ development goes, I think the Qt framework and it's new IDE, Qt Creator, could be worth keeping an eye on. I have yet to use Qt but I am itching for an excuse to get busy with it as by all accounts, it's a great framework - plus you get cross-platform support out of the box. Being able to write a modern C++ GUI and target Linux and the Mac has piqued my interest, especially now the Qt licensing is more relaxed. But, to be fair (again from a C++ POV), if MS fixed the crappy Intellisense bugs in VS2008 and supplied a help system that wasn't shamefully bad, then I'd be quite happy. Visual Assist X has fixed the first problem for me, and Google pretty much takes care of the second, so any competition in this area would have to be pretty special. The Qt framework and multiple OS support *might* be a start. If MS actually listened to developers, that would be something. There are bugs in Visual Studio that have been present since VS2003, and that's just taking the piss. More competition would be welcome, but taking on MS in the .NET world? Who's going to take that risk? They'd need something gold-plated and incredibly reliable to do so and a development like that is no mean feat.

                  S Offline
                  S Offline
                  Single Step Debugger
                  wrote on last edited by
                  #8

                  Rob Caldecott wrote:

                  More competition would be welcome, but taking on MS in the .NET world? Who's going to take that risk?

                  Borland try this with the Delphi .Net and as result went under.

                  The narrow specialist in the broad sense of the word is a complete idiot in the narrow sense of the word. Advertise here – minimum three posts per day are guaranteed.

                  C 1 Reply Last reply
                  0
                  • J Jim Crafton

                    Christopher Duncan wrote:

                    Borldandesque .NET IDE

                    Here's another issue. If you make it based on .NET, you're constantly in a position of playing catch up. Look at what happened to Delphi, it was constantly playing catch-up to Microsoft as it introduce new APIs. .NET would make it even worse, since you're writing to *their* language, API, everything. One change and you're potentially completely screwed.

                    ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Oh

                    D Offline
                    D Offline
                    dighn
                    wrote on last edited by
                    #9

                    Agreed. Unlike C++, .Net is essentially Microsoft's toy. You'd be competing with them on their terms. Would one create a separate implementation of .Net or use the one from Microsoft, assuming that's legally possible? The latter option creates an even higher reliance on Microsoft, and the former... well, the implementation of .Net is a massive and difficult undertaking as seen from the Mono project. And frankly software like Visual Studio has gotten so big and complex that it would take a lot of resources to create something that's competitive with it, and that creates a huge risk.

                    J C 2 Replies Last reply
                    0
                    • C Christopher Duncan

                      All this talk of MS dev tool lack of quality has me a bit nostalgic for the days when developing for MS technologies wasn't a monopoly. For those of you who haven't studied your IT history, there was once an upstart company named Borland who, back in the days of Pascal and C, developed a killer compiler and IDE, long before MS came along with Visual C++. It was fast. It was full featured. And it was really inexpensive. Turbo Pascal and Turbo C sold for around $89 when the comparable command line MS C compiler was going for $450. Borland made a lot of sales. Takes money to make money, you say? Not so. Philippe Khan, who started this little party, negotiated a full page ad in PC Magazine, around $5k, on 30 day terms when the norm was cash up front. This bought him enough time to make sales, cover his advertising, and hopefully live to fight another day. And he didn't even have the web to help him. Borland made a lot of money. Sure, you can do web development in any language / environment, but there's a huge market out there with MS skills. The same could be said for Windows development. Given the consistently crappy quality in MS tools, release after release, and a huge market of people who would doubtless pay for something better, especially if it was less expensive, my question is this: Where is the new Borland? Back in the day, it was considered a fool's errand to compete with Microsoft but Borland did it successfully using the oldest trick in the book. They offered superior value for less money. Am I really to believe that no one has the talent to write a .NET IDE that could kick Visual Studio's bug ridden posterior? If so, then it's a sad day for the programmer community, to be sure. There's money to be made here. If I wasn't headed for the exits, I might have a go at it myself. But I'd certainly cheer from the sidelines anyone with the talent and the guts to do what's successfully been done before - challenge the MS monopoly on dev tools and in the process not only make a ton of money, but force MS to get back into competing on quality as Borland once did. With no competition, they have no incentive to give us other than the flaky tools we get.

                      Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes

                      P Offline
                      P Offline
                      phannon86
                      wrote on last edited by
                      #10

                      Our company has moved over to Delphi, so now I use RAD Studio (formerly BDS) 2009 and let me say this, I relish in every chance I get to use VS2005 (for maintenence projects).

                      He who makes a beast out of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man

                      1 Reply Last reply
                      0
                      • J Jim Crafton

                        Christopher Duncan wrote:

                        Borldandesque .NET IDE

                        Here's another issue. If you make it based on .NET, you're constantly in a position of playing catch up. Look at what happened to Delphi, it was constantly playing catch-up to Microsoft as it introduce new APIs. .NET would make it even worse, since you're writing to *their* language, API, everything. One change and you're potentially completely screwed.

                        ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Oh

                        C Offline
                        C Offline
                        Christopher Duncan
                        wrote on last edited by
                        #11

                        Actually, Borland had to deal both with DOS (a Microsoft product) and Windows, and thus were vulnerable to operating system architecture and API changes, etc. That makes it harder, but obviously not impossible.

                        Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalUSA.com

                        J 1 Reply Last reply
                        0
                        • J Jim Crafton

                          But the entire market was different when Borland started out, unless I'm greatly mistaken. There was not a culture of "it must be free" that permeated everything software related.

                          ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Oh

                          C Offline
                          C Offline
                          Christopher Duncan
                          wrote on last edited by
                          #12

                          There's no free product comparable to VS, so a lower priced, higher quality product would be viable.

                          Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalUSA.com

                          J 2 Replies Last reply
                          0
                          • D dighn

                            Agreed. Unlike C++, .Net is essentially Microsoft's toy. You'd be competing with them on their terms. Would one create a separate implementation of .Net or use the one from Microsoft, assuming that's legally possible? The latter option creates an even higher reliance on Microsoft, and the former... well, the implementation of .Net is a massive and difficult undertaking as seen from the Mono project. And frankly software like Visual Studio has gotten so big and complex that it would take a lot of resources to create something that's competitive with it, and that creates a huge risk.

                            J Offline
                            J Offline
                            Jim Crafton
                            wrote on last edited by
                            #13

                            dighn wrote:

                            And frankly software like Visual Studio and .Net has gotten so big and complex that it would take a lot of resources to create something that's competitive with it, and that creates a huge risk.

                            Actually I don't agree with you there. A small team of really good programmers working full time on this could churn out some astonishing stuff assuming they didn't try and re-invent the wheel for everything. There are some astonishing projects out there that could taken advantage of for building a tool like this. But getting the seed money to pay a small team, say 5 guys, with full time salaries for a year? Pfft, forget about it.

                            ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Oh

                            M 1 Reply Last reply
                            0
                            • C Christopher Duncan

                              Actually, Borland had to deal both with DOS (a Microsoft product) and Windows, and thus were vulnerable to operating system architecture and API changes, etc. That makes it harder, but obviously not impossible.

                              Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalUSA.com

                              J Offline
                              J Offline
                              Jim Crafton
                              wrote on last edited by
                              #14

                              True, but the development market wasn't what it is today. As I understand things the market was a lot more open, there was a much wider diversity then than there is now. So people, it seems, were more open to something like this than they are now.

                              ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Oh

                              1 Reply Last reply
                              0
                              • C Christopher Duncan

                                There's no free product comparable to VS, so a lower priced, higher quality product would be viable.

                                Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalUSA.com

                                J Offline
                                J Offline
                                Jim Crafton
                                wrote on last edited by
                                #15

                                True, but there's become a mindset of "if it's not from Microsoft, then I'm probably not going to pay for it". Or at least that's how it appears to me.

                                ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Oh

                                1 Reply Last reply
                                0
                                • S Single Step Debugger

                                  Rob Caldecott wrote:

                                  More competition would be welcome, but taking on MS in the .NET world? Who's going to take that risk?

                                  Borland try this with the Delphi .Net and as result went under.

                                  The narrow specialist in the broad sense of the word is a complete idiot in the narrow sense of the word. Advertise here – minimum three posts per day are guaranteed.

                                  C Offline
                                  C Offline
                                  Christopher Duncan
                                  wrote on last edited by
                                  #16

                                  A fair point, but by then they'd evolved into another huge and stupid company (which also killed their C++ product). Being big is often not an advantage, but actually quite the opposite.

                                  Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalUSA.com

                                  1 Reply Last reply
                                  0
                                  • C Christopher Duncan

                                    All this talk of MS dev tool lack of quality has me a bit nostalgic for the days when developing for MS technologies wasn't a monopoly. For those of you who haven't studied your IT history, there was once an upstart company named Borland who, back in the days of Pascal and C, developed a killer compiler and IDE, long before MS came along with Visual C++. It was fast. It was full featured. And it was really inexpensive. Turbo Pascal and Turbo C sold for around $89 when the comparable command line MS C compiler was going for $450. Borland made a lot of sales. Takes money to make money, you say? Not so. Philippe Khan, who started this little party, negotiated a full page ad in PC Magazine, around $5k, on 30 day terms when the norm was cash up front. This bought him enough time to make sales, cover his advertising, and hopefully live to fight another day. And he didn't even have the web to help him. Borland made a lot of money. Sure, you can do web development in any language / environment, but there's a huge market out there with MS skills. The same could be said for Windows development. Given the consistently crappy quality in MS tools, release after release, and a huge market of people who would doubtless pay for something better, especially if it was less expensive, my question is this: Where is the new Borland? Back in the day, it was considered a fool's errand to compete with Microsoft but Borland did it successfully using the oldest trick in the book. They offered superior value for less money. Am I really to believe that no one has the talent to write a .NET IDE that could kick Visual Studio's bug ridden posterior? If so, then it's a sad day for the programmer community, to be sure. There's money to be made here. If I wasn't headed for the exits, I might have a go at it myself. But I'd certainly cheer from the sidelines anyone with the talent and the guts to do what's successfully been done before - challenge the MS monopoly on dev tools and in the process not only make a ton of money, but force MS to get back into competing on quality as Borland once did. With no competition, they have no incentive to give us other than the flaky tools we get.

                                    Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes

                                    K Offline
                                    K Offline
                                    Kent Sharkey
                                    wrote on last edited by
                                    #17

                                    Certainly not at the same scale as the old Borland, but I think JetBrains has been successful at doing what Borland used to do. They have great IDEs for Java and Ruby, and Resharper is a great support for VS. I imagine they don't really want to compete directly with Redmond, but if they came out with a small, light fast IDE for VS, I know I might switch.

                                    -------------- TTFN - Kent

                                    M D 2 Replies Last reply
                                    0
                                    • J Jim Crafton

                                      dighn wrote:

                                      And frankly software like Visual Studio and .Net has gotten so big and complex that it would take a lot of resources to create something that's competitive with it, and that creates a huge risk.

                                      Actually I don't agree with you there. A small team of really good programmers working full time on this could churn out some astonishing stuff assuming they didn't try and re-invent the wheel for everything. There are some astonishing projects out there that could taken advantage of for building a tool like this. But getting the seed money to pay a small team, say 5 guys, with full time salaries for a year? Pfft, forget about it.

                                      ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Oh

                                      M Offline
                                      M Offline
                                      Mustafa Ismail Mustafa
                                      wrote on last edited by
                                      #18

                                      If it can be proved to be profitable, the investors will put up the cash. It could be something as subtle as trying to build an IDE so good that MS will simply buy the company out right.

                                      If the post was helpful, please vote! Current activities: Book: Foundation's Edge by Isaac Asimov Project: Hospital Automation, final stage Learning: Image analysis, LINQ Now and forever, defiant to the end. What is Multiple Sclerosis[^]?

                                      J 1 Reply Last reply
                                      0
                                      • C Christopher Duncan

                                        There's no free product comparable to VS, so a lower priced, higher quality product would be viable.

                                        Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalUSA.com

                                        J Offline
                                        J Offline
                                        Jim Crafton
                                        wrote on last edited by
                                        #19

                                        Christopher Duncan wrote:

                                        There's no free product comparable to VS

                                        http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/[^] I don't know how it compares, and the few times I tried I always thought it was pretty flaky, but it's out there. Plus Microsoft now gives away the Express editions.

                                        ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Oh

                                        M M 2 Replies Last reply
                                        0
                                        • M Mustafa Ismail Mustafa

                                          If it can be proved to be profitable, the investors will put up the cash. It could be something as subtle as trying to build an IDE so good that MS will simply buy the company out right.

                                          If the post was helpful, please vote! Current activities: Book: Foundation's Edge by Isaac Asimov Project: Hospital Automation, final stage Learning: Image analysis, LINQ Now and forever, defiant to the end. What is Multiple Sclerosis[^]?

                                          J Offline
                                          J Offline
                                          Jim Crafton
                                          wrote on last edited by
                                          #20

                                          Mustafa Ismail Mustafa wrote:

                                          It could be something as subtle as trying to build an IDE so good that MS will simply buy the company out right.

                                          Ugh, what a depressing thing to work for. All that hard work, just to see it get swallowed up and disappear. :(

                                          ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Oh

                                          M 1 Reply Last reply
                                          0
                                          Reply
                                          • Reply as topic
                                          Log in to reply
                                          • Oldest to Newest
                                          • Newest to Oldest
                                          • Most Votes


                                          • Login

                                          • Don't have an account? Register

                                          • Login or register to search.
                                          • First post
                                            Last post
                                          0
                                          • Categories
                                          • Recent
                                          • Tags
                                          • Popular
                                          • World
                                          • Users
                                          • Groups