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  3. So where is the new Borland?

So where is the new Borland?

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  • 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
      • K Kent Sharkey

        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 Offline
        M Offline
        Mustafa Ismail Mustafa
        wrote on last edited by
        #21

        ReSharper is simply insanely awesome. It is without a doubt one of the top 3 tools that after using I have no idea how I was able to code without.

        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[^]?

        1 Reply Last reply
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        • J Jim Crafton

          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 Offline
          M Offline
          Mustafa Ismail Mustafa
          wrote on last edited by
          #22

          Its not bad and that's the sum of it. Not bad.

          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[^]?

          H 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

            E Offline
            E Offline
            Electron Shepherd
            wrote on last edited by
            #23

            Christopher Duncan wrote:

            Borland did it successfully using the oldest trick in the book. They offered superior value for less money.

            They also changed the rules: Before Borland, run-time licence fees to the compiler manufacturer were the norm. Borland got rid of those.

            Server and Network Monitoring

            1 Reply Last reply
            0
            • J Jim Crafton

              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 Offline
              M Offline
              Mustafa Ismail Mustafa
              wrote on last edited by
              #24

              Some people will work for a profit, others will work for passion. Personally, I'd like to hit a cross in between, I'm really passionate about my work (not the current stuff though :() but I do have a family to feed and I'd like to think that I made the right choice choosing engineering instead of medicine like my mom wanted (personally, I just don't want to hear her say "I told you so!")

              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 Y 2 Replies Last reply
              0
              • M Mustafa Ismail Mustafa

                Some people will work for a profit, others will work for passion. Personally, I'd like to hit a cross in between, I'm really passionate about my work (not the current stuff though :() but I do have a family to feed and I'd like to think that I made the right choice choosing engineering instead of medicine like my mom wanted (personally, I just don't want to hear her say "I told you so!")

                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
                #25

                Couldn't agree more! But still, even though making the presumably large chunk of money you'd get from the sale, it would be really sad to see the software die (which is exactly what would happen).

                ¡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

                  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
                  Kevin McFarlane
                  wrote on last edited by
                  #26

                  This perhaps explains the lack of focus in the IDE re: C++ at least MSDN Flash Poll Question Results from last poll: What language would you like to be using in April 2010 for new applications? 55% C# 17% Visual Basic 6% BBC Basic :-) 4% C++ 4% Other 3% F# 3% Ruby 2% Java 2% Python 2% PHP 1% JavaScript 1% Haskell

                  Kevin

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                  • K Kevin McFarlane

                    This perhaps explains the lack of focus in the IDE re: C++ at least MSDN Flash Poll Question Results from last poll: What language would you like to be using in April 2010 for new applications? 55% C# 17% Visual Basic 6% BBC Basic :-) 4% C++ 4% Other 3% F# 3% Ruby 2% Java 2% Python 2% PHP 1% JavaScript 1% Haskell

                    Kevin

                    D Offline
                    D Offline
                    Douglas Troy
                    wrote on last edited by
                    #27

                    I'd like to see the difference between those poll results and What language will you be using in April 2010 for new application development ... Just because a developer wants to use C#, doesn't mean they get to ... Just a thought. :)


                    :..::. Douglas H. Troy ::..
                    Bad Astronomy |VCF|wxWidgets|WTL

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                    • K Kevin McFarlane

                      This perhaps explains the lack of focus in the IDE re: C++ at least MSDN Flash Poll Question Results from last poll: What language would you like to be using in April 2010 for new applications? 55% C# 17% Visual Basic 6% BBC Basic :-) 4% C++ 4% Other 3% F# 3% Ruby 2% Java 2% Python 2% PHP 1% JavaScript 1% Haskell

                      Kevin

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                      R Offline
                      Robert Surtees
                      wrote on last edited by
                      #28

                      This means 72% of the developers that are surfing instead of working are .NET developers. :)

                      1 Reply Last reply
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                      • D Douglas Troy

                        I'd like to see the difference between those poll results and What language will you be using in April 2010 for new application development ... Just because a developer wants to use C#, doesn't mean they get to ... Just a thought. :)


                        :..::. Douglas H. Troy ::..
                        Bad Astronomy |VCF|wxWidgets|WTL

                        D Offline
                        D Offline
                        Dan Neely
                        wrote on last edited by
                        #29

                        I'd settle for a scientific poll of either type.

                        It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. -- Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

                        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.

                          S Offline
                          S Offline
                          Stuart Dootson
                          wrote on last edited by
                          #30

                          Rob Caldecott wrote:

                          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.

                          Qt have (a level of) Visual Studio support[^] - I think my ideal GUI development setup for Windows would be Visual Studio + Visual Assist + Qt. Qt is just so much nicer to develop for than MFC - the framework underlying MFC hasn't been seriously worked on for years...and it shows. [edit] In answer to the unasked (as yet) question 'Why use Visual Studio at all?' I prefer VC++ to gcc on Windows [/edit]

                          Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p

                          1 Reply Last reply
                          0
                          • K Kevin McFarlane

                            This perhaps explains the lack of focus in the IDE re: C++ at least MSDN Flash Poll Question Results from last poll: What language would you like to be using in April 2010 for new applications? 55% C# 17% Visual Basic 6% BBC Basic :-) 4% C++ 4% Other 3% F# 3% Ruby 2% Java 2% Python 2% PHP 1% JavaScript 1% Haskell

                            Kevin

                            C Offline
                            C Offline
                            Chris Austin
                            wrote on last edited by
                            #31

                            How many professional python/java/ruby/php/haskell developers are participating in a MSDN flash quiz?

                            Sovereign ingredient for a happy marriage: Pay cash or do without. Interest charges not only eat up a household budget; awareness of debt eats up domestic felicity. --Lazarus Long Avoid the crowd. Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece. --Ralph Charell

                            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

                              L Offline
                              L Offline
                              Lost User
                              wrote on last edited by
                              #32

                              Christopher Duncan wrote:

                              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?

                              In defence of Visual Studio, it would take a single person quite some time to rebuild all those features. There's even an icon-editor embedded! It shows class-diagrams of your code, has some very cool IntelliSense, integrates with SourceSafe/SVN, features a very nifty debugger and has a site dedicated to developers who want to write plugins for it.

                              Christopher Duncan wrote:

                              There's money to be made here.

                              Yes, there is. There is however, quite some competition. The Visual Studio editions include a free Express version. Next to that, there's SharpDevelop, which is also free and runs from USB. Visual Studio is quite large and it takes a few moments for it to load. If you just want to edit or review some code quickly, then check out ZeusEdit[^]. It also supports SVN, and loads quite fast. A nice addition to the toolbox, but not an alternative to Visual Studio.

                              I are troll :)

                              1 Reply Last reply
                              0
                              • K Kent Sharkey

                                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

                                D Offline
                                D Offline
                                Daniel Grunwald
                                wrote on last edited by
                                #33

                                Kent Sharkey wrote:

                                small, light fast IDE for VS

                                The main point of VS is that it is NOT small/light. Its feature list is so enormous that it's impossible for a small company to get anything similar. Just ask a few people here what features would be must-have for a new IDE and combine those lists. I'm pretty sure those features alone would be more than what fits in "small, light". My guess of the "must-have" feature list is: - C# IntelliSense, refactoring (at least the simple ones from VS08) - same for VB - C++/CLI IntelliSense - WinForms designer - ASP.NET designer - ASP.NET IntelliSense - WPF designer - XAML IntelliSense - Integrated Debugger (both managed and unmanaged) - Edit and Continue - Database explorer / using database tables in the various designers - Compatible with existing VS project formats - Compatible with Team Foundation Server - Compatible with ReSharper No one needs all of those features, but miss one of them and a lot of programmers won't even consider your IDE, no matter how good it is. And remember that only Microsoft has access to the inner workings of a C# compiler (Mono's gmcs doesn't count because it's horribly structured and not reusable at all for IDE purposes). Anyone else who wants to support features like Edit+Continue would first have to write their own compiler. By the way: what do you think of SharpDevelop? (I'm one of the SharpDevelop developers) Is it not fast enough? Not enough features? Not stable enough? At least it's pretty small - actually most of the current download size comes from integrated third-party code like WiX, Subversion, SHFB, PartCover, NUnit, Boo.

                                K 1 Reply Last reply
                                0
                                • M Mustafa Ismail Mustafa

                                  Some people will work for a profit, others will work for passion. Personally, I'd like to hit a cross in between, I'm really passionate about my work (not the current stuff though :() but I do have a family to feed and I'd like to think that I made the right choice choosing engineering instead of medicine like my mom wanted (personally, I just don't want to hear her say "I told you so!")

                                  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[^]?

                                  Y Offline
                                  Y Offline
                                  Yusuf
                                  wrote on last edited by
                                  #34

                                  Mustafa Ismail Mustafa wrote:

                                  "I told you so!"

                                  Moms are always right :doh: If we all turn out what our mom wants us to be then .... :sigh: seriously though, I get in trouble with my family for not having "strong feeling" as to what my kids should study. I tell them, I don't care what they want/choose as long as they work hard and excel in what they want to be. I'll be there to support and guide them but not choose for them.

                                  Yusuf May I help you?

                                  S 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

                                    J Offline
                                    J Offline
                                    Judah Gabriel Himango
                                    wrote on last edited by
                                    #35

                                    Interestingly, the Turbo Pascal you praise so highly was written by none other than the chief architect of C#, Anders Heiljsberg. On the topic of competitors, there's the free, open source IDE SharpDevelop, and the free, open source MonoDevelop. That the *really* expensive Visual Studio still whips these free things speaks a lot about the quality of Visual Studio. You think VS sucks? Try using these other tools and you'll see just how great VS is. To make matters worse, many Microsoft shops are unwilling to try non-MS tools. Silly, but that's reality right now. I think it's extremely difficult to write a darn good multi-language IDE with debugging, intellisense, designer support, etc. I think VS does a pretty darn good job. There are problems (mostly designer issues and some native code support problems), but frankly, I've yet to see any tool do a better job.

                                    Religiously blogging on the intarwebs since the early 21st century: Kineti L'Tziyon Judah Himango

                                    M 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

                                      C Offline
                                      C Offline
                                      CalvinHobbies
                                      wrote on last edited by
                                      #36

                                      think I last saw it 45-65 bucks at the local super drug store saddly in the discount bin. Before I got an offical copy of VS.net I worked on borland ( I think I still have the package installed on the "Old Bones Box". There is always ALTS to MS. Java, php come to mind. Course I'm the one to talk, I've been doing alot of my graphics designs for logos and headers using MS Power point (Doin it quite well actualy). One of these days I'll suck it up and get Paintshop.

                                      ///////////////// Thus spake the master programmer: ``A well-written program is its own heaven; a poorly-written program is its own hell.''

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                                      • J Jim Crafton

                                        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

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                                        Chris Losinger
                                        wrote on last edited by
                                        #37

                                        Jim Crafton wrote:

                                        no one is going to sell dev tools other than Microsoft

                                        that's 99.94% true. and the other .06% are just hiding in niches MS hasn't seen yet.

                                        image processing toolkits | batch image processing

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                                        • K Kevin McFarlane

                                          This perhaps explains the lack of focus in the IDE re: C++ at least MSDN Flash Poll Question Results from last poll: What language would you like to be using in April 2010 for new applications? 55% C# 17% Visual Basic 6% BBC Basic :-) 4% C++ 4% Other 3% F# 3% Ruby 2% Java 2% Python 2% PHP 1% JavaScript 1% Haskell

                                          Kevin

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                                          Nemanja Trifunovic
                                          wrote on last edited by
                                          #38

                                          What, no Lisp? Must be flawed.

                                          Programming Blog utf8-cpp

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