So where is the new Borland?
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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.
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
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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
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
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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
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.
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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
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 :)
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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[^]?
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?
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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
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
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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
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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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
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.
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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
What, no Lisp? Must be flawed.
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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.
I think the success of the Express products (much to the chagrin of some inside Microsoft, I'm sure) say that all of these in a single product aren't that necessary. Personally, I'd be happy with: - Starts in 3-5s, with an editor I can't out-type - integrated debugger - Intellisense (although I admit my happiest .NET development was just using UltraEdit and the command-line compilers) and refactoring support - single language support (I can live with multiple tools for different languages) - a better extensibility and project/template model than VS - good CSS edit support I can see the need (for some) for WPF and WinForms designers, but I rarely do desktop dev anymore. The ASP.NET designer is just ... not useful, IMO. I can certainly see your list being important to replace VS in an enterprise, but I don't see all those features being needed for all users (but then, I don't think most developers need the big-box VS package either) I'll admit it's been a long time since I looked at SharpDevelop. At my last employer, touching it was pretty much equivalent with getting fired (that whole LGPL thing), and I always associated it with desktop dev. I will take another look though, thank you.
-------------- TTFN - Kent
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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
Doesn't XACC.IDE count? :confused: Someone mentioned Borland's "like a book" licensing, and indeed that was a big factor in their success. But even more important was that Borland got into the colleges (at least the ones I went to). We had Turbo Pascal in the labs, therefore when the college added C it was Turbo C, and when Turbo C++ was released that was added. Furthermore, Borland offered student licensing (with no support) for half price (as I recall). I didn't even know Microsoft made competing products, I just looked them up now... huh, never heard of them. I still use Borland's free command-line C/C++ 5.5 to build C programs, but I never got around to trying their C# Builder.
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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[^]?
I have all three versions and you're right, not bad sums it up. It does have a reasonable VB to C# and vice-versa tool, so it is useful from that perspective. Unlike MS with VS though, each version gets slightly better. However, the devs for the product are (or at least used to be) confirmed open source disciples. So unless, for some reason they decide to sell it, it is unlikely to become a paid-for product.
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.”
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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
I agree with you, for the time being, there isn't another tool that can assume the multi-paradigm role that VS plays in a developer's life. I speak mainly for myself but I am sure that a massive proportion of the Windows developer herd is like that as well. The ultimate peeve is why? MS, unlike a mom & pop software house, has huge resources at its disposal. I grew up on MS and I remember the ecstasy I felt when I was the only one to be selected as an intern from my school and then as an employee from between all the interns. One of the reasons I hated working at MS was the feeling that I was nothing more than cog, a spare part. The point I'm trying to make is that they shouldn't be making such silly mistakes, IDE OS or otherwise. I can accept bugs in a program, this is something that we as developers and engineers have to accept in our working lives, but I cannot understand, accept or forgive silly mistakes that should have been caught by the coders, testers and unit testing. What's worse, MS has actually gotten audacious enough not to care and therefore you have bugs that have persisted since VS 2003 in some cases. That is so not good. It tells me MS doesn't give a rat's ass what I, or my fellow developer, does so long as we shell out the cash to buy their next edition. The thing is, how long is that going to last? Chris was venting about that.
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[^]?
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What, no Lisp? Must be flawed.
Nemanja Trifunovic wrote:
What, no Lisp Lithp? Must Mutht be flawed
Fixed that for you. :-D Sorry but I had to do it. :-\ :-O
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.”
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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
You are absolutely correct! In the day Borland kicked MS's butt, they had an awesome product at a decent price. The debugger alone was worth the price of admission. I, like you wonder what happened to Borland? Did they sell out? Did Philippe make all the money he needed to retire on a beach in the Islands or did he just get tired of butting heads with MS? Hmm that might be worth a google!_
Christopher Duncan wrote:
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.
_I second that. Mike
"It doesn't matter how big a ranch ya' own, or how many cows ya' brand, the size of your funeral is still gonna depend on the weather." -Harry Truman.
Semper Fi http://www.hq4thmarinescomm.com[^] My Site
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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
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?
It's not necessarily a lack of talent, but huge issues with 3rd party component compatibility. And not just for the present state of component development, but for the future state as well. After all, when Microsoft releases a new IDE, whom do you think gets first dibs before it even sees the light of day anywhere else? Component developers! So, any non-MS IDE is always going to be behind the times and not supported by component developers. It's a battle that, I believe, cannot be won. Except by using Microsoft's IDE classes. Which results in a different, but still buggy, third party IDE! Marc
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I have all three versions and you're right, not bad sums it up. It does have a reasonable VB to C# and vice-versa tool, so it is useful from that perspective. Unlike MS with VS though, each version gets slightly better. However, the devs for the product are (or at least used to be) confirmed open source disciples. So unless, for some reason they decide to sell it, it is unlikely to become a paid-for product.
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.”
Yes, that has to be said about their developers, they fix bugs and improve. To that, I salute them and their efforts. But really, VB <-> C# that's academic, why would I care, as a business owner what is running the underlying product so long as it is done right? You can write pos code in C# and any other language for that matter.
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I agree with you, for the time being, there isn't another tool that can assume the multi-paradigm role that VS plays in a developer's life. I speak mainly for myself but I am sure that a massive proportion of the Windows developer herd is like that as well. The ultimate peeve is why? MS, unlike a mom & pop software house, has huge resources at its disposal. I grew up on MS and I remember the ecstasy I felt when I was the only one to be selected as an intern from my school and then as an employee from between all the interns. One of the reasons I hated working at MS was the feeling that I was nothing more than cog, a spare part. The point I'm trying to make is that they shouldn't be making such silly mistakes, IDE OS or otherwise. I can accept bugs in a program, this is something that we as developers and engineers have to accept in our working lives, but I cannot understand, accept or forgive silly mistakes that should have been caught by the coders, testers and unit testing. What's worse, MS has actually gotten audacious enough not to care and therefore you have bugs that have persisted since VS 2003 in some cases. That is so not good. It tells me MS doesn't give a rat's ass what I, or my fellow developer, does so long as we shell out the cash to buy their next edition. The thing is, how long is that going to last? Chris was venting about that.
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Mustafa Ismail Mustafa wrote:
What's worse, MS has actually gotten audacious enough not to care and therefore you have bugs that have persisted since VS 2003 in some cases. That is so not good. It tells me MS doesn't give a rat's ass what I, or my fellow developer, does so long as we shell out the cash to buy their next edition. The thing is, how long is that going to last? Chris was venting about that.
Great insight, you've capture my views on VS quite well.
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
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Mustafa Ismail Mustafa wrote:
What's worse, MS has actually gotten audacious enough not to care and therefore you have bugs that have persisted since VS 2003 in some cases. That is so not good. It tells me MS doesn't give a rat's ass what I, or my fellow developer, does so long as we shell out the cash to buy their next edition. The thing is, how long is that going to last? Chris was venting about that.
Great insight, you've capture my views on VS quite well.
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
Its a sad reality and I myself have become extremely fed up with this attitude. I'm fast approaching a cross roads and I really don't know what to do. To carry on would be going against principles that have been ingrained in me as an engineer by my father before I went to university. To jump ship to something else... well, what's out there is half baked at best so I'll be damaging my livelihood. The other option is to take up Chris Duncan on his offer and change my company's paradigm to develop an IDE that works. I'll hire Graus as my chief software tester and if he is happy with it, I got me a VS killer! :-D
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[^]?
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Yes, that has to be said about their developers, they fix bugs and improve. To that, I salute them and their efforts. But really, VB <-> C# that's academic, why would I care, as a business owner what is running the underlying product so long as it is done right? You can write pos code in C# and any other language for that matter.
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[^]?
Mustafa Ismail Mustafa wrote:
VB <-> C# that's academic, why would I care, as a business owner
You are quite right, for a business, but for hobbyists it is more useful. Some hobbyists become businesses and many tend to use the tools they learnt with. Someone else in this thread said that at their college there were only Borland products, and they didn't know that there were MS alternatives.
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.”