So where is the new Borland?
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Its not bad and that's the sum of it. Not bad.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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:
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.”
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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:
blew it with Borland C++ 5
Yep, that was the end of the day for Borland.
Rocky <>< Recent Blog Post: Playing with Kubuntu Linux.. Thinking about Silverlight? www.SilverlightCity.com
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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
I agree with you! Back in the day, we had a Microsoft C Compiler on floppy for IIRC $400. They did not want to patch some bugs and claimed they were not there. Some of us used Lattice C or ??, there was one other main one, but hey that was too many decades ago. Then Borland came out with Turbo C for $49. Okay, 10% the price of Microsoft's product and hey, it worked great! Within a year or two that price moved up to #149 for Borland C/C++ and tools. Still quite a bargain and I was always right on top with my upgrades until 5.0 which killed everything. It was not just their horrible buggy 5.0 version, but they did not keep up with Microsoft on the move to Windows 95 with the new controls it brought. Was a hassle at best to use OWL. Anyway, I think there are a number of issues right now. First you would have to build a better product than VS Express tools, which is rought for small teams to compete with free. Microsoft is putting out some decent things for free and if you are a student, you get the professional tools for free or low cost along with their new program for startups. Then you have the ISV Empower program that brinngs you thousands of dollars worth of tools for $375. That is hard to compete with to say the least! There is always room for a new vision and new tools at a low price, but as developers we have huge amount of tools available now.
Rocky <>< Recent Blog Post: Playing with Kubuntu Linux.. Thinking about Silverlight? www.SilverlightCity.com
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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
Don't rush me, Christopher! I've been working on this for years now. Unfortunately, all I've got are these crappy Microsoft tools to work with, so it's been slow going. Patience, grasshopper...
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
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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
Kent Sharkey wrote:
At my last employer, touching it was pretty much equivalent with getting fired (that whole LGPL thing)
What's with that strange (L)GPL aversion? Sure, you're not allowed to copy/paste SharpDevelop's source code into your apps. But you're also not allowed to ship Visual Studio assemblies (e.g. the Microsoft.VisualStudio.*.dll) with your app. I don't really see where the difference between GPL open-source and commercial code is in this regard - thanks to Reflector, programmers could also try to steal code snippets from the latter. With SharpDevelop, it's actually fine to copy libraries like ICSharpCode.TextEditor into your app, as long as you keep them in separate assemblies. The LGPL only forces you to publish code modifications to the library itself - it's not viral like the GPL. Though we've thought about relicensing SharpDevelop to BSD - the LGPL seems to be frequently misunderstood in the Windows world.
Kent Sharkey wrote:
I always associated it with desktop dev.
That's still true - there are no web development features in SharpDevelop. It can compile Web Application projects, but that's about it - no Web Site projects, no code completion in .aspx files, no IIS debugging (though it's possible to debug ASP.NET applications using Cassini). For us, the primary usage of SharpDevelop is to code the next version SharpDevelop. And that's not a web app. But the main reason we don't have 'web development' support yet is that we don't have a clear feature list for it. Everyone interested in it seems to focus on the ASP.NET designer - the most complex and least important web dev feature they could choose. And then we usually don't hear anything again from them - they probably figured out that an ASP.NET designer is way over their heads.
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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
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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[^]?
Mustafa Ismail Mustafa wrote:
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.
I hit that crossroads 3 years ago. My company dropped .net and moved on. For the high level stuff we use python and for the low level stuff it's C/C++.
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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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
Expensive?? When it comes to giving away software at low price for developers and ISVs Microsoft ranks first. 1. Microsoft BizSpark for startups -> only $100 for 3 years and you get lot of goodies. 2. Empower for ISV ->5 licenses of MSDN for only $375 for 3 years. 3. Microsoft Partner program (Certified level) -> $1450 for 5 licenses of MSDN and 25 licenses of all major products (not for test and development but for actual production use). 4. Microsoft Partner program (Gold Certified level) -> $1450 for 25 licenses of MSDN and 100 licenses of all major products (not for test and development but for actual production use). All the developers/ISVs should know about these options. So when it comes to helping startup companies/ISVs: Microsoft is the best unless you want to launch something on MacOSX or on Java. The tools which came free on those platforms probably made MS provide all these special incentives. As a developer who has developed real life code in VS 2008, XCode, Eclipse, JDeveloper/SQL Developer, IntelliJ idea and NetBeans. I must say that the tools market is very competitive. Microsoft has to compete up with all these other products btw. If .Net development becomes difficult because of tools developers will shift to other platforms. Of course now the IDEs for Java got lot better some even better than VS and VS is trying to catch up. So if you broaden your scope you will see competition in the tools market and all the tools are improving. You can not simply compare the Borland C/Turbo C/Turbo Pascal of yesteryears with the modern IDEs and also not ignore other platforms (esp Java) when looking at the IDE competition.
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I agree with you! Back in the day, we had a Microsoft C Compiler on floppy for IIRC $400. They did not want to patch some bugs and claimed they were not there. Some of us used Lattice C or ??, there was one other main one, but hey that was too many decades ago. Then Borland came out with Turbo C for $49. Okay, 10% the price of Microsoft's product and hey, it worked great! Within a year or two that price moved up to #149 for Borland C/C++ and tools. Still quite a bargain and I was always right on top with my upgrades until 5.0 which killed everything. It was not just their horrible buggy 5.0 version, but they did not keep up with Microsoft on the move to Windows 95 with the new controls it brought. Was a hassle at best to use OWL. Anyway, I think there are a number of issues right now. First you would have to build a better product than VS Express tools, which is rought for small teams to compete with free. Microsoft is putting out some decent things for free and if you are a student, you get the professional tools for free or low cost along with their new program for startups. Then you have the ISV Empower program that brinngs you thousands of dollars worth of tools for $375. That is hard to compete with to say the least! There is always room for a new vision and new tools at a low price, but as developers we have huge amount of tools available now.
Rocky <>< Recent Blog Post: Playing with Kubuntu Linux.. Thinking about Silverlight? www.SilverlightCity.com
Yes. I am always surprised that people don't know about these special programs for ISVs.
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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.
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Mustafa Ismail Mustafa wrote: "But really, VB <-> C# that's academic, why would I care, as a business owner ..." Your business may not care, but I have been around many businesses which often have a goal of using only one language in their code base. In the case of acquring other products or components, having a tool to convert languages can be quite useful in that context. Sigh, I still remember the days of automatic Fortran -> C conversion. Yuck.
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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
I've posted this before, but it bears repeating that Borland really blew it. Microsoft gave them a huge opening in the late 90s with C++ and Borland fell flat on their face. I know several people who worked on the Quattro Pro transition from Borland to WordPerfect. The descriptions they gave of the Borland developers and the code pretty much told the story: as a group the Borland developers loved C++ and hated Windows (in Quattro Pro, they insisted on reinventing the wheel for even basic controls--if you used it way back when you would have picked up on this.) Borland still has a good C++ compiler and the makings of a decent IDE, but it's very clunky and weird to use. One cool feature would have been to fully support WTL with wizards and all that.
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
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Mustafa Ismail Mustafa wrote:
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.
I hit that crossroads 3 years ago. My company dropped .net and moved on. For the high level stuff we use python and for the low level stuff it's C/C++.
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
How is that working out? I've played around with Python, no GUI stuff, but nothing prodcution worthy or even remotely approaching that. Do you use it for web or windows applications? Having been released from the confines of windows, do you use other platforms like *nix? What IDE do you use? Is there a particular framework that you prefer? Man, you should write an article comparing the benefits! :-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[^]?
