WPF is dead? A sane voice in the madness
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Nah VB is like a bloody cockroach, you'll never get rid of it!
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
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Finally, someone has said something sensible about all this stupid "WPF is dead" nonsense - Mike Taulty explains that WPF is most certainly not dead[^] [As an aside, I'm going to be watching Mike talk about the Silverlight network stack[^] tonight, so if anyone else is around come say hi.]
Simon
I didn't even know it was dead, now you point me to something that tells me it's not ... this is almost half as confusing as working with WPF is. At least WPF is still around and still programmer hostile, undiscoverable, non-intuitive and just plan weird in places ... thank buddha for Expression Blend 4.0, that's an app that makes hand coding in notepad down right desirable. BTW I think the Message Type should be built with checkboxes rather than radio buttons cause this is part rant, part joke (ok, mostly rant, ok radio buttons are ok ;P ).
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There's nowt wrong with VB, and, let's be honest about this, you know it.
There is only one satisfying way to boot a computer.
Euhemerus wrote:
let's be honest about this
True, and I spent many years in it until I moved to c#. My only issue is that VBA developers tend to move into VB.net and that path is well worn.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
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There's nothing wrong with VB, it's the coders that use it poorly that are the culprits :(
There's nothing wrong with Bubonic Plague, it's the victims who carry it poorly that are the culprits
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I couldn't disagree more :) Would you say the same thing about... .Net MFC C++ C Assembly All of these technologies _only_ allowed developers "to do the same thing developers have been doing for years".
I think you inadvertently supported his point.
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It's not dead; it's resting... Or it's, ah...probably pining for the fjords.
It's turtles all the way down.
That is not dead which can eternal lie. And we all know that Microsoft can eternal lie.
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I think you inadvertently supported his point.
Maybe I misunderstand his point then :( I take his point to be: WPF is a technology that is just a different way to do something we could already do and doesn't provide any real/new value. My response to that is: Yes, I can write a WinForms app using MFC, but it's a lot easier to use .Net instead. Likewise, I can make a highly styled application in WinForms, but it's a lot easier in WPF.
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Maybe I misunderstand his point then :( I take his point to be: WPF is a technology that is just a different way to do something we could already do and doesn't provide any real/new value. My response to that is: Yes, I can write a WinForms app using MFC, but it's a lot easier to use .Net instead. Likewise, I can make a highly styled application in WinForms, but it's a lot easier in WPF.
I think the point is that it hasn't gotten any easier. Why? Because user demands are higher. I wrote a print spooler in assembler back around 1980, and that was just as easy to write as some of the stuff I do with WPF today. But it wasn't expected to handle graphics. Difficulty hasn't changed -- the goalposts have moved.
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I think the point is that it hasn't gotten any easier. Why? Because user demands are higher. I wrote a print spooler in assembler back around 1980, and that was just as easy to write as some of the stuff I do with WPF today. But it wasn't expected to handle graphics. Difficulty hasn't changed -- the goalposts have moved.
Sterling Camden / independent consultant wrote:
Difficulty hasn't changed -- the goalposts have moved
Interesting. I like that :). But don't you think that's the way software will always be? As hardware gets more powerful and abstractions make things easier for coders, the bar gets raised. No one expected animations in Win3.1 because there just wasn't enough power to do it and because it wasn't worth developers time. Today we have tools like WPF or jQuery that make animations trivial. So, the bar gets raised and users start demanding more. But that's not a bad thing. Why shouldn't users want more? I like more. The difficulty level hasn't changed for the average developer, but they're doing 10x more with the same degree of difficulty. For example, this app [plug]http://www.audioorchard.com[/plug] was built using Silverlight. Ten years ago I couldn't have written this in near the same time (if at all) with the tools that were available. I guess my point is that I like that the goalposts keep moving :). And my point to the original comment is that we're doing far more today then we did ten years ago because of a whole host of new technologies that came along. Those technologies helped move the posts. Without them, most of the software that I use every day just wouldn't exist.
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Sterling Camden / independent consultant wrote:
Difficulty hasn't changed -- the goalposts have moved
Interesting. I like that :). But don't you think that's the way software will always be? As hardware gets more powerful and abstractions make things easier for coders, the bar gets raised. No one expected animations in Win3.1 because there just wasn't enough power to do it and because it wasn't worth developers time. Today we have tools like WPF or jQuery that make animations trivial. So, the bar gets raised and users start demanding more. But that's not a bad thing. Why shouldn't users want more? I like more. The difficulty level hasn't changed for the average developer, but they're doing 10x more with the same degree of difficulty. For example, this app [plug]http://www.audioorchard.com[/plug] was built using Silverlight. Ten years ago I couldn't have written this in near the same time (if at all) with the tools that were available. I guess my point is that I like that the goalposts keep moving :). And my point to the original comment is that we're doing far more today then we did ten years ago because of a whole host of new technologies that came along. Those technologies helped move the posts. Without them, most of the software that I use every day just wouldn't exist.
Did anyone say it was a bad thing?
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Did anyone say it was a bad thing?
I think that's what the original comment was saying.
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I think that's what the original comment was saying.
Not necessarily. Frustration with having to keep up does not equate to an evaluation that the system is bad, even if it could be improved.
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Not necessarily. Frustration with having to keep up does not equate to an evaluation that the system is bad, even if it could be improved.
I think the point "doing the same thing" was meant in the context that, in a lot of ways, developers ARE doing the same things we've always been doing. The difference is the appearance and how the content is processed. For example: for all the technology advances we've gone through, payroll processing is *still* payroll processing and comes up with the same kinds of answers that we were coming up with back in the DOS days. I wrote applications back in DOS that were "generally" as complex as anything I'm dealing with today; it just wasn't as "pretty". Yes, there has been a ton of innovation - we couldn't process photos back then, nor could we store documents as PDF files for retrieval instantly. The point of the O.P. was a generalization. Maybe it would have been more appropriate to say that MUCH of what we do as developers is still the same. Yes, the constant upgrade cycle can be frustrating. Just as soon as you learn one way of doing things someone comes along and tells you that you now have to do it differently. The thing is ... it's not entirely true. You don't have to upgrade at EVERY opportunity; you can "leap-frog" it. Stick with a technology that works for awhile then upgrade your tool set when demand requires it. The Windows platform is "evolving" but much of what you were doing 5 years ago is still applicable. 10 years from now? Maybe not - but incremental change doesn't have to be too much of a shocker if you just learn how to determine when change is necessary for your situation. Make sense? -Max :D
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I think the point "doing the same thing" was meant in the context that, in a lot of ways, developers ARE doing the same things we've always been doing. The difference is the appearance and how the content is processed. For example: for all the technology advances we've gone through, payroll processing is *still* payroll processing and comes up with the same kinds of answers that we were coming up with back in the DOS days. I wrote applications back in DOS that were "generally" as complex as anything I'm dealing with today; it just wasn't as "pretty". Yes, there has been a ton of innovation - we couldn't process photos back then, nor could we store documents as PDF files for retrieval instantly. The point of the O.P. was a generalization. Maybe it would have been more appropriate to say that MUCH of what we do as developers is still the same. Yes, the constant upgrade cycle can be frustrating. Just as soon as you learn one way of doing things someone comes along and tells you that you now have to do it differently. The thing is ... it's not entirely true. You don't have to upgrade at EVERY opportunity; you can "leap-frog" it. Stick with a technology that works for awhile then upgrade your tool set when demand requires it. The Windows platform is "evolving" but much of what you were doing 5 years ago is still applicable. 10 years from now? Maybe not - but incremental change doesn't have to be too much of a shocker if you just learn how to determine when change is necessary for your situation. Make sense? -Max :D
Yes, I agree with this. If the OP's point was that we'll only know in retrospect what technologies lasted and that no technology is worth being overly dogmatic about, then I DO agree with that. However, I took the original statement to read more along the lines of "We don't need WPF. We can already make forms." That I must disagree with.
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There's nothing wrong with Bubonic Plague, it's the victims who carry it poorly that are the culprits
That's how I feel about Java... ;) VB is just a simpler language than C/C++/C#, etc. to learn, that has slightly less capabilities and a different syntax. If it's used correctly (the same as if any other language is used correctly) it gets the job done and done well. It's all a matter of personal style at the end of the day :3
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That's how I feel about Java... ;) VB is just a simpler language than C/C++/C#, etc. to learn, that has slightly less capabilities and a different syntax. If it's used correctly (the same as if any other language is used correctly) it gets the job done and done well. It's all a matter of personal style at the end of the day :3
The problem is that it's "simpler syntax" teaches bad programming. Of course, the majority of what's coded in C# is only marginally better, even though C# does provide some language features that could be used to code intelligently, but are largely ignored. Even so, C# is generally too verbose and type-anal -- which is fine for novices.
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Yes, I agree with this. If the OP's point was that we'll only know in retrospect what technologies lasted and that no technology is worth being overly dogmatic about, then I DO agree with that. However, I took the original statement to read more along the lines of "We don't need WPF. We can already make forms." That I must disagree with.
Herbrandson wrote:
However, I took the original statement to read more along the lines of "We don't need WPF. We can already make forms." That I must disagree with.
Maybe we don't need WPF. Maybe we do. I only heard of WPF recently myself and haven't even looked into it yet. I just use the forms engine provided by VS2008. Perhaps it uses WPF but as an application developer should I even have to care? I can build a form, wire up events and build an application. If the underlying technology is WPF then so what? This returns us to the point being made by the OP. In the context of what I just said I'm still "doing the same thing that developers have always done" aren't I? 20 years ago I built forms that handled I/O - today I'm doing the "same thing" - except now I've got stuff like image boxes, video controls and web controls. Now I've got a SQL Server DB that I can talk to instead of a flat-file or BTrieve or Access DB - but I'm still doing the "same thing" (as the OP put it). In that context, then, maybe VS2008 needs WPF but do I as a developer need it? (Oh oh ... chicken-egg discussion!) When the next "Gee-Whiz" tool comes out that I decide to upgrade to, should I be concerned about whether it supports WPF or should I simply ask "Will it still run under Windows"? I spent many years hamstrung by the attitude that I had to "know it all" ... I.E. I had to understand everything about the technology "underneath" the code I was writing. I think I developed that because for my first several years I was a systems-level developer. It can be a powerful thing to understand machine architecture right down to the bare metal. However as time went on and I tried to move on into app development it slowed me down - because I couldn't just accept the fact that there was technology I had to depend on that *I* didn't write. Fortunately I set that attitude aside in recent years! ;-) Sorry ... didn't mean to get to ruminating. I enjoy watching (and participating in) some of these discussions. I reached a point several years ago, though (fortunately before I fried my brain) where I realized that these technologies will come and go and to not get in a froth over it. If WPF dies it will just be replaced with something better (or not) and I won't lose sleep over it either way. I'll just continue "making programs" with the tool that works best. -Max :D (EDIT: I got curious about what WPF is so did a little looking up. OK, so THAT's how they come u
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That's how I feel about Java... ;) VB is just a simpler language than C/C++/C#, etc. to learn, that has slightly less capabilities and a different syntax. If it's used correctly (the same as if any other language is used correctly) it gets the job done and done well. It's all a matter of personal style at the end of the day :3
Ummm... VB is not really a language... Any language that depends on newline and tab as syntactic pre-requisites should not be considered a language :-D . I only like one thing in VB, the keyword Nothing haha...
Ashish Kaila