Thank you, Microsoft
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Nahh.. the goldfish post was your zenith I think. ;)
“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
John C wrote:
Nahh.. the goldfish post was your zenith I think.
Oh no! It's downhill from here, I guess! :) Marc
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Same really. I'd rather they'd just release something and then concentrate on service packs that fix the bugs etc for a while, maybe with the odd new version that finishes off some of the incomplete bits. As it is the bugs never get fixed and the software is replaced by something totally new a couple of years later, which has its own set of bugs that never get fixed and missing important features etc.
Dave Parker wrote:
As it is the bugs never get fixed
Bingo. Haven't tried VS 2010, but earlier versions seem to always have the same small set of bugs that the space cadets at Redmond can't seem to fix.
Everybody SHUT UP until I finish my coffee...
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About two weeks ago I suggested to my boss that we move all new development over to WPF/Silverlight. I purchased books and installed VS2010 along with the .NET 4 Framework. I've been working on learning the basics of Silverlight over the past two weeks and so far I love the technology. It appears that anything is possible. Today my boss put a print version of this article on my desk: http://www.infoworld.com/t/html5/microsoft-surrenders-silverlight-html5-cross-platform-front-654 Given the clarifications Microsoft has made so far I think the article is ignorant. Irresponsible reporting aside, none of this changes that fact I've been put in a less than ideal situation. Part of the problem is that the life cycle on so many products is getting to be ridiculous. New technologies/methodologies arise quickly, enjoy 15 minutes of fame, and then disappear. My view on this is best illustrated by my actions: I waited until Silverlight 4 to even look at the technology. WPF and Silverlight required a huge investment of time to master. The time involved makes learning "the hottest" every 18 months a foolish waste of time. I don't want VS 2012. I don't want Silverlight 5. I don't want HTML 5. I want a standard IDE that I can use long enough to master and enjoy without three new versions of a platform being introduced while I've yet to complete a project in the original. If they'd slow down a bit and allow a user base to develop maybe they'd enjoy more success. A development life cycle that seems to be driven more by panic than need will destroy adoption. I realize thing are competative, but if the development community is contantly playing catch up I cannot help but feel many of them will get tired and go someplace less dynamic. Where I work we have a 30+ year old mainframe that still does it's job. While we'll never get that from Microsoft I'd settle for something that lasts 5 years.
Microsoft has and will come up with new unproven technologies all the time. Some will stick and some will be abandoned. They have to do that just to remain relevant. That doesn’t mean we, as software developers, need to adjust our development platforms every time something new comes out, especially not for enterprise development. We need to separate personal aspirations from what is best for our employers. We are hired to make our employers money. That’s the bottom line. For enterprise applications, a WinForms client with properly layered service architecture on the server side will provide the most value and reduce time-to-market. Why? Because it has been around for ages and it just works. Couple it with ClickOnce and you get an easy deployment mechanism that works well in most corporate scenarios. If you want to waste your employer’s time and money, go ASP.NET and hack your way around with HTML/CSS/JavaScript/AJAX and all the other components that result in pure technical deficit. From a business perspective, what is the reason to use Silverlight for internal enterprise applications aside from one’s personal aspirations? The only reason I can come up with is if you went down the ASP.NET route (which I did at some point) and are buried in technical deficit and need a way out. It does have some potential in creating less chaos, but only if your employer recognizes that it will take a long time to build a development framework around it especially since it is an immature technology. Though, can you build a business case for it demonstrating cost savings or additional revenue? Ultimately, your choice of development platform really depends on your core business and the applications you develop. In typical scenarios, business applications will be written differently than public-facing applications and as such you should use different development tools to achieve your objectives. Personally, I don’t see a real good business argument for Silverlight. Sure it’s cool and you can do some fancy things with it, but will it make your employer more money? E.g., can you see yourself standing in front of your board of directors making an argument that Silverlight will make or save $2M? If you can come up with a real business argument (other than fear of becoming a dinosaur which your employer does not care about) then go for it. Otherwise, stay with what you have and if you are developing public apps then start looking at HTML 5. I heard Ballmer speak at the recent Gartner conference and my take on it was that they r
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On a different but very related issue... I realised something was wrong the day I (with a decade and a half as a Microsoft developer) needed to ask someone where the 'Save As' option was in the new version of Word. I still find myself wasting time trying to figure out how to do things I've been able to do for years with previous versions. I thought it was early signs of old age, but yesterday I saw a gathering huddled around a PC trying to figure out how to Print Preview. Somebody in Redmond needs to have a Wireless Keyboard shoved so far up their ass that they can type their resignation letter with their tonsils. -Rd
Hit any user to continue.
Yeah, I went through that too, but in a foreign language. By the time 2007 came out, I was in Japan and had been using Office 2003 based on memory of the keystrokes. Sometimes the menu items get resorted in a different language, so position was not safe. Then the menu hit the fan. I cursed.
Narf.
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Microsoft has and will come up with new unproven technologies all the time. Some will stick and some will be abandoned. They have to do that just to remain relevant. That doesn’t mean we, as software developers, need to adjust our development platforms every time something new comes out, especially not for enterprise development. We need to separate personal aspirations from what is best for our employers. We are hired to make our employers money. That’s the bottom line. For enterprise applications, a WinForms client with properly layered service architecture on the server side will provide the most value and reduce time-to-market. Why? Because it has been around for ages and it just works. Couple it with ClickOnce and you get an easy deployment mechanism that works well in most corporate scenarios. If you want to waste your employer’s time and money, go ASP.NET and hack your way around with HTML/CSS/JavaScript/AJAX and all the other components that result in pure technical deficit. From a business perspective, what is the reason to use Silverlight for internal enterprise applications aside from one’s personal aspirations? The only reason I can come up with is if you went down the ASP.NET route (which I did at some point) and are buried in technical deficit and need a way out. It does have some potential in creating less chaos, but only if your employer recognizes that it will take a long time to build a development framework around it especially since it is an immature technology. Though, can you build a business case for it demonstrating cost savings or additional revenue? Ultimately, your choice of development platform really depends on your core business and the applications you develop. In typical scenarios, business applications will be written differently than public-facing applications and as such you should use different development tools to achieve your objectives. Personally, I don’t see a real good business argument for Silverlight. Sure it’s cool and you can do some fancy things with it, but will it make your employer more money? E.g., can you see yourself standing in front of your board of directors making an argument that Silverlight will make or save $2M? If you can come up with a real business argument (other than fear of becoming a dinosaur which your employer does not care about) then go for it. Otherwise, stay with what you have and if you are developing public apps then start looking at HTML 5. I heard Ballmer speak at the recent Gartner conference and my take on it was that they r
Well, my thinking for going with Silverlight is as follows: 1: I read it's a good place to start as an introduction to WPF - sort of a WPF light. 2: WPF seems to be the replacement for Windows Forms and while Windows Forms will be supported for the forseable future it is a very limited technology when compared to WPF and I think Windows Forms will be dropped at some point. Sure you can get customized controls for Windows Forms but I refuse to use 3rd party controls (license fees, upgrades - it's a nightmare) 3: The web applications I write are for internal use only and I see Silverlight as a way to check out of the HTML uproar. Remember XHTML? Yeah, so much for stability there. 4: I don't think HTML 5 will be any more cross browser than HTML 4. It will work, but each browser will have it's quirks. Committee + Different Vendors = Headache. 5: I really hate AJAX and Javascript. I think it is unneccesarily complex and seems to be a bit of a bailing wire/chewing gum/twine approach to development. You can get some slick results but I'd hate to have to maintain it. How accessible is the average AJAX site? Checking business rules client side (for snappy feedback) and server side (for security) is always fun.... totally awful tools, IMHO.
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About two weeks ago I suggested to my boss that we move all new development over to WPF/Silverlight. I purchased books and installed VS2010 along with the .NET 4 Framework. I've been working on learning the basics of Silverlight over the past two weeks and so far I love the technology. It appears that anything is possible. Today my boss put a print version of this article on my desk: http://www.infoworld.com/t/html5/microsoft-surrenders-silverlight-html5-cross-platform-front-654 Given the clarifications Microsoft has made so far I think the article is ignorant. Irresponsible reporting aside, none of this changes that fact I've been put in a less than ideal situation. Part of the problem is that the life cycle on so many products is getting to be ridiculous. New technologies/methodologies arise quickly, enjoy 15 minutes of fame, and then disappear. My view on this is best illustrated by my actions: I waited until Silverlight 4 to even look at the technology. WPF and Silverlight required a huge investment of time to master. The time involved makes learning "the hottest" every 18 months a foolish waste of time. I don't want VS 2012. I don't want Silverlight 5. I don't want HTML 5. I want a standard IDE that I can use long enough to master and enjoy without three new versions of a platform being introduced while I've yet to complete a project in the original. If they'd slow down a bit and allow a user base to develop maybe they'd enjoy more success. A development life cycle that seems to be driven more by panic than need will destroy adoption. I realize thing are competative, but if the development community is contantly playing catch up I cannot help but feel many of them will get tired and go someplace less dynamic. Where I work we have a 30+ year old mainframe that still does it's job. While we'll never get that from Microsoft I'd settle for something that lasts 5 years.
For what it's worth... Scott Guthrie just put the issue to rest once and for all. http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/11/04/silverlight-questions.aspx Silverlight is not going away any time soon, especially in the enterprise space, which I would assume is where a lot of us are at.
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John C wrote:
Nahh.. the goldfish post was your zenith I think.
Oh no! It's downhill from here, I guess! :) Marc
Nope just need to recharge over the weekend - avoid extended analogies etc until Monday. ;)
“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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I can't say I feel very sorry for Silverlight developers right now. They have staked their livelihood on a single company's whims, a company mind you that has a storied history of changing its mind whenever it pleases. "Oh wow, Win32! Time to-" "Err, .NET is in now? Well OK, let's-" "Oh, WPF? I guess that makes since with Vista-" "Silverlight? Really?!" Just to give some examples of how spastic their desktop development toolchain has been. You may as well buck up and learn HTML/JavaScript because that stuff is proven, platform/company-agnostic, and is only going to grow in the future. Now I'm also a bit of an open web app zealot but I wasn't always that way. I still use Windows and I've always loved C#'s syntax and features - I just wouldn't stake my job on them given the choice.
You may as well buck up and learn HTML/JavaScript because that stuff is proven, platform/company-agnostic, and is only going to ...change as rapidly as all the other development platforms, as it has been for the last 15 years. Sticking with HTML has been clinging to a rollercoaster just as much as sticking with Microsoft has been. Plus it means sticking to the whims of 5 different browser makers all at once, which is even more work than sticking to the whims of a single company. I tend to agree that the Microsoft "platform of tomorrow" becomes the platform of yesterday faster than you can even learn it, and that is frustrating, but the entire development world has been doing this in recent years, MS no more or less than anyone else.
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About two weeks ago I suggested to my boss that we move all new development over to WPF/Silverlight. I purchased books and installed VS2010 along with the .NET 4 Framework. I've been working on learning the basics of Silverlight over the past two weeks and so far I love the technology. It appears that anything is possible. Today my boss put a print version of this article on my desk: http://www.infoworld.com/t/html5/microsoft-surrenders-silverlight-html5-cross-platform-front-654 Given the clarifications Microsoft has made so far I think the article is ignorant. Irresponsible reporting aside, none of this changes that fact I've been put in a less than ideal situation. Part of the problem is that the life cycle on so many products is getting to be ridiculous. New technologies/methodologies arise quickly, enjoy 15 minutes of fame, and then disappear. My view on this is best illustrated by my actions: I waited until Silverlight 4 to even look at the technology. WPF and Silverlight required a huge investment of time to master. The time involved makes learning "the hottest" every 18 months a foolish waste of time. I don't want VS 2012. I don't want Silverlight 5. I don't want HTML 5. I want a standard IDE that I can use long enough to master and enjoy without three new versions of a platform being introduced while I've yet to complete a project in the original. If they'd slow down a bit and allow a user base to develop maybe they'd enjoy more success. A development life cycle that seems to be driven more by panic than need will destroy adoption. I realize thing are competative, but if the development community is contantly playing catch up I cannot help but feel many of them will get tired and go someplace less dynamic. Where I work we have a 30+ year old mainframe that still does it's job. While we'll never get that from Microsoft I'd settle for something that lasts 5 years.
Meh, We all know technology is a moving target. Expecting anything to be stable in a sales/marketing stand-point is a fool's errand. In the end, you have to follow your gut. MS changes direction on a whim which is why this hornets nest got stirred up. We are all waiting for that other shoe to drop and MS to yank the rug out from under us. So we read the quotes as we wanted to read them. Silverlight isn't going away. Microsoft has 250 programmers working on developing SL. 250. That's not a dead product. It didn't take center stage at PDC, but that doesn't mean it is dead. IMHO: In the Windows platform world... If you are building desktop apps, go with WPF. (Disclaimer: I write WPF apps.) Why? Because it is a lot more powerful and flexible than WinForms. Sorry for those stuck in WinForm hell, but it's true. It is a lot of work to move to a XAML way of thinking, but it is worth it. Look into MVVM. If you are building web apps, go with your gut. My first gig out of college was as a webmaster. I wrote everything in Perl. I still support clients using PHP. That should give you some idea of my love of the Microsoft aka Evil Empire. If you want to deploy "anywhere", look at Silverlight but understand it's limitations. If you are writing WP7 apps, Silverlight or XNA are the only 2 ways to go. I've written a couple WP7 apps. It was easy after doing 2 years of WPF app development. Sticking with WinForms may be fine for your needs. But the sky is not falling when it comes to WPF. Unless you have to have Silverlight's Web-based features, go with WPF. The ideas you'll learning WPF will downgrade to SL. My $0.02 Ivan
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For what it's worth... Scott Guthrie just put the issue to rest once and for all. http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/11/04/silverlight-questions.aspx Silverlight is not going away any time soon, especially in the enterprise space, which I would assume is where a lot of us are at.
I don't think anything is put to rest... Microsoft is banking on Silverlight and the more coders that buy into it the better for Microsoft.... .Net... lib always changing, vb6 - gone... but was awesome, SilverLight... guess WinCE is... what? All that ribbon fuss... But if I code javascript, any kind of server output, and html... perhaps xhtml.. I can pretty much do the same stuff. Videos... need a compatible runtime or plugin for the browser... or something the OS can render from the browser... or at least launch a viewer for... I use microsoft technologies.. but only to get a job done... when it comes to innovation.. it's not my first pick... because way too many times I've invested in Microsoft wholeheartedly to finely get some good software done to have it antiquated by their current marketing pushes... yet... my UNIX knowlegde... keeps expanding... old stays working pretty much identical... still new technologies... but all centered around standards... makes it easy for everyone to play in the sandbox.... versus choosing a TEAM....
Know way too many languages... master of none!
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About two weeks ago I suggested to my boss that we move all new development over to WPF/Silverlight. I purchased books and installed VS2010 along with the .NET 4 Framework. I've been working on learning the basics of Silverlight over the past two weeks and so far I love the technology. It appears that anything is possible. Today my boss put a print version of this article on my desk: http://www.infoworld.com/t/html5/microsoft-surrenders-silverlight-html5-cross-platform-front-654 Given the clarifications Microsoft has made so far I think the article is ignorant. Irresponsible reporting aside, none of this changes that fact I've been put in a less than ideal situation. Part of the problem is that the life cycle on so many products is getting to be ridiculous. New technologies/methodologies arise quickly, enjoy 15 minutes of fame, and then disappear. My view on this is best illustrated by my actions: I waited until Silverlight 4 to even look at the technology. WPF and Silverlight required a huge investment of time to master. The time involved makes learning "the hottest" every 18 months a foolish waste of time. I don't want VS 2012. I don't want Silverlight 5. I don't want HTML 5. I want a standard IDE that I can use long enough to master and enjoy without three new versions of a platform being introduced while I've yet to complete a project in the original. If they'd slow down a bit and allow a user base to develop maybe they'd enjoy more success. A development life cycle that seems to be driven more by panic than need will destroy adoption. I realize thing are competative, but if the development community is contantly playing catch up I cannot help but feel many of them will get tired and go someplace less dynamic. Where I work we have a 30+ year old mainframe that still does it's job. While we'll never get that from Microsoft I'd settle for something that lasts 5 years.
I agree, technology is moving too fast. It's great when you have all the time in the world to study, but given our work and priorities it's very easy to loose pace and be left behind. I'm trying to catch up now with .Net Framework 4 and it's technologies, but I'm not sure if I will be able to until they release a next version.
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You may as well buck up and learn HTML/JavaScript because that stuff is proven, platform/company-agnostic, and is only going to ...change as rapidly as all the other development platforms, as it has been for the last 15 years. Sticking with HTML has been clinging to a rollercoaster just as much as sticking with Microsoft has been. Plus it means sticking to the whims of 5 different browser makers all at once, which is even more work than sticking to the whims of a single company. I tend to agree that the Microsoft "platform of tomorrow" becomes the platform of yesterday faster than you can even learn it, and that is frustrating, but the entire development world has been doing this in recent years, MS no more or less than anyone else.
Well of course it changes, any tech changes eventually unless it's Bad Tech™. But the point is that HTML/JavaScript probably won't ever be thrown under the bus by a single company; in my view having 5 entities work on it is a pro, not a con. It's not a silver bullet but nothing ever is, really. I just see it as the most future-proof tech right now. YMMV.
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Yesterday, goldfish, today, pawns. You have to realize that we developers are merely pawns in Microsoft's chess game to market its real meat and potatoes product, namely Windows and secondly, Office. The reason being, the more sexy products we develop for those platforms, and the more we develop stuff that looks and feels like whatever Microsoft's current fancy is (ribbon bars, what a crock of crap), the more the naive consumer will say, wow, look at all those nice shiny apps, or something to that effect. So, the sooner you realize you are a pawn, the sooner you can free yourself of the game. Consider the difference: WPF, Silverlight, C#, F#, .NET, Visual Studio, are all pieces in Microsoft's chess game. HTML 5? There is no "product" that this technology is pushing--it's agnostic, and even more insidious to some, it's not directly connected with profit. Microsoft hates that with a passion because it leads to free thinking and free thinking leads to free action. Microsoft wants you all under the yoke of making money for Microsoft. Marc
This is the same type of thinking I get from some folks who always 'blame the politicians' for the messes democratic countries get in, without considering the voter side of things that drives the stupidity. I've worked for many orgs that stay away from the 'hottest tech' rat-wheel.. those folks tend to create better/more stable/more predictable/more profitable products, and for some orgs run by folks completely in love with that same rat-wheel (with the coincident lack of quality and chaos that results). Its easy to blame the provider, but remember that they are simply providing what their customers ask for.. in the absence of that need, things would be a tad more rational. Remember.. Microsoft can't force folks to buy things, its a two way street. Your post ignores this part of the human equation, making it, err.. less than reflective of reality.
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Well, my thinking for going with Silverlight is as follows: 1: I read it's a good place to start as an introduction to WPF - sort of a WPF light. 2: WPF seems to be the replacement for Windows Forms and while Windows Forms will be supported for the forseable future it is a very limited technology when compared to WPF and I think Windows Forms will be dropped at some point. Sure you can get customized controls for Windows Forms but I refuse to use 3rd party controls (license fees, upgrades - it's a nightmare) 3: The web applications I write are for internal use only and I see Silverlight as a way to check out of the HTML uproar. Remember XHTML? Yeah, so much for stability there. 4: I don't think HTML 5 will be any more cross browser than HTML 4. It will work, but each browser will have it's quirks. Committee + Different Vendors = Headache. 5: I really hate AJAX and Javascript. I think it is unneccesarily complex and seems to be a bit of a bailing wire/chewing gum/twine approach to development. You can get some slick results but I'd hate to have to maintain it. How accessible is the average AJAX site? Checking business rules client side (for snappy feedback) and server side (for security) is always fun.... totally awful tools, IMHO.
3. XHTML is still around. 1 and 1.1 won't ever be depracated and browsers will always understand them so there's nothing wrong with that. XHTML lives on in HTML 5 as well, just serve the document as application/xml and close your tags and it's automatically converted. 4. I don't think you've been paying much attention to HTML5 at all from the sounds of it. This isn't really an insult to you but I'd refrain from talking about it until you research things a bit. HTML5 is actually a massive spec and to conform to it you also have to follow the rules on what to do about quirks. Probably the worst thing we've seen from browsers are browser-specific CSS attributes, and those existed long before HTML5/CSS3 and are for mostly trivial things anyways like rounded corners. If you made an HTML5 site using the currently most stable features, it would render exactly the same in any of the current browsers, including IE9. I guarantee you that. 5. Personally I wouldn't code any JavaScript outside of jQuery unless I have to. jQuery is just a really nice, small library that lets you do amazing things, simply. As for tools, the debuggers in Firefox and Chrome are great, although for actual code creation things still seem to be a work in progress. But then again I just use Notepad++.
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3. XHTML is still around. 1 and 1.1 won't ever be depracated and browsers will always understand them so there's nothing wrong with that. XHTML lives on in HTML 5 as well, just serve the document as application/xml and close your tags and it's automatically converted. 4. I don't think you've been paying much attention to HTML5 at all from the sounds of it. This isn't really an insult to you but I'd refrain from talking about it until you research things a bit. HTML5 is actually a massive spec and to conform to it you also have to follow the rules on what to do about quirks. Probably the worst thing we've seen from browsers are browser-specific CSS attributes, and those existed long before HTML5/CSS3 and are for mostly trivial things anyways like rounded corners. If you made an HTML5 site using the currently most stable features, it would render exactly the same in any of the current browsers, including IE9. I guarantee you that. 5. Personally I wouldn't code any JavaScript outside of jQuery unless I have to. jQuery is just a really nice, small library that lets you do amazing things, simply. As for tools, the debuggers in Firefox and Chrome are great, although for actual code creation things still seem to be a work in progress. But then again I just use Notepad++.
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My bad about the HTML 5 comments. I thought they were designing browsers (and releasing them) to work against specs that weren't yet complete.
While it is true that HTML5 as a spec is still under active development, certain parts are more mature than others and those parts are the ones being implemented in browsers right now. I've seen examples of both differences being resolved by newer versions of the spec (Google's O3D vs. WebGL for an easy example, although not really a 1:1 correspondence) and differences in fact being created by newer versions (the whole codec debate for example was because the OGG mandate was removed.) So as to whether quirks will pop up when everything is finally said and done, it is tough to say, I'll give you that. But I don't think any quirks will actually impede development, certainly not like how difficult coding around IE6 used to be (even when it was released.)
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This is the same type of thinking I get from some folks who always 'blame the politicians' for the messes democratic countries get in, without considering the voter side of things that drives the stupidity. I've worked for many orgs that stay away from the 'hottest tech' rat-wheel.. those folks tend to create better/more stable/more predictable/more profitable products, and for some orgs run by folks completely in love with that same rat-wheel (with the coincident lack of quality and chaos that results). Its easy to blame the provider, but remember that they are simply providing what their customers ask for.. in the absence of that need, things would be a tad more rational. Remember.. Microsoft can't force folks to buy things, its a two way street. Your post ignores this part of the human equation, making it, err.. less than reflective of reality.
richard_k wrote:
Your post ignores this part of the human equation, making it, err.. less than reflective of reality.
Indeed! Which begs the question, did someone ask for a platform specific browser package like Silverlight? IIRC, people have been bemoaning the conflicting support of HTML/Javascript in different browsers, wishing for that companies like Microsoft adhered to standards, and that standards addressed real world needs. So how does Silverlight fit this bill? I'm terribly cynical. After watching the PDC presentation on F#, I was left shaking my head, my god, they are REALLY talented at taking a technology and twisting it to promote their own agenda (Azure, cloud computing, etc) while hiding that under something we all theoretically want: access to lots of information and a good way of filtering that information. How they twist F# into a tool to accomplish their agenda (making money for themselves and information providers) while convincing us that F# is THE technology to use for interacting with that information, man, that's truly an accomplishment. Marc
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While it is true that HTML5 as a spec is still under active development, certain parts are more mature than others and those parts are the ones being implemented in browsers right now. I've seen examples of both differences being resolved by newer versions of the spec (Google's O3D vs. WebGL for an easy example, although not really a 1:1 correspondence) and differences in fact being created by newer versions (the whole codec debate for example was because the OGG mandate was removed.) So as to whether quirks will pop up when everything is finally said and done, it is tough to say, I'll give you that. But I don't think any quirks will actually impede development, certainly not like how difficult coding around IE6 used to be (even when it was released.)
I hope you are right. I'm a bit on the pessimistic side in that this whole thing has all the elements of epic failure: 1: A Committee 2: Unfinished specs 3: Multiple Vendors (all of which want to kill each other) 4: Race to Market I'm so excited about this... I can hardly wait for the BLINK tag to make a big comeback.
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richard_k wrote:
Your post ignores this part of the human equation, making it, err.. less than reflective of reality.
Indeed! Which begs the question, did someone ask for a platform specific browser package like Silverlight? IIRC, people have been bemoaning the conflicting support of HTML/Javascript in different browsers, wishing for that companies like Microsoft adhered to standards, and that standards addressed real world needs. So how does Silverlight fit this bill? I'm terribly cynical. After watching the PDC presentation on F#, I was left shaking my head, my god, they are REALLY talented at taking a technology and twisting it to promote their own agenda (Azure, cloud computing, etc) while hiding that under something we all theoretically want: access to lots of information and a good way of filtering that information. How they twist F# into a tool to accomplish their agenda (making money for themselves and information providers) while convincing us that F# is THE technology to use for interacting with that information, man, that's truly an accomplishment. Marc
People are doing what they always do, looking for solutions to their problems. Don't mistake statements by columnists as reality.. they are just statements. Microsoft has done well because they've generally listened to the marketplace and built what it looked like their customers needed. All companies will look to forward their own interests, and its up to customers to decide whether those self-same interests helps/hurts their cause as a customer.. which is why every decision to uptake a technology must be done carefully (I know this because I've been involved in many such decisions over the years, since I'm senior technical). I've been in this industry since 1982 and I've never seen overt manipulation as you suggest. Lots of folks imagine that Microsoft is evil, but imagining isn't the same as it being true. I just see a typical large company with a much better than average marketing/product research group and one heck of a technical staff. As long as the buying relationship is voluntary, it still comes down to personal choice and manipulation as you suggest just isn't possible. At the end of the day if customers don't want Silverlight (or any other tech of interest), they simply won't buy it. There IS such a thing as herd mentality.. and large companies play to this.. they are large which makes them stable.. which gives the marketplace a higher tendency to pick them rather than the small players.. but it still comes down to need. If folks didn't think Silverlight would solve a problem they had, it would die. Finally, I've been skeptical of some of the claims of certain languages being some type of magic bullet (F# and lambda based languages come to mind). At the end of the day, its not the language that determines good code, it the human being laying that code down. No matter how 'good' the system, it won't save you from a monkey at the keyboard. And given how business is normally transacted and technical management actually occurs, it can be supremely difficult for an engineer to actually design in extensibility and look ahead (assuming he even has the willingness or tendency to care about such things).. I've lived this reality too much over the years to fool myself about how languages and technologies play into the mix (I seriously thing 5% influence is all I'd give.. quality is about discipline and good management.. both of which have been sorely lacking in this industry EVER SINCE I STARTED). I've always been concerned about an over emphasis on technologies rather than the huma
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On a different but very related issue... I realised something was wrong the day I (with a decade and a half as a Microsoft developer) needed to ask someone where the 'Save As' option was in the new version of Word. I still find myself wasting time trying to figure out how to do things I've been able to do for years with previous versions. I thought it was early signs of old age, but yesterday I saw a gathering huddled around a PC trying to figure out how to Print Preview. Somebody in Redmond needs to have a Wireless Keyboard shoved so far up their ass that they can type their resignation letter with their tonsils. -Rd
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I worked at Oracle for more than a decade. Their internal site for doing employee related admin stuff changed every two years. And I'm not talking minor changes. From one day to the next the entire menu structure/layout would change, and the entire community of employees would be caught have to figure out where their 5 important menu choices went. This is a software company doing this. One with a whole division committed to usability. This experience, repeated every two years, convinced me that very little rationality went into some technical/UI Design decisions. I don't blame Oracle per se.. I think its just human nature. I think the folks in control of the UI for that internal site were more concerned about 'showing progress' in their work than about the effect their changes would have on the community using their product. I think this exact claim can be leveled at the redesign of the Office UI in recent years. Such is the world we live in.