Name your most hated technology
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To cheer up this forum, I thought we should play a little game. The game is "Name your most hated technology". :) It doesn't have to be a Microsoft technology, but you have probably worked with something in the past that you deemed totally hopeless or just not worthy your programming time. This site is littered with acrnonyms like ActiveX, ATL, COM and MFC. Most of them we enjoy and spend many intimate hours with. But what about that OLE Automation stuff? Remember that... when embedding a picture in Excel was a big thing. Do you remember the struggle to figure out the stuff about sources and containers? Or "Direct Animation" - the *big* Microsoft replacement for FLASH web contents... does anyone actually use this. And was I the only one to write a "QuickView File Viewer" shell extension, only so it could be killed in the next Windows version, 2 years later. I also once looked at writing an OLEDB provider using the "Simple OLE DB Provider" interfaces... I'm pretty convinced that all the C++ samples are there to fool the enemy - this has got to be a hack for Visual Basic to allow them to write anything that would be close to an OLE DB provider. No way that overly-simplified buggy no-functionality interface could be a real COM interface. So don't be shy. Here's a chance to flame your most hated technology... regards bjarke
many things about crystal are worth hating: - 20mb of dll's to install for the "web" version, you do one thing with crystal and they ALL are instantiated, often crashing the web server - lame api - poorly/non documented api but the worst thing about this completely lame product is that it will turn honest programmers into office-automation hacks... everything that you do, you have to hack to get it to actually work. i hate hate hate that product. in a job interview once, the interviewer asked what i thought about crystal, and i said, "I truly hate crystal reports and if it would be one of my job duties, then I will not take the job." -John
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To cheer up this forum, I thought we should play a little game. The game is "Name your most hated technology". :) It doesn't have to be a Microsoft technology, but you have probably worked with something in the past that you deemed totally hopeless or just not worthy your programming time. This site is littered with acrnonyms like ActiveX, ATL, COM and MFC. Most of them we enjoy and spend many intimate hours with. But what about that OLE Automation stuff? Remember that... when embedding a picture in Excel was a big thing. Do you remember the struggle to figure out the stuff about sources and containers? Or "Direct Animation" - the *big* Microsoft replacement for FLASH web contents... does anyone actually use this. And was I the only one to write a "QuickView File Viewer" shell extension, only so it could be killed in the next Windows version, 2 years later. I also once looked at writing an OLEDB provider using the "Simple OLE DB Provider" interfaces... I'm pretty convinced that all the C++ samples are there to fool the enemy - this has got to be a hack for Visual Basic to allow them to write anything that would be close to an OLE DB provider. No way that overly-simplified buggy no-functionality interface could be a real COM interface. So don't be shy. Here's a chance to flame your most hated technology... regards bjarke
Oh, this is an easy one: DirectShow. Has anyone here ever tried to write a DirectShow filter that modifies a stream as it's being played? Well, microsoft includes some "base classes" that make writing most filters easy. Unfortunately, the one kind of filter that is total hell to write is a splitter, and they don't even offer sample code for it any more! It's actually EASIER to write the filters from scratch, using your own COM objects than it is to use their base classes. -- Paul "I drank... WHAT?"
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many things about crystal are worth hating: - 20mb of dll's to install for the "web" version, you do one thing with crystal and they ALL are instantiated, often crashing the web server - lame api - poorly/non documented api but the worst thing about this completely lame product is that it will turn honest programmers into office-automation hacks... everything that you do, you have to hack to get it to actually work. i hate hate hate that product. in a job interview once, the interviewer asked what i thought about crystal, and i said, "I truly hate crystal reports and if it would be one of my job duties, then I will not take the job." -John
I feel your pain... I'm now venturing into Crystal Hell again myself. The last version that I worked with was 4.x several years ago, with Btrieve as the DB. I had to write a user DLL just to perform a simple table lookup. Now we're trying to use v8.5 with ASP, and while their examples work, a simple report of my own doesn't, and no one appears to know why or how to determine what's wrong. Sigh... Perhaps its time to learn XML and XSLT and write it myself. Steven J. Ackerman, Consultant ACS, Sarasota, FL http://www.acscontrol.com steve@acscontrol.com sja@gte.net
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To cheer up this forum, I thought we should play a little game. The game is "Name your most hated technology". :) It doesn't have to be a Microsoft technology, but you have probably worked with something in the past that you deemed totally hopeless or just not worthy your programming time. This site is littered with acrnonyms like ActiveX, ATL, COM and MFC. Most of them we enjoy and spend many intimate hours with. But what about that OLE Automation stuff? Remember that... when embedding a picture in Excel was a big thing. Do you remember the struggle to figure out the stuff about sources and containers? Or "Direct Animation" - the *big* Microsoft replacement for FLASH web contents... does anyone actually use this. And was I the only one to write a "QuickView File Viewer" shell extension, only so it could be killed in the next Windows version, 2 years later. I also once looked at writing an OLEDB provider using the "Simple OLE DB Provider" interfaces... I'm pretty convinced that all the C++ samples are there to fool the enemy - this has got to be a hack for Visual Basic to allow them to write anything that would be close to an OLE DB provider. No way that overly-simplified buggy no-functionality interface could be a real COM interface. So don't be shy. Here's a chance to flame your most hated technology... regards bjarke
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To cheer up this forum, I thought we should play a little game. The game is "Name your most hated technology". :) It doesn't have to be a Microsoft technology, but you have probably worked with something in the past that you deemed totally hopeless or just not worthy your programming time. This site is littered with acrnonyms like ActiveX, ATL, COM and MFC. Most of them we enjoy and spend many intimate hours with. But what about that OLE Automation stuff? Remember that... when embedding a picture in Excel was a big thing. Do you remember the struggle to figure out the stuff about sources and containers? Or "Direct Animation" - the *big* Microsoft replacement for FLASH web contents... does anyone actually use this. And was I the only one to write a "QuickView File Viewer" shell extension, only so it could be killed in the next Windows version, 2 years later. I also once looked at writing an OLEDB provider using the "Simple OLE DB Provider" interfaces... I'm pretty convinced that all the C++ samples are there to fool the enemy - this has got to be a hack for Visual Basic to allow them to write anything that would be close to an OLE DB provider. No way that overly-simplified buggy no-functionality interface could be a real COM interface. So don't be shy. Here's a chance to flame your most hated technology... regards bjarke
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To cheer up this forum, I thought we should play a little game. The game is "Name your most hated technology". :) It doesn't have to be a Microsoft technology, but you have probably worked with something in the past that you deemed totally hopeless or just not worthy your programming time. This site is littered with acrnonyms like ActiveX, ATL, COM and MFC. Most of them we enjoy and spend many intimate hours with. But what about that OLE Automation stuff? Remember that... when embedding a picture in Excel was a big thing. Do you remember the struggle to figure out the stuff about sources and containers? Or "Direct Animation" - the *big* Microsoft replacement for FLASH web contents... does anyone actually use this. And was I the only one to write a "QuickView File Viewer" shell extension, only so it could be killed in the next Windows version, 2 years later. I also once looked at writing an OLEDB provider using the "Simple OLE DB Provider" interfaces... I'm pretty convinced that all the C++ samples are there to fool the enemy - this has got to be a hack for Visual Basic to allow them to write anything that would be close to an OLE DB provider. No way that overly-simplified buggy no-functionality interface could be a real COM interface. So don't be shy. Here's a chance to flame your most hated technology... regards bjarke
Just one? I have several. 1. IBM Webshpere Application Server -- This Horrible piece of crap takes up 512 MB of memory per processor!!!!! 2. IBM Websphere Studio -- A poor imitation of Visual InterDev. You have to publish files multiple times before they are actually published. Crappy HTML/JSP editor. The damn thing actually tries to color code the text in a Java string, and when you save, the color coding dissappears. WTF? 3. MFC -- Well, I don't hate it. But I feel that it could have been implemented in a much simpler way. 4. MS Access -- I made the mistake of letting someone know that I had some experience with programming Access/VBA. Got stuck on a 9 month Access 97/VBA project. :-( 5. Crappy, half assed open source programs -- Not so much a technology but I still hate them. I have to do a lot of work with Linux lately. A great OS, but all the tools and utilities blow goats. Jason Gerard, Master of Kung Foo
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To cheer up this forum, I thought we should play a little game. The game is "Name your most hated technology". :) It doesn't have to be a Microsoft technology, but you have probably worked with something in the past that you deemed totally hopeless or just not worthy your programming time. This site is littered with acrnonyms like ActiveX, ATL, COM and MFC. Most of them we enjoy and spend many intimate hours with. But what about that OLE Automation stuff? Remember that... when embedding a picture in Excel was a big thing. Do you remember the struggle to figure out the stuff about sources and containers? Or "Direct Animation" - the *big* Microsoft replacement for FLASH web contents... does anyone actually use this. And was I the only one to write a "QuickView File Viewer" shell extension, only so it could be killed in the next Windows version, 2 years later. I also once looked at writing an OLEDB provider using the "Simple OLE DB Provider" interfaces... I'm pretty convinced that all the C++ samples are there to fool the enemy - this has got to be a hack for Visual Basic to allow them to write anything that would be close to an OLE DB provider. No way that overly-simplified buggy no-functionality interface could be a real COM interface. So don't be shy. Here's a chance to flame your most hated technology... regards bjarke
JavaScript and generally all the client-side scripting technologies. They make me crazy. Especially 'onmouseover()' :mad: X| :(( I vote pro drink X|
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Yeah - even coming down from the trees was a bad move... cheers, Chris Maunder (CodeProject)
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I feel your pain... I'm now venturing into Crystal Hell again myself. The last version that I worked with was 4.x several years ago, with Btrieve as the DB. I had to write a user DLL just to perform a simple table lookup. Now we're trying to use v8.5 with ASP, and while their examples work, a simple report of my own doesn't, and no one appears to know why or how to determine what's wrong. Sigh... Perhaps its time to learn XML and XSLT and write it myself. Steven J. Ackerman, Consultant ACS, Sarasota, FL http://www.acscontrol.com steve@acscontrol.com sja@gte.net
immediately i read this post, i scanned down the replies for 'crystal' ;P
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ya know what I really hate? ATL. ARGHH!!! IT'S SO ANNOYING! I'm forced to work with these appz that my "Fellow Engineers" have added to and it doesn't make me very happy! ATL might be very handy for some people, but it's just annoying for me! ARGH!!! :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: "The world doesn't care about your self esteem. The world expects you to get something done BEFORE you feel good about yourself." ~ Bill Gates
ATL *rules*. What don't you like about it ? Do you not have experience with templates ? If not, they are a pretty essential thing to wrap your head around. Christian #include "std_disclaimer.h" The careful application of terror is also a form of communication. Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
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To cheer up this forum, I thought we should play a little game. The game is "Name your most hated technology". :) It doesn't have to be a Microsoft technology, but you have probably worked with something in the past that you deemed totally hopeless or just not worthy your programming time. This site is littered with acrnonyms like ActiveX, ATL, COM and MFC. Most of them we enjoy and spend many intimate hours with. But what about that OLE Automation stuff? Remember that... when embedding a picture in Excel was a big thing. Do you remember the struggle to figure out the stuff about sources and containers? Or "Direct Animation" - the *big* Microsoft replacement for FLASH web contents... does anyone actually use this. And was I the only one to write a "QuickView File Viewer" shell extension, only so it could be killed in the next Windows version, 2 years later. I also once looked at writing an OLEDB provider using the "Simple OLE DB Provider" interfaces... I'm pretty convinced that all the C++ samples are there to fool the enemy - this has got to be a hack for Visual Basic to allow them to write anything that would be close to an OLE DB provider. No way that overly-simplified buggy no-functionality interface could be a real COM interface. So don't be shy. Here's a chance to flame your most hated technology... regards bjarke
Netscape's rendering engine. All of them. cheers, Chris Maunder (CodeProject)
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To cheer up this forum, I thought we should play a little game. The game is "Name your most hated technology". :) It doesn't have to be a Microsoft technology, but you have probably worked with something in the past that you deemed totally hopeless or just not worthy your programming time. This site is littered with acrnonyms like ActiveX, ATL, COM and MFC. Most of them we enjoy and spend many intimate hours with. But what about that OLE Automation stuff? Remember that... when embedding a picture in Excel was a big thing. Do you remember the struggle to figure out the stuff about sources and containers? Or "Direct Animation" - the *big* Microsoft replacement for FLASH web contents... does anyone actually use this. And was I the only one to write a "QuickView File Viewer" shell extension, only so it could be killed in the next Windows version, 2 years later. I also once looked at writing an OLEDB provider using the "Simple OLE DB Provider" interfaces... I'm pretty convinced that all the C++ samples are there to fool the enemy - this has got to be a hack for Visual Basic to allow them to write anything that would be close to an OLE DB provider. No way that overly-simplified buggy no-functionality interface could be a real COM interface. So don't be shy. Here's a chance to flame your most hated technology... regards bjarke
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To cheer up this forum, I thought we should play a little game. The game is "Name your most hated technology". :) It doesn't have to be a Microsoft technology, but you have probably worked with something in the past that you deemed totally hopeless or just not worthy your programming time. This site is littered with acrnonyms like ActiveX, ATL, COM and MFC. Most of them we enjoy and spend many intimate hours with. But what about that OLE Automation stuff? Remember that... when embedding a picture in Excel was a big thing. Do you remember the struggle to figure out the stuff about sources and containers? Or "Direct Animation" - the *big* Microsoft replacement for FLASH web contents... does anyone actually use this. And was I the only one to write a "QuickView File Viewer" shell extension, only so it could be killed in the next Windows version, 2 years later. I also once looked at writing an OLEDB provider using the "Simple OLE DB Provider" interfaces... I'm pretty convinced that all the C++ samples are there to fool the enemy - this has got to be a hack for Visual Basic to allow them to write anything that would be close to an OLE DB provider. No way that overly-simplified buggy no-functionality interface could be a real COM interface. So don't be shy. Here's a chance to flame your most hated technology... regards bjarke
ODBC - defninately the worst technology I have ever used. Oh yeah, and MMC.:mad: (2b || !2b)
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Netscape's rendering engine. All of them. cheers, Chris Maunder (CodeProject)
Amen! regards, Paul Watson Cape Town, South Africa e: paulmwatson@email.com w: vergen.org
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Yeah - even coming down from the trees was a bad move... cheers, Chris Maunder (CodeProject)
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NewEra, made by Informix, kind of program language, with a terrible windowpainter and builder. After 4 years Informix finally ended with NewEra, still celebrating that day every year :) René
That's bullshit. NewEra has fantastic window animations **Le Ridder Noir
Considderd to be the worlds fastest knoppenbonker.
one year of working experience with the worlds fastest copie paster(about 2000 lines a minute).
And experience with the one and only NewEra Guru and Crystal Ace.** -
Coming down out of the trees was merely the result of one person losing his grip and falling to the ground. It was an accident. :-)
Actually, I have to apologize for that happening. I had just a little too much to drink that evening and well I dozed off before securing myself properly. Seriously, it wont happen again ;P Chris
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To cheer up this forum, I thought we should play a little game. The game is "Name your most hated technology". :) It doesn't have to be a Microsoft technology, but you have probably worked with something in the past that you deemed totally hopeless or just not worthy your programming time. This site is littered with acrnonyms like ActiveX, ATL, COM and MFC. Most of them we enjoy and spend many intimate hours with. But what about that OLE Automation stuff? Remember that... when embedding a picture in Excel was a big thing. Do you remember the struggle to figure out the stuff about sources and containers? Or "Direct Animation" - the *big* Microsoft replacement for FLASH web contents... does anyone actually use this. And was I the only one to write a "QuickView File Viewer" shell extension, only so it could be killed in the next Windows version, 2 years later. I also once looked at writing an OLEDB provider using the "Simple OLE DB Provider" interfaces... I'm pretty convinced that all the C++ samples are there to fool the enemy - this has got to be a hack for Visual Basic to allow them to write anything that would be close to an OLE DB provider. No way that overly-simplified buggy no-functionality interface could be a real COM interface. So don't be shy. Here's a chance to flame your most hated technology... regards bjarke
MUMPS (Massachussets General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System), a.k.a. M, a.k.a. M Technology. It's actually a programming language and it's horrendous. When I was using it, commands and variable names were limited to a maximum of eight characters and we were encouraged to keep the number of characters as low as possible to increase the speed of interpretation. I don't know of any other language in which it is possible to write an infinite loop in three characters, two of which are invisible (F ). A while loop looked something like this:
I (condition goes here) F Q: (not (condition goes here))
. (loop body goes here)which is an IF, followed by a conditionless FOR loop (the infinite loop mentioned above), followed by a post-conditional which enables you to drop out of the loop once the condition is no longer met. (Apologies to any MUMPS enthusiasts if I have made any syntax errors eight years on, but the gist of it is more or less correct.) It is possible to write more pleasant code in MUMPS these days, but it's still pretty horrible. Seekers after horror may wish to refer to http://www.mumps.org, What is M Technology? or The M Technology FAQ. If you just want a quick flavour, refer to Appendices 6 and 7 in the second half of the FAQ - these contain, respectively, an example of new style and an example of old style MUMPS programming. Old-style is what I had to debug in a previous job... Gavin Greig
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To cheer up this forum, I thought we should play a little game. The game is "Name your most hated technology". :) It doesn't have to be a Microsoft technology, but you have probably worked with something in the past that you deemed totally hopeless or just not worthy your programming time. This site is littered with acrnonyms like ActiveX, ATL, COM and MFC. Most of them we enjoy and spend many intimate hours with. But what about that OLE Automation stuff? Remember that... when embedding a picture in Excel was a big thing. Do you remember the struggle to figure out the stuff about sources and containers? Or "Direct Animation" - the *big* Microsoft replacement for FLASH web contents... does anyone actually use this. And was I the only one to write a "QuickView File Viewer" shell extension, only so it could be killed in the next Windows version, 2 years later. I also once looked at writing an OLEDB provider using the "Simple OLE DB Provider" interfaces... I'm pretty convinced that all the C++ samples are there to fool the enemy - this has got to be a hack for Visual Basic to allow them to write anything that would be close to an OLE DB provider. No way that overly-simplified buggy no-functionality interface could be a real COM interface. So don't be shy. Here's a chance to flame your most hated technology... regards bjarke
Well - I have many well hated technologies and applications! :mad: Really bad technologies: SMS (a great way to turn a Pentium into a 486) Any Reinstaller Micrografx Mirrors (goes back a ways - ever use Micrografx Designer for OS/2 - built using Mirrors - real crap). Az-Tech Everlock - some of our projects used this crap, a software based copy protection system. Overall, it has proven to be there number one support issue. Oh, I should give an honorable mention to COM - DispID encoding for multiple dual interfaces - what a total Kludge). You would think that a company like Microsoft could have made a component technology that worked like "just compile and link and your classes can be exposed as object interfaces". It took them long enough to finally come out with .Net. Really bad applications: Most anything from Rational (can't install ClearCase after installing Rose?!?!?!). Frontpage 98 - works great for small web sites - then mysteriously crashes, Oh, and when it loses it's mind and you have to suck down the site to "recreate" it in FP - but you can never reorganize it correctly - very nice). Notes 4.x - my company is going to be stuck with this forever too. Microsoft C/C++ 7 - unlike version 6, it didn't take 3 patches before it would work - but it was pretty bad. Shovelware. Oh, the install utility with it was way bad as well. Dale Thompson
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To cheer up this forum, I thought we should play a little game. The game is "Name your most hated technology". :) It doesn't have to be a Microsoft technology, but you have probably worked with something in the past that you deemed totally hopeless or just not worthy your programming time. This site is littered with acrnonyms like ActiveX, ATL, COM and MFC. Most of them we enjoy and spend many intimate hours with. But what about that OLE Automation stuff? Remember that... when embedding a picture in Excel was a big thing. Do you remember the struggle to figure out the stuff about sources and containers? Or "Direct Animation" - the *big* Microsoft replacement for FLASH web contents... does anyone actually use this. And was I the only one to write a "QuickView File Viewer" shell extension, only so it could be killed in the next Windows version, 2 years later. I also once looked at writing an OLEDB provider using the "Simple OLE DB Provider" interfaces... I'm pretty convinced that all the C++ samples are there to fool the enemy - this has got to be a hack for Visual Basic to allow them to write anything that would be close to an OLE DB provider. No way that overly-simplified buggy no-functionality interface could be a real COM interface. So don't be shy. Here's a chance to flame your most hated technology... regards bjarke
- Caravans 2) Mixer taps (mixer faucets to you Americans). Damned inefficient... want a drink of cold water, you have to run the thing for a while to get rid of the hot/luke warm water. Aaargh, I hate mixer taps. Hey, you said technology, not computer technology :-) Stephen Kellett -- C++/Java/Win NT/Unix variants Memory leaks/corruptions/performance/system problems. UK based. Problems with RSI/WRULD? Contact me for advice.