Visual Studio is FREAKING AWESOME!!! (Seriously, hear me out)
-
I come from a land where the wheel was being reinvented on a daily basis, so to speak. A time when REAL programmers built their applications from scratch, and libraries (other than stdio) were for sissies! Just tell me which bits to flip to get which result and then get out of my way. Trust me I'm going somewhere with this. Fast forward 30+ years and the hardest thing for me is to let go of that "Do it yourself" thing. So, I often find myself spinning my wheels to try and figure out how things are done. So (because of my 30+ year "handicap"), here's what a typical scenario looks like. Suppose I wanted to write a client/server app for Windows. I would... 1. First I would think "Oh, no problem! I've been doing this type of things for years!". 2. I would proceed to start writing an HTTP daemon for the server side component using the winsock library, because "I don't need no stinking full-blown web server for this app". 3. I would write a rudimentary client app using sockets to establish the foundation of the communications piece. 4. Inevitably, I'll get stuck on some trivial thing, google for a solution, then find someone who has done all of the work that I've done so far, in VS, in like 10 clicks of the mouse. It still happens to me sometimes but not quite so much anymore, as I have submitted my will (so to speak) to VS and let it do all of the dirty work for me while I glue everything together. Microsoft and many who support them, has figured out not just the fact that everything that will be done has pretty much been done already, but has also figured out how to automate the creation of pretty much everything. I used to gripe about these 20-somethings who crank out apps in VS, and have no idea what's going on under the covers. But I am quickly realizing that this really is the way to go. Fortunately for me, I have built almost every type of app from scratch, so I have a very good understanding of what's under the covers. It just took me this long to realize that this is not an excuse to continue building everything from scratch. Anyway, I hope you can see how, coming from my perspective, Visual Studio is like the greatest thing since sliced bread. :-)
"Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories." - Steven Wright
It is not just VS that allows you to glue libraries together. One of our devs recently put together a python POC, almost every operation was done by an open source library. An enterprise level java application built on hadoop currently in development is based on a technology stack that is mind boggling I think I counted 17 different libraries/tool sets being blended together to build the application.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
-
I come from a land where the wheel was being reinvented on a daily basis, so to speak. A time when REAL programmers built their applications from scratch, and libraries (other than stdio) were for sissies! Just tell me which bits to flip to get which result and then get out of my way. Trust me I'm going somewhere with this. Fast forward 30+ years and the hardest thing for me is to let go of that "Do it yourself" thing. So, I often find myself spinning my wheels to try and figure out how things are done. So (because of my 30+ year "handicap"), here's what a typical scenario looks like. Suppose I wanted to write a client/server app for Windows. I would... 1. First I would think "Oh, no problem! I've been doing this type of things for years!". 2. I would proceed to start writing an HTTP daemon for the server side component using the winsock library, because "I don't need no stinking full-blown web server for this app". 3. I would write a rudimentary client app using sockets to establish the foundation of the communications piece. 4. Inevitably, I'll get stuck on some trivial thing, google for a solution, then find someone who has done all of the work that I've done so far, in VS, in like 10 clicks of the mouse. It still happens to me sometimes but not quite so much anymore, as I have submitted my will (so to speak) to VS and let it do all of the dirty work for me while I glue everything together. Microsoft and many who support them, has figured out not just the fact that everything that will be done has pretty much been done already, but has also figured out how to automate the creation of pretty much everything. I used to gripe about these 20-somethings who crank out apps in VS, and have no idea what's going on under the covers. But I am quickly realizing that this really is the way to go. Fortunately for me, I have built almost every type of app from scratch, so I have a very good understanding of what's under the covers. It just took me this long to realize that this is not an excuse to continue building everything from scratch. Anyway, I hope you can see how, coming from my perspective, Visual Studio is like the greatest thing since sliced bread. :-)
"Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories." - Steven Wright
I'm still waiting for VS to have a Google extension that does this: "It looks like you're writing code that has already been written by others. Here are some GitHub, Code Project, and SO links that you should look at." ;) Marc
Latest Article - Merkle Trees Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
-
I come from a land where the wheel was being reinvented on a daily basis, so to speak. A time when REAL programmers built their applications from scratch, and libraries (other than stdio) were for sissies! Just tell me which bits to flip to get which result and then get out of my way. Trust me I'm going somewhere with this. Fast forward 30+ years and the hardest thing for me is to let go of that "Do it yourself" thing. So, I often find myself spinning my wheels to try and figure out how things are done. So (because of my 30+ year "handicap"), here's what a typical scenario looks like. Suppose I wanted to write a client/server app for Windows. I would... 1. First I would think "Oh, no problem! I've been doing this type of things for years!". 2. I would proceed to start writing an HTTP daemon for the server side component using the winsock library, because "I don't need no stinking full-blown web server for this app". 3. I would write a rudimentary client app using sockets to establish the foundation of the communications piece. 4. Inevitably, I'll get stuck on some trivial thing, google for a solution, then find someone who has done all of the work that I've done so far, in VS, in like 10 clicks of the mouse. It still happens to me sometimes but not quite so much anymore, as I have submitted my will (so to speak) to VS and let it do all of the dirty work for me while I glue everything together. Microsoft and many who support them, has figured out not just the fact that everything that will be done has pretty much been done already, but has also figured out how to automate the creation of pretty much everything. I used to gripe about these 20-somethings who crank out apps in VS, and have no idea what's going on under the covers. But I am quickly realizing that this really is the way to go. Fortunately for me, I have built almost every type of app from scratch, so I have a very good understanding of what's under the covers. It just took me this long to realize that this is not an excuse to continue building everything from scratch. Anyway, I hope you can see how, coming from my perspective, Visual Studio is like the greatest thing since sliced bread. :-)
"Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories." - Steven Wright
TonyManso wrote:
and libraries (other than stdio) were for sissies!
Why use stdio, the core functions read() and write() were easily sufficient. stdio was just more laggy bloat bet you were one of those softies that used strcpy() and it's friends too - more rubbish that for instance in this case could easily be achieved in a single for(); statement.
-
I'm still waiting for VS to have a Google extension that does this: "It looks like you're writing code that has already been written by others. Here are some GitHub, Code Project, and SO links that you should look at." ;) Marc
Latest Article - Merkle Trees Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
Taking cutting and pasting from SO to a whole new level. Except leaving the purpose of the code out of the search, creating a whole new type of interesting bugs. :-\
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
-
I come from a land where the wheel was being reinvented on a daily basis, so to speak. A time when REAL programmers built their applications from scratch, and libraries (other than stdio) were for sissies! Just tell me which bits to flip to get which result and then get out of my way. Trust me I'm going somewhere with this. Fast forward 30+ years and the hardest thing for me is to let go of that "Do it yourself" thing. So, I often find myself spinning my wheels to try and figure out how things are done. So (because of my 30+ year "handicap"), here's what a typical scenario looks like. Suppose I wanted to write a client/server app for Windows. I would... 1. First I would think "Oh, no problem! I've been doing this type of things for years!". 2. I would proceed to start writing an HTTP daemon for the server side component using the winsock library, because "I don't need no stinking full-blown web server for this app". 3. I would write a rudimentary client app using sockets to establish the foundation of the communications piece. 4. Inevitably, I'll get stuck on some trivial thing, google for a solution, then find someone who has done all of the work that I've done so far, in VS, in like 10 clicks of the mouse. It still happens to me sometimes but not quite so much anymore, as I have submitted my will (so to speak) to VS and let it do all of the dirty work for me while I glue everything together. Microsoft and many who support them, has figured out not just the fact that everything that will be done has pretty much been done already, but has also figured out how to automate the creation of pretty much everything. I used to gripe about these 20-somethings who crank out apps in VS, and have no idea what's going on under the covers. But I am quickly realizing that this really is the way to go. Fortunately for me, I have built almost every type of app from scratch, so I have a very good understanding of what's under the covers. It just took me this long to realize that this is not an excuse to continue building everything from scratch. Anyway, I hope you can see how, coming from my perspective, Visual Studio is like the greatest thing since sliced bread. :-)
"Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories." - Steven Wright
Nice and well as long as your projects don't span 10 years or more. Mickeysoft has no interest in supporting yesterday's greatest idea. They want to sell you their next great thing. Just try to make major changes to a project that has been built with some older version of VisualStudio and you will see how you pay back the time you may have saved. With interest. The way I see it, in the long run it's better to stay independent of Mickeysoft's ideas. If you count in the time I saved by not learning things that went exactly nowhere or that are incompatible to older versions, you might come to other conclusions.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a fucking golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?" "You mean like from space?" "No, from Canada." If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns. -
Understand completely. When I started this ride, I began teaching community college electronics courses, one of which was programming. My students hated it! We started with 8080 assembler to get something done, (and the had to rewrite each instruction definition from the Intel manual in their own words); once they understood what was happening at that level, I introduced them to Turbo Pascal. Lo and behold, what took the a week of assembly level that could do in an hour. Those that continued never forgot the lesson - to know what is going on under the covers. The covers have gotten more varied and are covered in paisley, but the lesson remains.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - Lazarus Long
stoneyowl2 wrote:
Those that continued never forgot the lesson
And those that continue further can then become just as quick with assembly again. Once you have things like calling conventions and accessing libraries out of the way, it's not so hard. You just write the same short functions you would also have written in a higher language and you call the same library functions.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a fucking golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?" "You mean like from space?" "No, from Canada." If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns. -
I come from a land where the wheel was being reinvented on a daily basis, so to speak. A time when REAL programmers built their applications from scratch, and libraries (other than stdio) were for sissies! Just tell me which bits to flip to get which result and then get out of my way. Trust me I'm going somewhere with this. Fast forward 30+ years and the hardest thing for me is to let go of that "Do it yourself" thing. So, I often find myself spinning my wheels to try and figure out how things are done. So (because of my 30+ year "handicap"), here's what a typical scenario looks like. Suppose I wanted to write a client/server app for Windows. I would... 1. First I would think "Oh, no problem! I've been doing this type of things for years!". 2. I would proceed to start writing an HTTP daemon for the server side component using the winsock library, because "I don't need no stinking full-blown web server for this app". 3. I would write a rudimentary client app using sockets to establish the foundation of the communications piece. 4. Inevitably, I'll get stuck on some trivial thing, google for a solution, then find someone who has done all of the work that I've done so far, in VS, in like 10 clicks of the mouse. It still happens to me sometimes but not quite so much anymore, as I have submitted my will (so to speak) to VS and let it do all of the dirty work for me while I glue everything together. Microsoft and many who support them, has figured out not just the fact that everything that will be done has pretty much been done already, but has also figured out how to automate the creation of pretty much everything. I used to gripe about these 20-somethings who crank out apps in VS, and have no idea what's going on under the covers. But I am quickly realizing that this really is the way to go. Fortunately for me, I have built almost every type of app from scratch, so I have a very good understanding of what's under the covers. It just took me this long to realize that this is not an excuse to continue building everything from scratch. Anyway, I hope you can see how, coming from my perspective, Visual Studio is like the greatest thing since sliced bread. :-)
"Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories." - Steven Wright
OK, first of all, you qualify "hear me out" when, in fact, you are posting only that of text, which means we can only "read" you... Combine that with "Visual Studio is FREAKING AWESOME!!!" ... yup, exceedingly certifiable. :omg: :wtf:
-
Nice and well as long as your projects don't span 10 years or more. Mickeysoft has no interest in supporting yesterday's greatest idea. They want to sell you their next great thing. Just try to make major changes to a project that has been built with some older version of VisualStudio and you will see how you pay back the time you may have saved. With interest. The way I see it, in the long run it's better to stay independent of Mickeysoft's ideas. If you count in the time I saved by not learning things that went exactly nowhere or that are incompatible to older versions, you might come to other conclusions.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a fucking golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?" "You mean like from space?" "No, from Canada." If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.CDP1802 wrote:
as long as your projects don't span 10 years or more
My company's flagship product was released 16 years ago. I've been working on it my entire career. If I stay a few more years, I just might get the migration re-write finished! :laugh:
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
-
Nice and well as long as your projects don't span 10 years or more. Mickeysoft has no interest in supporting yesterday's greatest idea. They want to sell you their next great thing. Just try to make major changes to a project that has been built with some older version of VisualStudio and you will see how you pay back the time you may have saved. With interest. The way I see it, in the long run it's better to stay independent of Mickeysoft's ideas. If you count in the time I saved by not learning things that went exactly nowhere or that are incompatible to older versions, you might come to other conclusions.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a fucking golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?" "You mean like from space?" "No, from Canada." If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.My projects span 15 years and counting - I've had no problems using VS with them. /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
-
My projects span 15 years and counting - I've had no problems using VS with them. /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
Then you may have found a good balance between a stable foundation for your code and new features that have come and gone. I recently had to work on a module for a larger application that had been used as it was for at least tebn years. It was a compact thing, data access (with an early version of the entity framework) and WPF forms, all in one assembly. Application logic only existed in the code behind the forms, not as a separate layer in any way. Now some not even very extensive changes had to be made, so I had to add a new entity and add some fields to two existing ones. Editing them with VS2015 was no problem, but the pdated entities were not compatible to the old code. No time to rewrite the entire thing, so I had to install VS2008, port back the project to VS2008, make my changes and port the whole thing back to VS2015. This procedure cost me enough time that could have been spent for better things. Now we needed some new application logic that used the changed entities plus some things that already existed in other parts of the application, but not in this monolithic module. Just a matter of splitting it up into two assemblies, copying the WPF forms to the new presentation layer assemblies, renaming the namespaces of the moved files, setting the assembly references and recompile. An hour's work, right? Nope. VS2015 would not compile it anymore, always claiming that classes or namespaces did not exist. At first I looked for mistakes I had made when moving files to the new assembly, but classes and namespaces always were there where they should have been. After a few days (!) of unsuccessful tinkering I finally found a way to get it working again. I had to remove all WPF forms and then add them one by one and then recompile for each form that had been added again. Two or three times the chaos returned and I had to start all over again, but in the end it finally worked again. There had been no mistakes. All classes and namespaces were correct, but the compiler was unable to sort it out. These were only the most recent experiences with such things and could tell a few more war stories. This makes me a little more reluctant to use newer VS versions or to include every shiny new thing. I prefer to keep my project organized, avoid a patchwork of versions and dependencies and upgrade only if it really must be.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a fu -
Then you may have found a good balance between a stable foundation for your code and new features that have come and gone. I recently had to work on a module for a larger application that had been used as it was for at least tebn years. It was a compact thing, data access (with an early version of the entity framework) and WPF forms, all in one assembly. Application logic only existed in the code behind the forms, not as a separate layer in any way. Now some not even very extensive changes had to be made, so I had to add a new entity and add some fields to two existing ones. Editing them with VS2015 was no problem, but the pdated entities were not compatible to the old code. No time to rewrite the entire thing, so I had to install VS2008, port back the project to VS2008, make my changes and port the whole thing back to VS2015. This procedure cost me enough time that could have been spent for better things. Now we needed some new application logic that used the changed entities plus some things that already existed in other parts of the application, but not in this monolithic module. Just a matter of splitting it up into two assemblies, copying the WPF forms to the new presentation layer assemblies, renaming the namespaces of the moved files, setting the assembly references and recompile. An hour's work, right? Nope. VS2015 would not compile it anymore, always claiming that classes or namespaces did not exist. At first I looked for mistakes I had made when moving files to the new assembly, but classes and namespaces always were there where they should have been. After a few days (!) of unsuccessful tinkering I finally found a way to get it working again. I had to remove all WPF forms and then add them one by one and then recompile for each form that had been added again. Two or three times the chaos returned and I had to start all over again, but in the end it finally worked again. There had been no mistakes. All classes and namespaces were correct, but the compiler was unable to sort it out. These were only the most recent experiences with such things and could tell a few more war stories. This makes me a little more reluctant to use newer VS versions or to include every shiny new thing. I prefer to keep my project organized, avoid a patchwork of versions and dependencies and upgrade only if it really must be.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a fuCDP1802 wrote:
I prefer to keep my project organized, avoid a patchwork of versions and dependencies and upgrade only if it really must be.
:thumbsup: I admit I overlooked something very important. The decade+ apps that I'm talking about - while they have a user base in the tens of thousands - are my own freeware apps. As a result, I have the luxury of having to maintain only the latest version (they are data backward compatible all the way to V1) of the codebase. In RL, I can understand this is much more of a challenge, where one has to support multiple versions at the same time. :-O /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
-
CDP1802 wrote:
as long as your projects don't span 10 years or more
My company's flagship product was released 16 years ago. I've been working on it my entire career. If I stay a few more years, I just might get the migration re-write finished! :laugh:
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
Just look at my reply to the post below. I think I had my share of scenarios where the nice new VS turns against you and then eats more time than it can ever save you. For my projects I now use SharpDevelop and miss only one really essential feature up to now: I can't debug into a webservice call up to now. With only this exception, I think less sometimes is more.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a fucking golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?" "You mean like from space?" "No, from Canada." If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns. -
CDP1802 wrote:
I prefer to keep my project organized, avoid a patchwork of versions and dependencies and upgrade only if it really must be.
:thumbsup: I admit I overlooked something very important. The decade+ apps that I'm talking about - while they have a user base in the tens of thousands - are my own freeware apps. As a result, I have the luxury of having to maintain only the latest version (they are data backward compatible all the way to V1) of the codebase. In RL, I can understand this is much more of a challenge, where one has to support multiple versions at the same time. :-O /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
For my own code I now use SharpDevelop. This little project of mine has a solution folder with almost 50 projects in it and the less sophisticated IDE lets me used any .Net framework from 1.0 to the latest without any troubles and lets me take care of the code instead of letting me wrestle with incompatibilites.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a fucking golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?" "You mean like from space?" "No, from Canada." If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.