iPhone 13 mini. Why are all the phones so huge? I don't want my phone to be the size of a tablet. Generally I'm not interested in surfing the 2" web - if I am doing something other than phone calls and messaging, I will move to a real computer. --Cranky old lady

So true. Something that ticked me off in the last couple of years is a UX change they made to the treeview in Outlook. Previously it showed the number of unread items in a folder right next to the folder name, which made it very easy to read. They changed it so that the number of unread items is right justified so that it is far away from the folder name. Now it is much harder to tell at a glance which folder the unread items are in. WHY DO THAT? It makes things objectively worse. That's when I realized they are just making changes to justify their jobs, with no real thought or care.

Microsoft's choices over the last several years are appalling. Windows 11's UI changes are awful, and the injection of ads everywhere is worse. This latest upcoming "Recall" feature that will chew up your disk space for no discernable benefit and huge privacy drawbacks has put me over the edge. I've been talking for years about switching to MacOs for my daily driver, and this week Microsoft convinced me that was the right choice. I can't completely escape Windows - I support applications for Windows servers, but MY main computer will not be Windows moving forward.

--Avonelle

Yep, case sensitivity is pretty annoying to me, too. Those of us who started with .NET 1.0 were told for years that selecting C# or VB.NET was a "lifestyle choice", and either was fine. And I believed them. I can even understand that there is no easy migration path for the move from WebForms to MVC or Razor Pages. I get it. But now I'm supposed to not only completely rewrite all these web applications, I'm also supposed to do it in a completely different language? Not a chance. You are lucky you are out of coding these days. While I love writing code, I don't love the current software development landscape, as you put it.

While Microsoft denies it, they have largely abandoned VB.NET developers. I'm a VB.NET web developer, and there is no way forward with Microsoft's newer .NET Core framework and VB.NET. Razor Pages or Blazor would be great for me if I could code in VB.NET, but instead I have to switch to C#. It also means my web applications have no migration path. Sure, I can switch to C#, but it truly pisses me off that they have left me hanging in this way. So why am I still choosing this older technology? * There is nothing wrong with it. * I have a LOT of existing VB.NET projects that I support for clients, and with no migration path, I'm leaving them as is. My clients don't pay me to rewrite apps just to change the language/technology with no tangible benefit for them. * I have some C# projects that I support, but I don't enjoy it. VB.NET is a joy to me, which makes me very productive. * I am stubborn. --Pissed off VB.NET web programmer

I guess it depends on what you mean by "dead". I'm still using VB.NET for most things. It is my preferred language, although I also have one project in C# that I support. That being said, I'm a web developer, and Microsoft has pretty much screwed over VB.NET web developers. Very little of the ASP.NET Core things can be written in VB.NET. :-( Mostly the work I am doing is supporting existing WebForms applications so this hasn't been a big issue for me. But if I was building something new, I'd probably use RemObjects Mercury to take advantage of ASP.NET Core but still be able able to use VB. My clients generally don't care about the language choice, so I can choose whatever I prefer. I agree that I haven't seen many listed positions for VB.NET these days, although I'm not really looking much so I probably don't have a good feel for that. There is definitely a small contingent of folks who still love the language and are actively using it, but I suspect we are aging out. --Avonelle

Rage wrote:

Please give me my IT world back from 10 years ago - Everything has only been going downhill since then.

1000% agree. My husband I discuss this ALL the time. He provides infrastructure support for consulting clients and I'm a developer. They want to move everything and everyone to the cloud, with degraded experiences. Every week, some kind of update makes things worse - less secure, more buggy, worse UI. We've been in the industry for over 25 years, and things used to get better, but now they do not.

True - SnagIt is also a great product (and considerably cheaper than Camtasia). I use it for screenshots and quick and dirty screen videos. However, I don't think it has the mouse capture features that the OP requested, which is too bad. --Avonelle

I recommend TechSmith's Camtasia for this. It does a great job of recording applications, and includes all the features you mentioned. https://www.techsmith.com/video-editor.html[^] You will need to use their recording software (not just their editing software) to add or smooth mouse movements. It isn't free, but if you are doing a lot of this, it is absolutely worth the money. --Avonelle

MadGerbil wrote:

I wasn't very excited about the switch to C# but it ended up taking about 3 days.

I could, but my plan is to go a different route as I'm a freelancer and my customers don't care about the technology choices. Instead, I intend to switch to RemObjects Mercury, which is almost fully compatible with VB.NET, plus supports many platforms, including ASP.NET Core, WASM, iOS, Android, and Linux development. Currently in beta, and the company is very responsive.

--A. Lovhaug

Quote:

Microsoft technologies that I used in the 90s and 00s that got dropped after we had committed years of development to them include: Visual C++ cross-compilation to Mac Visual J++ (and the Microsoft JVM) Visual Basic 6.

Don't get me started. I'm a VB.NET web developer. After years of being told that language selection was a "life-style choice", I'm now being told that for web development C# is the only option moving forward.

--A. Lovhaug