VS IDE Blues

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G

Guest

Well,

it's been a year since I jumped from C/C++ and ModPerl to Visual Studio 2003
and C#.

Frankly, I'm disappointed with it. There are a lot of little annoying bugs
with the IDE that just shouldn't have made it through rigorous testing. I'm
sure some of what I think of as deal killing flaws in the IDE are features
that have settings that I can change, but the environment is so clogged with
excess baggage it's impractical to go looking for the proper preference
setting.

-It took me a couple of months of being annoyed before I spent a *couple of
hours* trying to figure out how to turn on line numbers. Perhaps that's user
error, but I've been working with IDE's for a long time and it should be more
obvious than it's made. Do a search on "line numbers" in the help. Do you
find any help? Any entry that says "line numbers, enabling view of/lines
numbers, disabling view of"?Nope. You see a whole bunch of other stuff that
doesn't seem too relevant. One is forced to ask if the good people at
Microsoft even use the tool they are selling to the rest of us?

-The install is a humorous to say the least. I see no good reason for a 3
hour install. Putting the compiler on a new machine takes half a day. Now
that is expensive TOC.

-I still cannot figure out how to turn configure the ide so that when I open
a .aspx web page that it defaults to the HTML view instead of the design
view. So I have to wait for a page to render EVERY TIME I OPEN IT FOR
EDITING. Do you realize how much of my life I've watched dribble out on the
keyboard waiting for pages to render that I don't even want rendered!

-Web Applications (my god, where to start), what a hellish journey. Thanks,
but requiring file system access and http access to my projects is just
scary. Again, I can't think of anything I'm gaining by having this
requirement rammed down my throat. Where I work, we aren't allowed to access
the web servers, so your whole paradigm adds a huge amount of unnecessary
work (the needless pain). Basically this tool is unusable in my opinion.
Nobody I know likes working with it for Web Application development.

-Code bloat. Well it seems like it takes 5 to 10 times more lines of code to
do a job with .net .aspx than it does in Perl. I say work smarter not harder
and go with the fewer lines of code.

-I'd say that the last reason our whole company (1400 employee bank) is
leaving .net for Java is all the marketing drivel inserted in the Microsoft
documentation. It's not enough to talk about a paradigm, you have to add
things like "Web applications are finally maturing, and the abstraction level
rises with ASP.NET". The implication being that we've finally arrived at a
mature technology with ASP.NET. Don't waste my time, I already bought the
product! Get to the point without forcing me to think about the propaganda. I
think there are a lot of folks who feel as though their technology is pretty
mature with modperl, python, and ruby. Interestingly, the books from those
camps don't seem to have the same need to claim dominance. Again, TOC is too
high with Microsoft literature once you count in all the wading through
needless marketing drivel.

-Double pumping web pages... Since I can't get the debugger to work without
hanging my computer, I've resorted to Response.Write for debugging. Why in
the world does each response write twice???

I feel better already.

-tad
 
For HTML design view instead of html view: Options --> HTML designer -->
Design View (3 times).

For your Response.Write writing two times: make sure that AutoEventWireup is
set to "false". Also you may want to make a check with Trace.axd.

S. L.
 
-It took me a couple of months of being annoyed before I spent a *couple of
hours* trying to figure out how to turn on line numbers. Perhaps that's user
error, but I've been working with IDE's for a long time and it should be more
obvious than it's made. Do a search on "line numbers" in the help. Do you
find any help? Any entry that says "line numbers, enabling view of/lines
numbers, disabling view of"?Nope. You see a whole bunch of other stuff that
doesn't seem too relevant. One is forced to ask if the good people at
Microsoft even use the tool they are selling to the rest of us?
Click to expand...

Hmm. Searching for Line Numbers in the help includes an entry:
"Navigating Code and Text". That page includes:

<quote>
1. In the General, All Languages, Text Editor, Options dialog box,
click Line Numbers.
-The install is a humorous to say the least. I see no good reason for a 3
hour install. Putting the compiler on a new machine takes half a day. Now
that is expensive TOC.
Click to expand...

Agreed, the install is pretty horrible.
-I still cannot figure out how to turn configure the ide so that when I open
a .aspx web page that it defaults to the HTML view instead of the design
view. So I have to wait for a page to render EVERY TIME I OPEN IT FOR
EDITING. Do you realize how much of my life I've watched dribble out on the
keyboard waiting for pages to render that I don't even want rendered!
Click to expand...

Options -> HTML Designer -> Start Web Form pages in HTML view sounds
like it would do it.
-Web Applications (my god, where to start), what a hellish journey. Thanks,
but requiring file system access and http access to my projects is just
scary. Again, I can't think of anything I'm gaining by having this
requirement rammed down my throat. Where I work, we aren't allowed to access
the web servers, so your whole paradigm adds a huge amount of unnecessary
work (the needless pain). Basically this tool is unusable in my opinion.
Nobody I know likes working with it for Web Application development.
Click to expand...

The idea is that for development you run your own web server rather
than having to access any production ones. There are definitely pluses
and minuses to this, I agree, but it gets your code running under
development in a similar way to how it will run in production.
-Code bloat. Well it seems like it takes 5 to 10 times more lines of code to
do a job with .net .aspx than it does in Perl. I say work smarter not harder
and go with the fewer lines of code.
Click to expand...

How long does each of those lines of code take to write and maintain
though? I'd rather read 5 lines of C# than 1 line of Perl any day.
-I'd say that the last reason our whole company (1400 employee bank) is
leaving .net for Java is all the marketing drivel inserted in the Microsoft
documentation. It's not enough to talk about a paradigm, you have to add
things like "Web applications are finally maturing, and the abstraction level
rises with ASP.NET". The implication being that we've finally arrived at a
mature technology with ASP.NET. Don't waste my time, I already bought the
product! Get to the point without forcing me to think about the propaganda. I
think there are a lot of folks who feel as though their technology is pretty
mature with modperl, python, and ruby. Interestingly, the books from those
camps don't seem to have the same need to claim dominance. Again, TOC is too
high with Microsoft literature once you count in all the wading through
needless marketing drivel.
Click to expand...

I haven't seen much marketing drivel in the technical documentation I
have to read, to be honest.
-Double pumping web pages... Since I can't get the debugger to work without
hanging my computer, I've resorted to Response.Write for debugging. Why in
the world does each response write twice???
Click to expand...

Pass - but I'd have another go at getting the debugger to work...
 
-The install is a humorous to say the least. I see no good reason for a 3
hour install. Putting the compiler on a new machine takes half a day. Now
that is expensive TOC.
Click to expand...

FWIW I've found if you have the DVD version, copy it to the harddrive and
run setup from there. Install speed increases by an order of magnitude.

Greg
 
Hmm. Searching for Line Numbers in the help includes an entry:
"Navigating Code and Text". That page includes:

<quote>
1. In the General, All Languages, Text Editor, Options dialog box,
click Line Numbers.
</quote>
Click to expand...
There are 200 other pages shown as well. Are you suggesting that I wade
through a book to turn something off that should never have been turned on in
the first place?
Agreed, the install is pretty horrible.


Options -> HTML Designer -> Start Web Form pages in HTML view sounds
like it would do it.
Click to expand...
That did the trick. Thanks!
The idea is that for development you run your own web server rather
than having to access any production ones. There are definitely pluses
and minuses to this, I agree, but it gets your code running under
development in a similar way to how it will run in production.
Click to expand...
IT's not a best practice to run a web server on your own machine. You are
asking for trouble if you do that. It's a security hole. You cannot do that
in an environment where everything is hardened.

Whomever thought that up is probably the same person who wrote up all those
MSDN ASP examples where you have SQL embedded in the raw ASP, so leave your
SQL server wide open for the world. The whole idea of having a sql username
and password embedded in a text file at the root of my web directory seems
just plain stupid. You are begging to be hacked.
I haven't seen much marketing drivel in the technical documentation I
have to read, to be honest.
Click to expand...
Then you have a higher tolerance for it than I do.
Pass - but I'd have another go at getting the debugger to work...
Click to expand...
I don't have access to the software setups or hardware. That's why we have
an IT department. I have to submit a help desk ticket. So it takes about a
week to work through something, that I could have resolved in a half hour
with Python. My point is that I don't have this problem with any other tool,
nor have I ever, and I can't afford to be down for even a day because someone
delivered a product that wasn't quite ready for primetime because they have
to deliver on a schedule. I know plenty of people at Microsloth and I know
the drill there. It's not about innovation, it's about market share.
Microsoft is always about 5 years behind the technology curve. The problem is
that the consumer industry is about 8 years behind the curve.
 
-Code bloat. Well it seems like it takes 5 to 10 times more lines of code to
do a job with .net .aspx than it does in Perl. I say work smarter not harder
and go with the fewer lines of code.
Click to expand...
Not only is the code smaller, it runs faster.
 
By the time the bloated .net runtime has fired up to begin doing it's thing,
my modperl code has already executed and is still resident in memory
servicing other requests. I use both environments every day, and am
constantly porting apps from one environment to another so I have a large
suite of real world data and experience to go on. We use PHP, Python, Perl,
Java, ASP and C# and have roughly 15 mission critial apps in these
environments. As a lead testing coder I'm in somewhat of a unique position to
see benchmarks. We've written lots more lines of .net code, but in the end
only 3 apps are running in that environment after 2 years, but all the rest
were done in other environments in much less time per app. They are easier to
maintain as well. Same coding conventions, same group of coders.

Total Cost of Ownership is really a discussion in and of itself, but what I
see whith the Microsoft Web Application solution set is that I have to pay
for tools that have free variants that are as good or better (and to pay for
something that I can't fix problems in or customize to my work flow, when I
can get something that does give me that for free really rankles), then I
have to pay never ending yearly license fees for the web server and the OS to
run it on, and pretty soon from what I've read Micsosoft will be trying to
get programmers to rent code libraries on a per use basis. I can put up a
robust (more hardenened that you could possibly do with Windows)
transactional web site in a week for peanuts using open source tools. I only
have to charge the customer for hardware and labor. If I use Microsoft, it
takes literally 3 or 4 times as long to do the setup for each machine, and
the price goes up by a factor of 5 or 6 at least to the customer. Even the
really good ideas for open source are $500/pop, but they work. And they have
features that you will not see from a Microsoft IDE until 2007. Me, I can't
afford to wait around.

I don't understand how a company who has that much money can't seem to
produce something on their own. C# is a bitwise copy of Java. Period. Flat
out, unabashed ripoff.

I'll ask again, what did I get for all this pain of learning a new
enviroment that I didn't already have, other than some back pain?
 
"C# is a bitwise copy of Java"

rofl! I don't need to read anything else.

<done>
 
rofl! I don't need to read anything else.
I'm not sure what eMVP is, but it wouldn't be a Microsoft affiliation would
it?

My main point is that this tool is something I'd expect to see from
Metroworks who had 20 programmers, not something I see from someone with 2000
programmers. It's as though the whole generation of senior engineers at
Microsoft all cashed out their stock options and walked out the door, leaving
all these fresh out of college coders with a couple years experience running
the show. The willfully decided to toos everything out and decided on a new
brilliant idea called "XCOPY" deployment. It's puppy day at MS. I don't want
someone's assembly on my computer just because I download a web page. IF you
think you have security problems now, just wait a year or two. You're killing
your market. You're losing almost 2% of the world web browser share a month.

..net just isn't secure. I could point out a dozen show-stopping bugs from
the perspective of a secure financial institution. We've done some cool
experiments as proof of concept. Sure in 4 or 5 or years you will iron out
the bugs, but I need it right now. And just as soon as you iron out the bugs,
you will introduce a whole new set of API's, to ensure that I have to buy
more books and compilers from you.

Lets this this straight. I went into this last year with an open mind. Happy
to be paid to learn a new language. I have notning to gain, and everything to
lose by denigrating it. I just don't think it's ready for prime time, and I
question spending any effort at all on developeing it. I'd have killed it if
it were me. Too many cooks in the pot (cooks who are all too imressed with
their own cleverness).
 
http://genamics.com/developer/csharp_comparative.htm
"C# language was built with the hindsight of many languages, but most
notably Java and C++."

I would hardly call that a ripoff.
Click to expand...
Then you haven't followed the politics behind it. And Microsoft joining on
board and then subtly changing their Virtual Machine so much so that it
became uncertified. And the series of lawsuits. Total ripoff. Microsoft has
never been about putting out the best and coolest technology. It's been about
rigid and exclusive sales contracts wth hardware OEM's and buying or bullying
out anyone who might possibly compete.

When I worked at Netmanage, the division I worked for wrote X-Display Server
software. The people we worked with at Microsoft basically told us that they
were going to include a free X-Display server with NT 5. Knowing we couldn't
compete, we stopped work on the product. I still don't see an X-Display
server with Win2K (was NT 5). They knew we'd have to stop working on it if
they started. They put our division out of business with a 10 minute phone
call. 30 million dollar revenue stream and 20+ programmers.

Do you want to give money to a company that behaves that way?
 
TadPole,

I understand from your messages that you are happy that Microsoft made a
tool that perfect fits to their operating systems and is without any problem
1 by 1 to use for every Java programmer?

Or do I have to read it in another way?

Cor
 
tadpole said:
I'm not sure what eMVP is, but it wouldn't be a Microsoft affiliation
would it?
Click to expand...

I am not a Microsoft employee. I was merely commenting on the notion that
you believe C# is a "bitwise copy" of another language. If you actually
looked at the languages (or even the dates/sizes of the
compilers/dlls/runtimes/etc.) that notion would be clearly absurd. By
making some blatantly wrong comments, you dilute your entire argument.

Are they similar languages? Sure. Is C# a "bitwise copy"? No way.
 
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