Cross-Platform Microsoft 348
willdavid sends us to the ZDNet blogs for a provocative opinion piece by John Carroll. He points to Microsoft's evident cross-platform strategy with Silverlight, and wonders whether the company couldn't make money — and win friends — by extending its excellent development ecosystem cross-platorm. "Microsoft, apparently, is helping the folks at Mono to port Silverlight to Linux. This is good news, as the primary fear I've heard from developers is that Silverlight will be locked to Microsoft platforms and products. Microsoft has already committed to supporting Silverlight cross-browser on Windows, and has a version that runs on Mac OS X (which is even available from the Apple web site). The last step is Linux, and Microsoft is working with Novell and Mono to make this happen."
How cross-platform are we talking here? (Score:4, Informative)
How exactly is Microsoft going to be supporting these cross-platform apps? Maybe they're thinking about doing what they did with IE on Macintosh, produce a version for other platforms, then stop distributing or providing updates to it once they decide it's no longer convenient.
Business applications are kind of strange beasts in the software world because of the long usage life they're expected to see. That's one of the reasons companies often want some big name company behind a product because they're afraid somewhere down the road the company might fold and they'd be left without support for a vital application. The problem is most of these companies haven't yet realized that open source applications provide much better guarantee because even if the original developers quit working on the application, it's always possible for someone else to take up the reins. In a proprietary system, even with a big developer behind it, there is nothing insuring that development continues on any given application.
Of course, in this case it sounds like maybe Microsoft is doing the right thing and actually helping the Mono guys make their product compatible with Microsoft's, but I'll still be wary of anything Microsoft is distributing directly.
Re:So the real question is.. (Score:3, Informative)
You have to be joking, right? (Score:5, Informative)
Does anyone really expect Microsoft to continue development of Silverlight for Mac and/or Linux after Silverlight has killed Flash? After Microsoft killed Internet Explorer for Mac and Windows Media Player for Mac (not that they even remotely considered maknig any of that available on Linux)? You trust them? You trust some guy who has been praising Microsoft exclusively to the detriment of all else for almost a decade?
You have to be joking, right?
For one (Score:3, Informative)
Re:One word... ActiveX (Score:3, Informative)
Huh? I made my living as a web developer using MS as a platform. So did everyone at my former employer (who is being bought out). I don't think you know the true market, because we never had any problem finding clients.
Excellent Development Ecosystem? (Score:5, Informative)
Excellent development ecosystem? Don't make me laugh. I've been hearing about the asserted superiority of Microsoft's development tools and the wonderful enterprise features of their products for years, and always thought to myself "well, probably." However, I recently started working in a Microsoft shop and I can tell you first hand that the Microsoft "development ecosystem" is not excellent. It's not terrible, but it's not great, either. Certainly not worlds better than some already available environments (cross-platform or otherwise).
Without going into specifics, I can say that I spend more time struggling with Visual Studio than doing anything else. Most of the features I want are actually there, but it's not always obvious where to find them or how to use them. Some features are missing, or are nominally there, but fail to work in the situations where I need them. Then there is a load of baggage that just gets in the way. Erorr messages that it gives me are almost always uninformative, wrong, or both (my favorite so far is "'1' is null or not an object"). At first, I thought it was just me being inexperienced, but even colleagues with years of experience run into these same issues. And it's not like I'm very demanding; usually, I'm just trying to find out what the value of something is or how the program got to a certain point.
And that's just Visual Studio. We use a number of other Microsoft products in our workflow, and there are issues with most of them. For the most part, these are usability issues. They don't actually prevent you from getting work done, but they do slow you down. Stability issues come a distant second. One issue that hasn't affected me but is affecting the company as a whole is that a lot of time goes into making sure things work with the current _and_ previous versions of Microsoft products. Sometimes, this is as simple as just not using some new feature, but sometimes it takes up a lot of time.
Note that I have purposefully highlighted the bad parts and omitted the good ones. My point is not to give an objective impression of the Microsoft platform for development purposes, but to show that it falls short of excellence. I would never choose it myself, but I wouldn't say it's actually bad. Just not excellent.
Re:Excellent Development Ecosystem?? (Score:4, Informative)
I mean, when you hit compile, it generates and spews out a command line to a little text window. Which is fine, but it doesn't bother to actually parse that data and present it in a meaningful way. You end up scrolling through dozens of warnings (if you're not compiling with the equivilent of -ferror) to find relevant errors.
Huh? You're looking at the Output window, which shows the build output. Visual Studio does parse that into a list of errors and warnings, accessable from, the "Error List" window. You can turn off warnings in this window to just show the errors. Double clicking on the errors will take you to the correct source file and line that generated the error.
Oh, and then there's deployment. I worked for a while with some folks that had a C++ application that talked with the Microsoft SQL database and IIS. Their "push" procedure involved remote desktop to the server, clicking buttons to take down the server, pointing it at the maintenance site, creating a new directory in the file explorer, naming it correctly and copying the existing database files to it, copying over the newly compiled bits, testing it in situ and finally pointing the server back to the live site. This took them between 3 and 6 hours, every Friday night. I asked them why they can't just write a shell script (or dos shell script, whatever the hell windows has) and they said that it would take too long to develop that. Idiots.
Yes, they're idiots. We do all of this automatically through NAnt. I'm pretty sure you can do this all through the command line if you're masochistic (quite frankly, the Windows command line sucks hairy balls). But theres seriously no excuse not to have deployment automated, especially if its taking several hours.
But thats not what I'm here to rant at you about. I'm here to rant about Visual Studio. Why, if the OS is called Windows, am I only allowed to have one of them in my development environment? I never got the MDI thing, but I routinely, on Mac OS, have 20 source files open and visible. Why does Visual Studio insist on cramming them into one single pane?
Theres a setting in Visual Studio that lets you switch to a windowed environment. Tools->Options->Environment->General->Window Layout->Multiple Documents. It still constrains those source code windows to the area of the parent window (Visual Studio's window), but you can pane them and everything. If what you want is to be able to drag the source code windows outside of the main Visual Studio window, then you can't do that. I would agree that it would be much nicer if you could. I prefer the tab layout, personally.
Gargh, its frustrating. Why can't the compiler take normal command line switches with meaningful names?
I use MSBuild to compile our app, and it takes command line switches. I'm not sure what kind of switches you are looking for, however. You don't get things like specific optimization switches, since those are in the project settings, but I typically build one of a set of pre-defined modes (Release, Debug, etc).
Since we're talking about the "development ecosystem", why does the command.com shell so completely fail at being useful?
cmd sucks. Big time. It would be nice if they could actually start pushing powershell, but thats unlikely to happen anytime soon. They should have put it in Vista, at the very least. Hopefully their next server product has it.
The debugger is even worse, hiding and showing things based on what it *thinks* I want to see. The only benefit it has over gdb on the command line is mixed assembly/source view, but at least with gdb I can quickly disassemble whatever I need to, not just where the PC is.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of any examples of the debugger hiding and showing me things. It pretty much shows me what I ask it to.
Can someone please desc
Re:Excellent Development Ecosystem?? (Score:2, Informative)
*Sigh* Here we go. Its call the "Error List" window. By default its there, so I would go and reopen it the next time you compile. Code properly, and the warnings go away. If you can't figure out good coding practices, then clicking on the Warnings button on the Error List window will filter out all the warnings.
Oh, and then there's deployment. I worked for a while with some folks that had a C++ application that talked with the Microsoft SQL database and IIS. Their "push" procedure involved remote desktop to the server, clicking buttons to take down the server, pointing it at the maintenance site, creating a new directory in the file explorer, naming it correctly and copying the existing database files to it, copying over the newly compiled bits, testing it in situ and finally pointing the server back to the live site.
Sounds like that's the process they wanted. My deployment is a simple nant script. All it does is copy files and create and sign a manifest file. I use Sql Compare to update the database along with some custom scripts. That's it. I can do an upgrade in 15 minutes. ClickOnce is a great way to deploy an application.
This took them between 3 and 6 hours, every Friday night. I asked them why they can't just write a shell script (or dos shell script, whatever the hell windows has) and they said that it would take too long to develop that. Idiots.
How is that the fault of any MS product?
But thats not what I'm here to rant at you about. I'm here to rant about Visual Studio. Why, if the OS is called Windows, am I only allowed to have one of them in my development environment? I never got the MDI thing, but I routinely, on Mac OS, have 20 source files open and visible. Why does Visual Studio insist on cramming them into one single pane? Gargh, its frustrating. Why can't the compiler take normal command line switches with meaningful names? Since we're talking about the "development ecosystem", why does the command.com shell so completely fail at being useful?
I guess you don't know how to redock the windows or use the split pane features. I also guess csc
The debugger is even worse, hiding and showing things based on what it *thinks* I want to see. The only benefit it has over gdb on the command line is mixed assembly/source view, but at least with gdb I can quickly disassemble whatever I need to, not just where the PC is.
Ya, its a pain how it makes the point the exception occurred at highlite in yellow, with a big box pointing to the line explaining what the exception is, and what some common causes are. That's AWFUL. How dare it do exactly what you tell it to (no, it doesn't change its behavior randomly, there are settings that YOU control which dicate how much to show or hide).
Can someone please describe what is so great about visual studio? I've heard other people say it, but I really don't see it. (Please compare and contrast to Eclipse and/or Xcode.)
Maybe if you took the time to learn the tool you'd have an easier time.
Re:their goal is to protect Windows, Flash Must Di (Score:2, Informative)
Flash: It has a monopoly right now. It is a piece of shit. It barely supports linux. And beyond that, I have to use terrible development tools in a windows environment to do anything with it.
Silverlight: Gives me hope. I like
Re:bleh (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The last step is Linux? (Score:4, Informative)
They didn't cut and paste from Linux, they took it from BSD [wikipedia.org], and in the open. The BSD license "Regents of the University of California" attribution was in their copyright for a long time, though they did rewrite it (I think) for Vista.
Re:How cross-platform are we talking here? (Score:3, Informative)
Well, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find any OS that didn't break a few things version to version, but 2000 to XP was minimal (mostly additions like the native WiFi networking, not changes to old stuff) and in all my playing with Vista's driver models (a lot; I've been using it since early beta 2 when almost nobody was making native Vista drivers) the only thing I've found that I simply can't work around is networking. My guess is that the new (written in-house from the ground up) network stack in Vista is just different enough from the NDIS in earlier versions of Windows that old drivers won't work. Pretty much everything else, including old video drivers (though you lose all the advantages of WDDM) can be loaded by either tweaking the INF file (if it's a manual installation, which only a few drivers are anymore) or running the installer in Compatibility Mode (which Vista will automatically prompt you to do if the install fails the first time).
You mean the new formats that, when you attempt to open them in an older version of Office (all the way back to Office XP I think) prompts you to download a free converter plugin for those files? MS would certainly like you to upgrade, but they aren't making interoperability between the versions impossible, even if the Office 2007 user forget to save in the legacy format.
This one I admit I'm not sure where you're going with it. Since VB4, VB code should compile to native binaries without need of a redistributed library, although it obviously will rely on some native Windows libraries that may (but shouldn't) have changed slightly. In other words, programs coded in VB6 should still run happily enough. If you mean they aren't supporting the development platform anymore, I can't say I'm surprised... VB6 is history, and rightly so. VB.NET is a nearly identical language with much better libraries and capabilities, is cross-platform (through Mono), and has good performance. I can't for the life of me see why they shouldn't EOL VB6; the copies people have will keep on working but nobody should be either learning it or starting work on a new project in it. That said, if you have any details about this I don't know, send me a reply please.
Technically true, but you're insulting the intelligence of anybody expected to take this at face value. IE7 is an automatic upgrade, but it's not a silent one; even with automatic update installation enabled, the user must approve the installation. It's also possible - easy, even - to uninstall IE7 using Add/Remove Programs like XP users are used to. This will restore IE6 in all its antique and insecure glory. Of course, if you managed to write some inhouse web app or ActiveX so badly that it actually doesn't work on IE7, go right ahead (though I hope you'll be using Firefox or another alternative for all external browsing). That said, the policy where I work presently is "Don't install IE7, it will break things. Uninstall it if you have it." Well, fine; I just don't use IE on my work desktop. On the laptop, which is mine and not the company's, I run Vista (and openSuse Linux) and in Vista I use IE7 primarily. I have yet to come across a single company page or tool that wouldn't work. YMMV of course, but you need to screw up pr
Re:I don't think it's so paranoid... (Score:2, Informative)
Among other things, it was developed from scratch for a more application-targeted usage, whereas Flash is basically an animated movie player that was modified with spit and duct-tape to kind of be an application delivery platform.
Silverlight uses a subset of the XAML and WPF frameworks, which are light years beyond doing layouts in Flash. And here's the biggie for app developers: Silverlight doesnt force you to work in the death-trap that is Javascript. You can use a real, compiled, IDE-supported language to do your development, and not be stuck in the 1980's with javascript.
Look into it a little more. The media-delivery stuff is just what's sexy right now, due to YouTube's success. But its really a tiny piece of it. Just think of it as a mini app-dev platform for web delivery.