Visual Studio issues
Unknown
tell me how to see this dataset in VS2005 without having to re-do the
entire form.
2. Tab Control on a form; edit via tabpages..collection. Change the
font and all Groupboxes on the form get changed also. This is
extrememly productive to have to change all the groupboxes AGAIN.
3. Drag several checkboxes from a dataset onto your form. Some of
them are light-grey and others aren't. They seem to all go to
dark-grey after you change the value and Save. Once again, real
productive trying to figure out why some of this stuff works, and some
of it doesn't.
4. VS2005 SP1 problems on Vista. Jeez thats real surprising.
5. Vista won't support anything other than a VS that actually works;
to be determined at a later date.
6. &Text on a button doesn't display that character underlined (the T
in this case). Nothing special here, a button within a GroupBox.
7. The normal VS development would include: drag something onto your
form, then spend the next week trying to figure out why it doesn't
work correctly. Pick any control.
8. I am using the same tried and tested VS2005 as the rest of you, on
an approved box, with a certified OS; so whats the deal?
9. I recently saw an example of a tried and tested VS2005 application,
and now the developer spends all his time trying to figure out various
error messages and how to work around these problems. This application
was supposed to replace a lotus notes application, but they have never
figured out how to display 100,000 rows of data without timing out, or
taking forver to display. Notes never had a problem in the 8 years it
was in production. There were actually over 1 million rows of data in
the notes database, but the VS application limits everything you view
to the last 20 days. The VS2005 application has SQL Server 2005 as
the backend. I'm not impressed.
10. Help is a frigging joke. It's worse than a google search. I am
in the development environment, and have hilighted a reserved word,
and would expect to see help on that, but no, I get 10,000 items that
I need to sift through. I used microsoft foxpro several years ago,
and pressing Help would return the details of the function or
procedure, with examples. VS2005 seems to want to return to you
everything that ever existed anywhere for this item, and in no
particular order. And even if you get lucky, there won't be any
useful examples.
11. Using Outlook as a COM object in an application is absolutely
ridiculous. You have to find a 3rd party solution to actually get
this to work. Work arounds every where, but nothing from Microsoft.
12. Rest assured, that anything you develop today will be ancient
history tommorrow. Forget about having something you developed
yesterday actually running. Applications used to have a life cycle,
but now its driven by Microsoft's latest OS or development environment
with patches.
13. Anyone remember when Borland Basic or Pascal ran as expected.
Functions and Procedures performed as documented, and never once was
there an unexplained application crash. They provided books with all
technical documentation with the software. I love purchasing another
VS book, then looking in the index for something like Cursor, or hot
key or whatever, and it simply isn't there.
Summation: Business's have to be loosing a ton of money every year in
productivity supporting this thing they call a development
environment. It's extremely complicated, not well documented, and
prone to attack. I tell all my clients to switch to open source/linux,
which is robust, free and less prone to virus attacks. I can deliver
an application to them in less time, with little or no support after
delivery. The only reason they are skeptical of doing this is because
of the Microsoft hype, which doesn't hold much credibility these days.
They all feel they need to be on XP or upgrading to Vista. Let them
upgrade and face the same problems as today. Most corporations need a
large staff to support Microsoft products anymore, and still, they can
not quickly resolve the problems they encounter every day.
Kevin Spencer
you are experiencing are due to a combination of factors that are almost all
entirely of your own making.
First, if you are using Visual Studio on a Vista machine, all bets are off.
Vista is in beta right now, and as every decent developer knows, beta
software is *not* reliable. If it was, it would be RTM software, not beta.
In fact, like every other software vendor that releases beta software,
Microsoft prominently warns the user of the inherent dangers in using it.
Almost every developer that I know (including myself) will not run beta
sofware (*especially* an operating system) on their productiion machines.
Nor will they do any production work using such software. Beta software is
released in order to find (and fix) all of the bugs in it, and the larger
and more complex software is, the more bugs it will have during the beta
release phases.
Second, you failed to mention whether these issues occurred in a Visual
Studio installation on the beta Vista operating system you seem to be so
unhappy with. Although you claim that "I am using the same tried and tested
VS2005 as the rest of you, on an approved box, with a certified OS," you
also make the statement "VS2005 SP1 problems on Vista" - implying that at
least some of the issues you are describing may be occurring on the beta
Vista platform you have (see my first point). In other words, while you may
feel better after ranting, you have not provided the necessary information
that might be useful in diagnosing the reasons for your issues. Since the
first possible cause of any issues *could* be related to the OS, which is
not a "certified OS," it is impossible to rule out that possibility in any
of the cases you described. Analysis of a problem is dependent upon the
ability to narrow down the list of possible causes. The operating system is
the bedrock of any software, so any analysis is impossible from the start.
Third, the fact that one is uneducated about how to use something does not
reflect on the quality of that being used. Your laments about "the good old
days" (e.g. "when Borland Basic or Pascal ran as expected") are
irrelevant.If you were to purchase an equivalent Borland product to Visual
Studio, it would be just as complex to use. The simple fact is, computers
and software have become increasingly complex over the years. The days of
"simple" programming are long past. Now, these development environments are
full of productivity tools, but the mere fact that they contain so many
productivity tools implies necessarily that their operation is not simple. A
knife is a simple tool. A Swiss Army knife is much more complex. But we are
not talking about anything as simple as any pocket knife. The more features
that any software has, the more of a learning curve is involved in using it.
If you are not up to the self-education involved, which all professional
software developers have to perform, you are in the wrong line of work.
Again, this is not a reflection on the software, but on yourself.
Fourth, as for the help: The Microsoft .Net SDK is huge, as the sheer number
of pre-built assemblies and their respective classes is huge. Admittedly,
the Microsoft search engine is fairly poor compared to, for example,
Google's web search engine, but you seem to have problems using Google as
well ("It's worse than a google search."). Google is the best search engine
in the history of the world. However, getting answers to questions is
dependent upon asking the right questions. GIGO. After having used the MSDN
Library for a number of years, I have learned the type of questions it
responds best to, and how it returns results. After all, complaining about
it does nothing to improve my situation or solve my problems. It is
important to take responsibility for your own welfare at some point in your
life. Practice makes perfect.
Fifth, you are not compelled to buy or use Visual Studio.Net. In fact,
installing the (free) Microsoft .Net platform on any machine installs all of
the command-line compilers and utilities that Visual Studio employs to make
your job easier. Visual Studio is all about productivity. It will write a
lot of code for you if you allow it to, but it does not compel or require
you to employ that code, or not to modify it. An over-reliance on
productivity tools is death to the professional life and/or sanity of any
programmer.
Finally, your conclusions are not logical. Your statement "Business's have
to be loosing a ton of money every year in productivity supporting this
thing they call a development environment" is pure conjecture, with no basis
in statistical fact. It is a conclusion without a premise.
Your assertion that Visual Studio is "prone to attack" is also pure
conjecture. The Windows operating system is certainly a target of hackers
and evil-doers, simply by virtue of the statistical fact that approximately
90% of all computers in the world are running it. The larger the target, the
more likely it is to come under attack. This is a reflection on the nature
of predators, not on the nature of the target. In fact, the United States
Computer Emergency Readiness Team
(http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/bulletins/SB2005.html), a U.S. government
agency, reported far fewer vulnerabilities in Windows Operating Systems
(812), than in Unix/Linux Operating Systems (2328) for the year 2005. That's
less than *half*. Like the human immune system, the more an operating system
is attacked, the stronger its defense becomes over time.
Your statement "The only reason [all my clients] are skeptical of doing this
[switch to open source/linux] is because of the Microsoft hype, which
doesn't hold much credibility these days" is both conjecture, opinion
(regarding Microsoft's credibility), and an assumption that your clients do
not take your advice because of advertising "hype," ignoring the possibility
that you could be wrong about your conclusions, and the possibility that
your clients simply do not trust your advice.
Rather than parsing each statement of your conclusions, I will simply assert
that there is no statistical or factual evidence to support any of them.
This implies a poor discipline of logic on your part, which might also
account for at least some of your difficulties. Logic is the life blood of
software developers.
So, again, I hope you feel better. But feelings won't pay the bills, and
illogical arguments will not convince anyone but fools.
--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
Microsoft MVP
Software Composer
http://unclechutney.blogspot.com
A watched clock never boils.
<Jason> wrote in message news:qngrh2lfpm5fdm37d...@4ax.com...
cmoore
<Jason> wrote in message news:qngrh2lfpm5fdm37d...@4ax.com...
> 8. I am using the same tried and tested VS2005 as the rest of you, on
> an approved box, with a certified OS; so whats the deal?
but I personally have not had any of the ones you mentioned above.
> 9. I recently saw an example of a tried and tested VS2005 application,
> and now the developer spends all his time trying to figure out various
> error messages and how to work around these problems. This application
> was supposed to replace a lotus notes application, but they have never
> figured out how to display 100,000 rows of data without timing out, or
> taking forver to display. Notes never had a problem in the 8 years it
> was in production. There were actually over 1 million rows of data in
> the notes database, but the VS application limits everything you view
> to the last 20 days. The VS2005 application has SQL Server 2005 as
> the backend. I'm not impressed.
Suggest you have a look at your design, we have used much larger datasets
without out any problems, but like most things you need to do moe than just
drag and drop stuff to make it work.. This is not a fundermental VS 2005
issue that I am aware of..
<snip>
12. Rest assured, that anything you develop today will be ancient
> history tommorrow. Forget about having something you developed
> yesterday actually running. Applications used to have a life cycle,
> but now its driven by Microsoft's latest OS or development environment
> with patches.
Must agree, would prefer that they make something actually work as specified
before moving onto the next shinny thing..
<snip>
>
> Summation: Business's have to be loosing a ton of money every year in
> productivity supporting this thing they call a development
> environment.
We have facts which support this view with VS 2005 which has a 30% loss of
productivity over vs 2003, and has cost us over $150k due to know breaking
bugs identified before the "offical" release and still not fixed..
But vs 2003 without SP1 works fine, so there realy is no need to move to vs
2005..
>It's extremely complicated, not well documented, and
> prone to attack.
Dont belive there is any evidence to support this last claim..
<snip>