Slashdot Mirror
Does Visual Studio Rot the Brain?
duffbeer703 writes "As a UNIX guy dragged kicking and screaming into the Windows world, I've never really been able to enjoy Windows programming. Charles Petzold, who is a long-time developer for DOS & Windows really laid out the reasons for me at the NYC .NET Dev group. Visual Studio and Microsoft tools force you to adopt programming techniques designed around implementation speed, not understanding or quality."
I have a good friend whose son is brilliant. He looks at anything, and instantly is taking it apart and putting it back together. In our technical day and age, he has tinkered with computers a LOT and has shown great acumen in troubleshooting and configuring not only Windows, but putting together a network.
I tried to turn him on to coding, but he went out and got Visual Studio, and went off on his own. He came back and proudly demonstrated his various creations.
While I liked his creativity, it was evident his depth of grasp of the workings of programming were as deep as VS allowed him. Cute screens with cute input buttons and cute input boxes. But nothing in the sense of real code.
He is now taking some programming classes, and while he is doing well, they have begun java, and it has totally thrown him. He's getting back on his feet, but his initial foray into VS gave him some bad (and some wrong) insights into programming and languages.
His reaction so far to having to actually write and understand code is that it is stupid. I think that's a dangerous culture to cultivate in an IT universe. He is doing well in his class but he constantly wants to go back and do the drag and drop thing.
Help I did type Y work for years and now I'm doing type X. Things are different and I don't understand, why!
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
This is in the section where he's talking about filling in event handlers for a VB form:
> This bothered me because Visual Basic was treating a
> program not as a complete coherent document,
> but as little snippets of code attached to visual objects.
So true. You can't "read" the program, instead, you can only leap about from handler to handler. And another good point when talking about a XAML demo:
> It was very, very cool, except that the 12 tick marks
> of the clock were implemented in 12 virtually identical chunks of XAML.
I'm not sure about this one - seems that one of the few times that duplicated code is OK is when it's in generated code; i.e., in a JavaCC-generated parser. For everything else, there's CPD, the Copy/Paste Detector.
The Army reading list
I ten to turn off all the auto coding features and use it for a really good editor, code highlighting, regex replacement, etc. It is actually really nice when working with both a Database and coding by hand.
They allow and perhaps encourage, but they don't force anything...
Visual Studio (VS newer than VS 6, up to and including VS 2005) is in the top 3 products MS has ever produced (behind MS Office and MS SQL Server). Powerful, flexible, and yes, it allows for very rapid development.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
I don't like MSFT any more than the next guy, but they do a couple things right:
...)
1) Hardware (keyboards, mice,
2) Developer tools
I find Microsoft tools like VS.net and even some of their languages (C#) to be surprisingly good.
Granted, I prefer Open Source most of the time, but when forced to use certain Microsoft things like Natural Keyboards or Visual Studio, I kind of like them.
I'm sure I'll get modded down for supporting them, but hey I'm just being honest.
If you "get" pointers add me as a friend (116)!
In the article, he mentions that IntelliSense encourages bottom-up programming, as it can only give hints for existing code. That's less true about IntelliJ's excellent Java editor IDEA (and I think Eclipse too, but it has been a while). Why? Because if you write a method call that doesn't exist, you can hit alt-enter and it will create the method for you. As somebody who likes both top-down and bottom-up approaches depending on circumstance, I think it balances things out nicely.
I'm a C# coder who uses Visual Studio 2003 8 hours a day during the week. I recently got an MRI and the results were unanimous - TEH BRAIN ROT!
I will say VS has "allowed" more "unqualified" developers into the mix due to the ease in using the tool, but to say it would effect the creativity of a good developer is bullshit. This guy sounds like the old time machinists who bitch about CNC over a mill and lathe.
There's a reason we start with printf("Hello World."); and not with dragging a text box into a big white rectangle.
Beware the coder who can't for the life of him code without it.
This anecdote is quite a load of bullspit. Anyone who has been working with GUI will be stumped for a bit in front of a console.
did you forget to take your meds?
Is it good or bad? I can't tell you. But the more disconnected from the environment and the machine, the less comfortable I feel about programming. Then again, the only program languages I know are Assembler for 6809, general forms of original BASIC and C. Object oriented stuff more or less caused me to lose interest in programming because it was increasingly difficult to imagine what the computer was really doing when it was executing my code. With BASIC and C, I can mentally write the assembler code and understand what's going on.
So... yeah I can see where programmer's eye-candy would be a major distraction for a programmer just getting started. But "back in the day" useful code could be written in Basic and C... wasn't complex or beautiful but served some purpose. In today's visual environments, it's not too hard to imagine kids getting REALLY bored with making meaningless code that doesn't look like the apps they are accustomed to running... but it's that meaningless code that really drives apps right?
Maybe I'm missing something important (and I probably am) but my initial impressions of graphical RAD tools are that it's a lot of flash and bluster but doesn't inspire a coder to write code.
I guess I'm one of those uncool geeks who actually likes Visual Studio. I use it 10 hours/day and it certainly makes me more productive at my job.
It's also worth noting that VS doesn't FORCE you to do anything. There's always "Win32 console project" if you want to code like that.
Some people like to build a computer by simply identifying compatible components and plugging them together. Others aren't satisfied unless they know the intimate details of how each of those individual components works. Either way the computer does its job in the end.
Hopefully this analogy makes sense. Basically, don't assume that just because somebody's preferred modality is different from yours, that makes it faulty.
I use VB6 and .net when I need to bang out an app, esp for database stuff.
I known dame well it's the ideal way, but then again, I don't call myself a programmer. I really don't care about the deep stuff, just making something to get the job done. If I need something better, I would hire someone to do it. .net is like an automatic car; purist dispise them, but for 90% of people, they could care less, they are not intrested in the car, just were it can get them.
I often end up reviewing or working on code from other people, and I couldn't agree more about his dislike of generated code.
Note that there are two sorts: the kind you never edit and the kind you have to edit. I love compilers, as they generate machine code so well that you never should have to look at it. But programs that generate source code or, even worse, documentation, are things I revile. They let an amateur get quick results, but at a drastic reduction in long-term maintainability. As Martin Fowler says, "Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand."
Eclipse has even more nice/brain-rotting features than Visual Studio, mostly because Java is a much easier language for an IDE to understand than C++ because there is no preprocessor. In fact Eclipse makes Visual Studio look like not much more than Notepad with a GUI builder. It even detects compile errors and warnings as you type. So it totally encourages that bottom-up programming style. Is it also evil? Developing Java in Eclipse is so much faster than developing it by hand, and Eclipse provides tools to "clean up" what you did by refactoring, tools to automatically generate stubs for those undefined classes/methods that you're calling to get rid of those nasty red underlines representing compile errors, etc. I would say it's just much easier to make an IDE smart if it knows what you're doing, i.e. you declare stuff before using it.
Apparently parent can't get enough of this crap.
Skype is too convoluted... Now I'm reverse-engineering the Kyoto Protocol.
You seem to be comparing 'Playing with Visual Studio' against 'Taking programming classes'.
:o)
Visual Studio is not a teaching aid. It's (just about) a programming toolkit with some bolted on frameworks. You will create rubbish if you do not know what you are doing. Try thowing eclipse at him, he would have the same problem.
Having said that, I hate having to program with Visual Studio. It's like a great big book of usefull spells, but they are written in invisble ink
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Why, in case the martians attack and take out all our strategic IDE reserves?
"Visual Studio and Microsoft tools force you to adopt programming techniques designed around implementation speed, not understanding or quality"
Force? noone's forcing me to use the RAD tools; I use VS primarily as an editor with intellisense and solution/project file management; no more, nor less. FUD.
- Oisin
PGP KeyId: 0x08D63965
As a long time user of both MSFT's Visual Studio IDEs, Eclipse, and *nix style (autoconf/automake/emacs/etc.) development and build environments, I have to attest that this article is somewhat misleading. Visual Studio doesn't force you to use drag-and-drop anymore than say Eclipse's Visual Editor plugin. Sure, the marketing people at MSFT spend all of their time talking about how VS let's you do drag-drop-n'-click programming, but that doesn't mean the actual product does solely that alone. You can write everything by hand if you so choose.
.NET CLR and class library framework) to get the most out of it.
I think we've seen this argument before, but in other forms. How many times have I seen hard-core C and/or C++ programmers state that "automatic garbage collection rots the mind?" Sure, you might not need to keep track of all of those allocations anymore with GC, but you still need to understand how a given garbage collector works in order to write efficient code for that garbage collector. Same goes with Visual Studio and managed applications: you need to understand the underlying system (in this case the
Professional developers worth their salt understand this.
If the first tool you introduce someone too teaches people, particularly bright kids, not to think about...
If it matters in the least whether a non-OS programming class uses Windows or Linux, it's a lousy class.
The problem here doesn't have so much to do with VS as it does the mentality of any given programmer. VS provides you with a WYSIWYG interface which does most of the connecting of elements, events and properties for you, without ever touching the code. THAT'S A GOOD THING. If the user doesn't have any experience with programming, they'll probably stop there and will have what amounts to a bunch of disorganized components in a form. When it comes to IDE's, the program can only be as good as the programmer. Sure, it'll provide necessary hints and make code/program/solution development quicker or better, but unless the programmer knows what's happening, they're going to create some BS program.
Most would laugh at someone who tried to create a decent web page in FrontPage and it looks like a turd. Why? Because most people who use FrontPage usually don't touch the markup and can only get to a certain level. Once again, the output is only as good as the programmer (or developer, whatever). If the web developer knows good practices like using CSS, external files and correct markup, the website will probably look good or better. The same goes for programmers and VS--if the programmer doesn't know the difference between a function and their mom, they'll only go so far (and they probably have other issues too).
Don't blame someone's bad coding job on the IDE. It can't force you to adopt shoddy programming practices unless you didn't know any in the first place.
Grammar Lesson: you're is a contraction of "you are"; your means you possess something; yore means days gone by.
Exactly; if a person needs an IDE in order to understand the code, then that person is not a programmer, they are an IDE operator. IDEs are the assembly line of the programming world; you can get cheaper, less skilled labour to produce something adequate using it. I wouldn't say that they necessarily "rot the brain", but they do keep many people from ever improving beyond the level of being an IDE operator.
If used correctly Visual Studio does not "rot your brain" or cause bad habits.
The places where Visual Studio excels is in some of the following:
Code/syntax highlighting
Structure/layout
Designing graphical aspects (forms, window layouts, etc.)
And others
One of my favorite features is the form of auto-completion and showing function prototypes. You don't have to have memorized the entire Win32 API to be a "good" programmer. Documentation comes in many forms and by having the IDE tell you when you open a parenthesis what the function expects as inputs is just another way of looking at the docs.
The one place where I think that an IDE can cause some harm for new programmers is the "shake-and-bake" method of designing an app where it asks 10 questions and writes the code for you. Past that, IDEs are a great tool for managing larger programming projects.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
Just as repeated use of calculator degrades a person's math skills I agree that Visual Studio can degrade a programmer's ability to remember all the aspects of a language. However, it really only affects those programmers who are lazy. Many people have already noted that it is easy to turn off the auto-whatevers and use code. You can go further and just use the command line. Lazy FU|5. Also, if you don't use Visual Studio why are you reading this?
...I'd agree that you're just as well off working in a text editor. However, most software projects involve using other folk's libraries - whether Microsoft's, other vendors' or just libraries created by your co-workers.
I just finished a project where a co-worker of mine worked on the business logic objects for a system and I did the presentation and screen flow. Yeah, I could've fished through his JavaDocs and designs. That would have added 10-30 minutes everytime I had to figure out a new call to one of his libraries. Instead, I could hit "." in Eclipse, pull up the methods and select the one that I needed. In the future, other folks on my team will need to support that code. Being able to receive documentation from within the editor will make their jobs much easier.
It's interesting that the project that author most enjoyed was a C program he wrote for his own amusement. Unfortunately, most of the coding folks do for money involves working with others. While working individually on a project is more fun, being able to do so is typically a luxury.
Hypercard had some serious limitations (no data structures, monochrome, single-user applications, sometimes slow on machines under 50 MHz, etc.), but it had a very nice approach to both constructing UI-intensive applications and an extremely fast edit-run-debug cycle.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
It is a tool. Does your socket wrench teach you how to build a house? Do your credit cards tell you how to spend your money?
Someday, somehow the Microsoft bashing needs to end, or at least be about something intelligent. If you are a programmer, well versed in the basic concepts of code, both procedural and OO, then all that Visual Studio will do for you is increase your productivity in what ever you are planning to create in the programming languages that it supports.
Now, some might argue that features like 'intellisense' can help you remember the depth and breath of the WIN32-64 APIs but that is not close to doing what it takes to become a profiecient programmer. The only thing that teaches you how to code, is to CODE, CODE and CODE SOME MORE. In addition to that, it wouldnt hurt to learn from others, from books, from classrooms, user groups, etc, what programming is all about.
If you (or your good(but not so brilliant) friend think that by picking up an IDE that it will teach you how to really program, then you both need counseling.
Tools are there to facilitate the developer. If the tool doesn't force you to look in depth at the code it generates it can be more productive than tools that do force you to look at auto generated code. This has nothing to do with proper software engineering practise. A good software engineer will first think about use cases, requirements, design before touching the tool. So don't blame the tool for bad development practise.
Just try doing an #import with GCC.
When you switch from VS to GCC you suddenly find many things you had taken for granted aren't there. Hey, where's the RAD? How do I do this? Why don't my #import's work? What's with those unresolved links?
Etc. etc. etc.
The great thing with open source libraries like wxWidgets (which is very similar to MFC, by the way) is that you know what you're linking to and how they work.
So the key word in here is "transparency".
I have been programming pretty steadily for about 30 years now, and only once have I seen a computer fail in a way I'd classify as "interesting."
I really wanted to hear the end of this...
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Got my degree in CS and programmed almost entirely in *nix and using Emacs. Did my senior thesis using C# and VS .Net. Don't really notice anything different really... The only difference is that I use the .Net library which gives me a lot of prebuilt stuff. VS.Net is not all that different from what Emacs was for me. They both accomplish one thing and that's to save/write my code to a file. I fail to see what was forced on anyone. Programming, the actual process of writing the code is VERY simple. All you need is a text editor and something to compile it afterwards. So I don't see how any tool you use to do that can force you to do anything. If I have bad techniques or habits, that's my fault. If nothing else, VS.Net has made commenting and generating documentation a lot easier. My programming technique isn't something I'm going to blame/give credit to MSFT--not this one for sure.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
The tool has nothing to do with whether your fundamental understanding of application architecture is strong or not. What a tool like VStudio or QT Designer DOES do is let people who have no knowledge build applications. That doesn't make VStudio rot your brain. Your brain was either rotted before or not. Most of the worst code I've seen during my career was entered via vi and/or emacs. That doesn't mean vi doesn't rock or that emacs leads to brain rot now, does it?
Loading...
All articles like this overgeneralize.
I don't care what tool you use. If you aren't a good programmer, you're not going to produce good code, no matter what tool you use. If you are a good programmer, then Visual Studio helps you produce good code much faster.
That said, perhaps I might agree that people who are learning how to code, should probably do so with as little assistance from the tool as possible.
This is the same thing I would say about kids learning math. Using calculators rots the brain, don't you think?
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
It's not about "an MS development platform" - it's about a wizard-packed, macro-laden, obfuscuated way of programming. Visual Studio is a gem of a programming environment and I use it for my own C++ science apps. I just don't use the things in it that sprawl my code across 20-odd different source files and make coming back to it at a later date a nightmare. And that's a news flash for you.
No offense,
But, taking stuff apart doesn't make you brilliant. Most of us geeks took things apart when we were kids. People around us said the same things you're saying about so and so's kid. The kid is stumped with java because he's having to go beyond instant gratification and actually learn something. There is a fundamental difference between just discovering random facts and learning ideas that have depth. Just because he can play video games or memorize oodles of random computer facts, or fankly, even put a network together, doesn't mean much. I'm not saying the kid isn't smart, most geeks are "smart", few are brilliant.
It's good for him to struggle. He'll find out if he's really brilliant. His response that the ideas are stupid is just his ego combined with youth. Does he think math is stupid too?
My point is that visual studio isn't the problem. The problem is thinking that mucking about with computers is equivalent to learning difficult things. Whipping up some crappy kid-app in Visual Basic is about as difficult as Whipping up some crappy speakers in woodshop. It no more makes you a programmer, or dare I say, a computer scientist, than building the crappy speaker makes you an acoustic engineer.
The kids problem isn't visual studio, the kids problem is that the stuff he's done requires tinkering and doing but no hard thinking. Now he's being forced to think and it sounds like he's finding out that it's not quite as easy as just doing. That's good!
ymmv.
Wanted: Clever sig, top $ paid, all offers considered.
While I liked his creativity, it was evident his depth of grasp of the workings of programming were as deep as VS allowed him. Cute screens with cute input buttons and cute input boxes. But nothing in the sense of real code.
This only demonstrates that Visual Studio is a bad environment for "teaching yourself", not that using Visual Studio is a bad thing in our professional lives. VS has fully fledged languages behind it (nothing stopping you from compiling/linking from the command-line...). There is nothing about VS that intrinsically limits the depth of one's understanding.
For Professionals: I think this point from the professional's perspective is really well covered by Andy Hunt and David Thomas in Section 35 of "The Pragmatic Programmer": "Evil Wizards".
In summary: If you use code generated by wizards and other similar tools without understanding what that code does, you are going to run into problems. Wizards and generators are tools that can increase your productivity (why bother writing code a computer can write for you?), but if you don't understand what they're doing, then you are going to run into troubles. Finally, their tip: "Don't use wizard code you don't understand".
For students: Regardless of the language/environment that kids start on, they need someone to guide them. They need to be taught the underlying concepts behind functions and classes. They need to be taught a few fundamental design concepts. They need to be taught some of the common idioms. If they aren't then how can they get it right? For the VS learners, it will be the flashy wizard generated dialogs that do very little, and ungracefully. For the console/C learners, it will be the almost-as-flashy text based menus (generated with reams of printfs), that do very little, and ungracefully.
Yeah - I originally learnt to program (in Turbo Pascal and C) in a self-directed manner, and I had the same problem as the kid you talk about. It wasn't until many years later at Uni, that I finally learnt to program.
I tried to turn him on to coding, but he went out and got Visual Studio, and went off on his own. He came back and proudly demonstrated his various creations.
Shoulda started with Perl. Everyone knows Perl is the best language for learning quality programming skills.
Find coupons in Greeley
I don't program in anything else anymore, unless I have to!
The Mac tools are especially horrible. All XCODE is, is a poorly integrated GUI slapped on top of GNU tools. And heaven help you if one of your binary "NIB" files gets corrupted. You're SOL.
Best Buy can have you arrested
I don't mean to troll or even to necessarily disagree with the submitter, but I have another perspective to offer.
:) )
Does Visual Studio rot the brain, or is Visual Studio designed for less l337 programmers? (I don't want to say that it's for rotten brains
Microsoft's strategy is to provide easy to use development tools (ex VisualBasic) and innondate the world with cheap MCSE's trained in 6 month courses to use them. Microsoft can then go to PHBs and tell them their solutions don't require them to hire expensive developers, just these cheaper code monkey MCSE's. I'm not saying all or even most MCSE's are idiots, but from what I read this is a major part of Microsoft's sales pitch.
This seems to go hand in hand with one of the submitter's conclusions, which is that these tools promote or even enforce rapid application development at the expense of robust maintainable applications.
This space left intentionally blank.
"While I liked his creativity, it was evident his depth of grasp of the workings of programming were as deep as VS allowed him. Cute screens with cute input buttons and cute input boxes. But nothing in the sense of real code."
As deep as VS "allowed" him? WTF are you talking about? I've used VS every workday for 7 years. I gather it has some sort of functions for making cute screens with buttons on them? I wouldn't know, I've never written a gui app.
He's a kid. He wanted to make something he thought was cool; and he did, good for him. It makes sense he went for the drag-together an EZ-GUI stuff; He made something that looked cool and didn't do much. I'm guessing "looks cool" was his design target.
Heck, I first got into programing (time to date myself) writing BASIC programs to draw maps of D&D dungeons. 99% of what I learned in my first months of coding was the details of the particular extended ascii set my computer suported. I learned useless trivia and wrote lousy code in pusuit of eye-candy. But eventually, I wanted to move a marker around the dungeon, then I wanted to keep track of what was in different rooms. Today I make a fairly nice living writing complex C++ without a bit of eye-candy anywhere near it.
In short, leave the kid alone. Soon enough he'll want those cute buttons to do real stuff. If adults can be kept from eliminating his fun by insisting that "real" programs can't look good, he'll be a crackerjack coder in no time.
... you mean where you modify code at runtime while running it inside a debugger?
:-)
Get on Mac OS X, and start coding using Xcode. You may drool once you find the Fix & Continue (ZeroLink) feature.
This year our computer science department switched to Visual Studio, and I can say without qualms that they couldn't have made a worse decision. Now we are forced to use VS.NET because the professor can't run the programs to grade it without .vcproj and .sln files.
Fortunately, this is not my first foray into C/C++, and I am quite used to writing programs in vim and compiling on the command line at my job, so usually I just import the source into VS.NET and compile to make sure it doesn't produce any strange microsoft errors (my favourite is the crap about "unable to verify assembly source", I'm looking right at the assembly source, why can't I verify it myself?). However, this does not bode well for my classmates. For one, the cost of using linux/bsd is now prohibitive: it's extremely inconvenient to haul ass down to the lab every week just to import some source.
It seems like the focus, even in obtaining a cs degree, is now speed of implementation instead of speed of code. I realize that this is common business practice in the real world, but do we really want all of our new cs graduates to be a horde of IDE-dependant windows programmers? I know that I dont look forward to working in that kind of environment, or running software produced in it either.
I think that's a dangerous culture to cultivate in an IT universe.
Oh Jeez, get over yourself.
You've completely ignored the subtleties of a choice made by an intelligent mind when presented with different ways to do things. I find it fascinating he went right to the GUI and started developing code that way. Instead, you're peeved he didn't start figuring out what include files to use to do a printf() to a console.
Maybe the path he blazes will be the next paradigm. History is full of people making huge leaps in technology by finding easier ways to do things that interested them, but were against the norm.
Viewed from this perspective, I think you should step off and let him learn what he wants how he wants, and not in a way that pleases you.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
First, none of the features he complains about are unique to Visual Studio- intellisense, visual designers, code generation all have counterparts in other code editors.
Second, any code editor is a tool. In the end, they are a fancy way to create text files to compile into binary. There are people who use VS to write code without understanding what it's doing behind the scenes, just like there are people who drive without knowing how an internal combustion engine works.
Finally, there are people who hand-write all their code, waste alot of time, and still write bad code.
IDEs can definitely help you understand the code faster, however. Take Eclipse, for example:
Granted, I could understand the code without an IDE, but it's going to take me longer. I don't know if you were being sarcastic (I'm a little tired, so not so mentally keen), but people who use IDEs should not be written off as the equivalent of assembly line operators...
- shadowmatter
There is no way anyone can wrap my head around 60,000 equally accessible and - as far as the computer is concerned- equally relevant system calls.
With technologies like "Intellisense" (or the EMACS scratch buffer, or your other local system equivilent- no it wasn't invented here fanboys), you don't have to.
In contrast, POSIX has relatively few APIs layered underneither relatively few more. Across all the "common" APIs you'll find on a modern Linux system, you'll probably find just about as many as you'll find on Windows.
However, you'll note that many POSIX programmers refuse to use things like Intellisense (or whathaveyou) for these purposes- not just because they rot the brain (that's something we find out the hard way as well) but because it simply isn't necessary(!)
I'm almost positive GNOME offers perfectly usable functions somewhere that allow me to put up struts, but I have never used them. Oh I think I went looking for them once, but I didn't look long because once I found GDK_WINDOW_XID() I was back in X11 land.
Because my knowledge is layered as well, this means that building my application for a platform or environment I don't normally target means that I don't have to learn everything at once. I'm happy to use the normal file I/O operations I use everywhere when I cannot quite figure out the glib way to do it, and so it is I should!
The win32 development model doesn't make this so easy- APIs are all at the same level (do I want GetDriveType or SetupDlGetDeviceRegistryProperty?), change meaning (e.g. MoveFile working differently on WinME and Win2K), and sometimes completely defying documentation (SqlDataReader.GetChar?) and so on. Worse still, by making all API available equally how is the programmer to function?
As a result, methodologies that I have used for several decades now are completely inappropriate- I may be able to write a ActiveX control in C, but I certainly would never want to! Not only will Windows dictate your resource files, dialog boxes, and programming structure, but it'll also dictate your programming language as well!
Enough is enough!
There are plenty of tasks that are a pleasure to code in perl. Others that Objective-C makes for more fun. Still others I might find a use for Java or even C#, and yet I haven't found any on their own merits that would demand C++ other than the IMAPI* family of interfaces is grossly inaccessible to any other language.
The consequences are that I keep win32 development to the bare minimum and do not accept any win32 development jobs- and the result? I'm writing more code than I ever did before.
I'd like to ask anyone who actually enjoys writing software on Windows to tell me their secret. The development tools are lacking, and the APIs are daunting. I dare say the Win32 development environment is the absolute worst ever, so I tenatively question anyone who says otherwise: Have you ever used anything else? (Seriously. Take 30 minutes and write kiosk software in Objective-C and XCode. Take another 30 to see how good ol' GNUMakefiles can improve your life. It's absolutely amazing Win32 developers that see my methods to understand that they can work on sources instead of processes)
The problem with this approach is that it is the same as allowing calculators for students who are learning to add fractions. The calculator is certainly the faster way, and in my professional life, I will likely use a calculator over adding fractions by hand, but when you are learning the fundamentals of mathematics, it is much more important to understand what's going on than it is to simply get the right answer.
Likewise, Visual Studio is a great way to generate code, and can be a great tool for professionals. But teaching people to program with it is another matter. Visual Studio completely abstracts these beginning programmers from what the program is actually doing, and without and understanding of what's going on under the hood, you aren't much of a programmer.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
it's the brain using it. A program is only as good as its
:-) We programmers are some of the only
organization. This is why large programs often fail or are
terribly bug-ridden. The complexity of software grows much
more than linearly with the number of lines of code. VS.NET
is an excellent tool for program editing, but it has its
limits as to the number of files (and, hence, data structures)
that it can present coherently to the user.
The challenge for programmers is always how much of the
design can be visualized in the brain. As much as I like
VS.NET, it does not allow me in any way to visually represent
my internal organization of my software, therefore my brain
is the limiting factor. (AAA, Visio sux and I don't have
the cash for Canvas X).
But, hey, what do you think I do on my machine, other than
read slashdot
engineers who create our own tools, so stop complaining, and
get to coding!
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
I agree. What you know before using a tool like Visual Studio (C# of course) is what counts in life.
/. crowd is critical of the VS suite. For what it is designed for the Visual Studio does a great job at allowing coders with a solid background to develop application quickly and completely. They might not be the most efficient application performance wise, but most computers today have CPU cycles to burn. Any ways C# was designed to develop business applications, not enterprise applications. If you are developing something where CPU cycles and RAM are critical you need to be using C or even assembly.
It is too bad that the
Whether the 'old' timers (myself being one) like the abstraction of low level coding and what is becoming mainstream, this is an evolution of development.
Visual Basic back in 1992 was in of itself a massive advance for this type of programming and programming understanding. Look at all the 1000s of VB applications from this time period by people that truly had very little coding experience.
However, some of the VB programs from this time were quite effective.
I think the biggest injustice to programming and the programming community as a whole, is the lack of UI guidelines, and understanding usability and User Interaction and User Flow.
How many times have you grabbed a GOOD program, with brillant LOW LEVEL coded features, but the interface to the application work about as well as a broken pay phone.
So sure VS can remove the user from 'low level coding', but this is NOT always a bad thing.
As development EVOLVES, there is NO REASON with the AI in the development tools and the AI in the code produced by these development tools should not be used. Why should a person in the 21st century truly have to fully understand memory allocation, advanced recursion, or even see program past advanced event handlers, as that is what programs ARE - event handlers...
Why do we have to beat down development tools just because they remove the developer from having to DO THINGS THE Tool or Compiler should DO FOR YOU? This is what makes advanced devleopment and the progression of better applications bloom.
Go back to the VB of 1992, it was a major eplosion for application availability. Sure some of the programs were crap and from people that had no idea of coding, but there were also serious developers that didn't want to take time to screw with all the crap that a developer in THIS DAY and AGE should not have to do.
I welcome development tools advancement. Sure there is some fundamental coding knowledge that everyone should know, but you can't blame these tools for this.
I could have the same arguments about many projects in the Open Source world, they are brilliant, but since the coders have little undertsanding of usability or UI guidelines, they applications are virtually worthless to anyone that is not a geek.
I'm not even arguing VS is the best set of tools out there, Borland still makes some really great development environments. I still like Delphi, and am amazed of how tight the code it produces, and yet how much it DOES FOR ME, even if I do know how to do the things it is doing for me is irrelevant.
We not only need to support development that is beyond a text editor and command line compiler, but we also need to support development tools that try to structure and help users with usability for the people that will be using the applications. PERIOD.
VS and Borland products are pretty good, but they could even be better - imagine a development environment that gives a flag when it notices a break in usability, or gives a compile warning after it 'intellectually' sees the appliction has many inconsistencies that would confuse the user.
Additionally, VS is even dated for what the new Microsoft Development and technologies are introducing. VS2005 barely touches the abilities of future Windows development - that is why the 'Expression' like of products will be used to augment the UI and User experiene for VS applications.
Give the world a couple of years, and the foundations of 'native' understanding being built into the next generation of Windows Vista, WILL change not only the user experience, but the development world. Leapfrogging concepts of today.
Go look up some of the concepts Microsoft has introduced and HAS that are often overlooked, go do a search on the last PDC. There are things in Vista that move development to a new level of understanding and functionality for not only developers, but what the users will start to see in the next 5 years.
It is like one of the brains behind the XAML and XPS systems in
Is a troll. Can anyone tell me what he did wrong though?
So far I count a distinct lack of insults towards nmb's parents, and not a single reference to his sexuality.
I can see how you could say that about VS, but I think it applies to a lot of things. If you don't know (or want to know) anything about how computers work, then you could get lulled into just clicking the pretty widgets and filling in the blanks on all the things the wizard does for you. Myself, I use VS but almost always start with a blank project and build from there. When I was first learning in the mid 90s, I got roped into using MFC because of it, but experience has taught me to avoid proprietary stuff like that--and by "proprietary" I mean "specific to a particular system". You could make the same argument against using shell scripts with calls to commands found only on your favorite distro of Linux. If you aren't aware of the existance of a "Linux standards base" or "C99" you are going to get suckered into writing something "trendy" when you didn't mean to. Then you'll find yourself re-writing it 2 years later when the "release often" cycle has made your efforts irrelevant; but I don't hear anybody saying Open Source rots your brain. You have to learn to defend your brain. Defend it against tools that hide too much, defend it against trendiness, defend it against outdated designs touted as the latest thing, defend against marketing, and hold on to what stands the test of time. If you have a good brain, a bad tool might keep you down for a while, but you'll learn, and you can actually "un-rot" your brain.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Earth? Cool? Lucky, lucky you, weren't you the spoiled brat? Back in the day, I had to envision a billion Buddhas within a billion Buddhas within a billion Buddhas, all on top of a turtle's back just to get a big bang and some actual space time with matter...
Visual Studio and Microsoft tools force you to adopt programming techniques designed around implementation speed, not understanding or quality.
It is not the responsibility of the tool developer to insure the user has a clue.
Some projects at my company were written by people who did not know how to program well. Others of us follow well-organized, structured development.
Their code looked like the Microsoft samples. (God help us all! And MSDN Team: I write you EVERY THREE MONTHS that is is int main() and not void main().) When some of my team was asked to help them write unit tests for their code, we gave up and told them to rewrite. When they wanted to add more functionality, they couldn't and finally asked us for help. We told their boss (not their team lead) to rewrite when we found that every button had their own set of SQL calls and set the state of various controls on the form. Most of the buttons duplicated the work of all the others.
Contrasting it with our beautiful code. :) Ours looks like it was planned, mainly because it was. Only one of our projects is a GUI. The rest provide libraries with M/V/P or M/V/C structure. It is all under unit test, and adding features is a joy. Well, as much of a joy as work can be.
VS itself is not the problem. It's the developers who never learned how to program that are the problem.
frob
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
I recently saw, first hand, how Visual Studio should *not* be used. The problem with rapid application development is that generally, as with any precise scientific endevor, the more rapidly the work is done, the more opportunity to make massive mistakes. In my recent experience, I came across a fellow who had started working on a database system for a small mechanical company. He obviously had programming experience, and even wrote some fairly good conditional loops for processing payroll taxes. However (and largely due to inept management who did not have any programming expertise) he found himself making larger and more extravagant promises of expanded features to his bosses. Eventually, because of the way his program had been rapidly banged together, he found himself 'paited into a corner,' unable to deliver his promised new features without an extensive rewrite. In this respect, I feel that RAD tools, such as MS-VS, can lead to even greater delays than carefully planning and writing all the code by hand.
It's a friggin kid we're talking about. What did you do when you were programming as a kid, if you did ? I know i tried to have the computer display fancy stuff, in stupid ways. I wrote some sort of "demos" consisting of loops likeor composed some sort of animations in an ascii 8x8 grid because i didn't know of sprites and all the stuff. That was probably stupid, utterly useless, and definitely not the good tool for the job. I should have been using assembly at the time, and some sort of backbuffer instead of calling cls... But what the heck, that's what made me love programming. At the time i remember i tried to join some computer clubs, but they all were doing some things i thought were utterly boring, like learning how to use spreadsheets, or having programs "behave in an intelligent way" (that is, validating input...).
They were right, validating input is more than necessary in even the most stupid program, and using a spreadsheet instead of making a custom program yourself for each formula is certainly a good idea. But it wasn't fancy, and was very boring to do... Let this kid alone, he'll understand soon enough that you can certainly make nice looking programs with vs, but you have to learn programming to have them do anything usefull. And if he's really interested, he'll learn that too. And i'll congrat him because frankly, when i was a kid learning to program 8 bit computers was certainly a fun thing to do, but now with all the stuff you have to know, the fact that you can only access the computer via stupid apis that you have to learn, you have to be really interested by it to find it amusing. Computers are boring nowadays, seriously...
I had ROM Basic, GW Basic, Quick Basic, and Power Basic. I had Borland C/C++ for DOS.
Bah! All you children, with your fancy gizmos and whirleygigs. Why, when *I* was a budding hacker, we had to flip bits with a TIDDLEYWINK! And we LIKED it that way!
All you kids with your fancy interactive terminals, and your 300-baud modems, and your higher-level languages. "Ooo, my BASIC is SOOOOOOO powerful!" "Logo could do that in a jiff or less!" Ha! Nowadays, you kids just don't know the first damned thing about computers! Do you!
Why, if it wasn't for the PDP-8, you wouldn't even KNOW HOW TO PROGRAM! Face it!
Seriously, though, back in the day, I noticed that Mac geeks generally weren't very good at general problem solving. Now, it seems the other way around; the MS-Windows nerds seem to be behind the curve in general computer intelligence. But what do I know? I just had a fight with a clerk in a computer store about whether color laser printers were better than inkjet printers.
Like Charles Petzold (bless his OS/2-loving heart), I'm getting too old for this shit.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Writing C code in vi will rot the brain... or make it stronger.
In either case, something drastic is going to happen. Tread lightly.
The functionality you mention has nothing to do with an IDE (which is about integrating the development chain) and has been readily available in most decent programming editors for over a decade.
* If I see a class name I don't recognize, I can control-click to go to the class definition. If the source is not attached, I at least get a view of all the method signatures.
If you hit ctrl-t in vim, you go to the class definition (or function definition, variable definition, etc). I can't remember the keybinding in emacs, but it's in the context menu or M-x follow-tag.
* If my code invokes a method I don't recognize, I can hover the mouse over the method and the Javadoc description of the method will pop up, telling me what the method does, what the arguments are for, and what the return value is.
K in vim brings up the man pages or info pages for the defined function. I use it with Python docs; Java programmers use it with Javadoc. Emacs has similar capability.
* If I'm navigating through someone else's class hierarchy, by selecting the class name and pressing Ctrl+T I can see all interfaces this class implements, and its superclasses from which it inherits methods. If I hit Ctrl+T again, I can see all classes that inherit from this class, and what classes inherit from them, etc.
Sounds like emacs' oobr or vim's cscope interface (which is used for more than just C in vim).
If I hot Ctrl+O, I can see all the methods callable from my current cursor position. I can also see all variables within scope.
This is the only point that vim doesn't do by default yet (there are 3rd party packages to give similar completions, and vim 7 that encompasses this and a more powerful Intellisense(tm)-type thing). Emacs has this feature, though.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Maybe ten year ago, Visual Studio was great. We all used it.
Now, we have Eclipse, and _I_ have GCJ, and SWT. And I don't need Visual Studio to make a standalone dialog EXE.
So I don't use it.
Or maybe it's the fact that I can use Eclipse for my web development too. And the same with Java.
Or maybe it's that Eclipse does so much more than syntax highlighting. Refactoring is solid with Eclipse. CVS support is flawless (to the extent of the capabilities of CVS) . Working with Eclipse feels, now, the same that Visual Studio felt like back in 1995.
That, in the technical realm, aside from the fact that Eclipse is free. As in beer, and as in, for example, being available from here to eternity (another nice side-effect of free software).
so you will never have to retrain, or recode, or change the language you use.
Java with Eclipse rocks.
Of course you could use other languages with Eclipse, but that's what _I_ like.
But I just have a hard time actually accomplishing useful programming in an IDE enviroment. Delphi was an exception to that. I got a student version of Visual Studio.NET my first year of graduate school, but I just got too frustrated trying to actually do any programming in it. When I discovered MinGW and the ability to create Windows native programs with gcc, I completely ditched trying to use Visual Studio at all. My brain has been rotted, I have been spoiled and I can't deal with the horrible complexities of trying to get an IDE to do what I want.
I can build my makefiles up from just a couple lines like "all: gcc file.cpp" to 20 or 30 lines as my project grows. Have you ever tried to edit the project files, or move a manually built project into Visual Studio? Trying to create the necessary files manually is pretty much impossible, and I don't think it's even possible to import projects whose makefiles were created by autoconfig/automake.
As long as everything works in your IDE, it's fine, they're usable, but when you try to do something outside the boundries of "common and expected tasks", well, give me a brain rotting command line any day...
All the fancy wizards are for people who dont program for a living or for putting together quick demos..etc I dont think many people will/would actually use the wizards for large products as the code maintnance would be hell in the long run. I believe that eventually VS.NET will be close if not easier for a non-programmer to make a small database app/Office app similar to MS Access. (You would need a little knowledge, but the wizards would do most of the work). Some people who either hate MS or hate the fact that coding has been made a lot simpler will resent this, but this is normal for most technologies. I remember about 2 years ago when I was in college, a classmate told me that programming against .NET felt like it wasnt really programming, he prefered C++. I dont know why he would say such a thing, but the amount of time it takes to write a program in .NET compared to most other languages is huge, which is probably why the framework has grown so much and will continue.
Personally I dont use the wizards often because they generate too much code that is not needed. This was susposed to be changed a bit in the next version, also more wizards are should be added, so I may have to bit the bullet try them out again.
Everyone here seems to be under the impression that Visual Studio hides the source/nuts and bolts/inner workings from you. It doesn't. You can program assembly and K&R C if you so wish. (Using Visual Basic/J++/C# is a different thing, but that's more of an argument against those languages than Visual Studio.)
Granted, you can draw a dialog box by hand, but you can also create that dialog by assigning an HWND to point to the result of a CreateWindowEx(). You can also manually code your own .rc resource scripts and use the MAKEINTRESOURCE macro. Do whatever makes you all warm and fuzzy inside, but don't say Visual Studio is t3h n00b! shift+1
DATABASE WOW WOW
I'm a computer science student (3rd year), and we we're forced to use VS.Net in a class last semester. Having done some pretty spiffy things with it, I really have mixed feelings. I'm normally a gedit, GCC and terminal type of guy, so I wasn't overly excited for that course. After 5 months of heavy .Net usage, these are my feelings.
.Net was tkinter with python and XCode on my Mac. .Net is much more complex than the python, but not nearly as polished as XCode.
.Net just crashes and burns. If you're lucky, it'll pop up a box telling you what line of code failed in some closed source file you can't examine, or if you can examine, is worthless cause there's no comments anywhere. If you're not lucky, .Net will take the whole system down. If you're neither lucky or unlucky, you can use .Net like you would normally use GCC in any situation.
.Net won't be to bad. My overall oppinion of it is "bleh". I've used better, but I've certainly seen worse (Boa Constructor comes to mind). It doesn't promote good coding habits, but that's not really the IDE's main purpose in my oppinion. Your teachers or book should do that. .Net is good for those willing to put up with it, but for the OP's sake, drag and dropping objects does not a computer scientist make. Hell, I've got computer science professors that can't actually program, but they can write pseudocode for optimization problems for NP-complete problems without stopping to think.
.Net != programming teacher/book.
Pros:
It's a wonderful project management program.
The syntax highlighting and the step through code abilities were nice.
Creating command-line programs was actually easier than ever before.
MSDN.com is, surprisinigly, a really awesome resource for information.
Cons:
Creating a gui for a program was utter hell. When you start a program that has a gui, there's a bunch of code that gets written for you that you have zero control over. There's no comments explaining why it's there, and vague errors given if you mess some of it up. This may also be because the only GUI programming I've done prior to
The compiler seems a little fragile. Given that I'm not a stellar programmer, I make some syntatical errors every now and then. GCC can usually handle these, or give me useful information about what I did wrong.
Again, I'm only a moderate programmer, so maybe if code just clicks for you,
Computer Science != programming.
When MSFT's best Windows development author starts complaining about MSFT's development environment, MSFT had better wake up and take notice...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
It was at the bottom of the page as a footnote:
1It was the late 70s. I was working for New York Life Insurance Company at 51 Madison Avenue, programming in PL/I on an IBM 370 via TSO (Time Sharing Option) and an IBM 3278 terminal. I was using a new-fangled "full-screen editor" called FSE to edit my source code. At one point I pressed the Backspace key and instead of the cursor moving backwards as is normal, the entire screen moved left one character, including the frame of the editor, with the beginning of each line wrapping to the end of the preceding line. It was as if the entire frame buffer shifted. I pressed the Backspace key a couple more times, and it did the same thing. Then it started going by itself, with the lines circling around the screen and right up through the top until the screen was entirely clear. Then we called the IBM repair guy. I was very eager to tell him what happened and hear his diagnosis, but that's not they repaired 3278s. Instead, the repair guy had a box full of spare circuit boards. He swapped them in and out of the machine until the terminal worked again.
I had the a double stroke of good fortune when I learned Windows development:
.rc files, etc.---instead of using VS's horrible tools like the godforsaken "ClassWizard". And while it took more time in some cases, it allowed me to carry over lessons from the Unix world. Between that and "Deep C Secrets" I was feeling good...
1) I worked in a shop that did cross-platform development with core libraries that had to compile and run across various Unices and also Windows (95 and NT 4.0 at the time).
2) someone turned me on to Petzold as the best place to start.
Petzold's uncompromising focus on the code and away from the tools (like VS) allowed me to get used to doing things the "hard" way---rolling my own message handlers, hand-editing
Unfortunately, the advent of COM/COM+/DCOM prevented this approach from working for too long. For instance, magical precompilers that generate binary files that must be linked into your project to make it "just work"---I'm looking at you, "tlb."
Premature optimization is the root of all evil
But then, what do you expect from an outfit that believes a BOOL is tri-state. (one would have thought that would have been fixed by now, but nooooo....)
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
Perl isn't "complicated." It's just that C is retarded. I mean, really, in the "real world," you will never have to make a starry background. Perl (and especially Ruby) allow the perfect mixture of very high- and high-level elements. In fact, in Ruby, you can mix in modules and polymorphically redefine derived classes in the same function if you were so inclined.
And, *no*, you do not have to understand anything about rendering black or whatever. No Fourier transforms or 11-dimension existentialism either. (The only "strings" for you are scalars!)
Anyway, your code in Perl:
perl -e'while(){print int rand 99.99?" ":"."}'
Written in a term, by the way.
Are all of you bobble heads agreeing its a good thing to get back to c and 'Feel like a real programer again' really saying you want dejure coding to be re-inventing the wheel everytime you start an app? That for the umpteenth time you will re-create X set refferences and little functions etc.... ?
No, people who do that (code in lower level languages) build their own "RAD" system with their own code snippets as they build their tool box over time. And in that system EVERYONE has a different hammer, different screw driver and diferent voltage meter and none of the damn things work alike.
All this guy said in so many words was that he dosn't like the way M$ did it.
I do agree that VS's habit of saying hands off this code is beyond fucking annoying and borders on down right criminal. That being said I have found no examples of a bar across my path when I want to do something down dirty and hands on. The system is just not set up to do it so it is even more cumbersome than it would be otherwise to get at the gutz. The IDE is what has problems with messing with the designer code... if you don't use the designer and edit your code elsewhere and link it yourself (something he admits elsewhere is possible) then this is no longer a problem. He praises using his own choice of editors in one situation and then in a backhand way is annoyed that the VS environment dosn't provide what he wants. Fine, use something else if you have a problem with it.
The reality is that modern systems and modern graphical environments have a shitload of dumb overhead programming to be done to handle the stupid ass forms. No matter how you simplify the refferencing system someone is going to complain that if you don't do it all yourself you don't udnerstand what is going on. If you want to redefine forms more power to you. But the power of computing is that once YOU do it that means eveyrone else can easily benifit from it and they do not have to repeat your work. All VS does is leverage all the work done through the years on windows forms in an easy to access and implement manner. It is a GOOD thing that you can punch out a program in a week now that would have taken months if you had to manually handle all the form operations. Remember... all code generated by someone else is like other drivers on the road... if they are going faster they are idiots and if they are slower they are numb nutz. Just think of the generated code as another memeber of the coding team and get over it. You just can't do it all yourself. If it is truly atrocious enough to change then make the effort, else shut up and get on with it.
There is and always will be a time to go back to the drawing board. At others you reap the benifits of what has come before and enjoy the fact that what once was hard and the domain of the few is now easy and achievable by all. VS is fantastic at bringing application development to the masses. It accomplishes its goal. If that goal isn't what you want then damnit don't use it or figure out a way to adapt it to your purposes. But for crying out loud would eveyone stop bitchign that the thing is not all things to all people.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
The important thing, For what it is designed for is exactly right on the button.
VS and VS.NET, are *primarily* rapid application development environments. They try to serve the developer by offering all the cool intellisense mojo and whatnot, and try to serve the employer of said developer by trying to make said developer more productive.
I for one think that MS does a pretty damn good job of this...
However, I can see the validity of Mr. Petzold's complaints. The code that VS and VS.NET generates can be rather obtuse at times. Intellisense can get REALLY annoying. Sometimes it really does feel like VS is trying to hijack one's code, but you know what? We as developers don't need to use it. I often find myself using some arbitrary text editor and calling the freely downloadable win32 SDK or
And I like it this way.
But when my employer comes around and asks me why I've spent the last hour hand rolling a complex dialog with property sheets and all that ballyhoo, when using the Dialog Editor or Windows Forms Designer would have taken ten minutes, what do I say? "Uh, I'm just pining for the days when men coded their own resources, with their teeth!"
But then again, I had trouble finding my belly button today, so maybe VS really does make me stoopider...
I, for one, am looking forward to the inevitable
I was both poking fun at the parent and using my reply as a vehicle for Perl one-line obfuscatory hotness. Please to be grounding yourself contextually in future endeavors, effendi.
Last time I looked (and admittedly, this wasn't recently), the IDEs on Windows always brought dependencies on the particular user's environment. Dependencies such as absolute file names, environment variables, registry settings, etc. For the solo programmer, this may not be a big deal. But in my job, every single member of the development team has to be able to build the exact same binary from the same sources. The dependencies on the environment made this practically impossible, and we switched to using command line compilers/tools and GNU Make (which also has its wrinkles, but that's beside the point). In addition, the project files containing the compilation options etc. were usually binary files, and the actual changes to them from version to version were painful to trace.
My question is, have these issues been addressed in recent versions of Visual Studio? If not, I really couldn't recommend it for managing larger programming projects with more than one developer.
I usually say that this requires one to write a what_is_truth() function.
At MS, confusion is Job 1.Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
Prior to Visual C++/Turbo C++ IDE's, the Windows C programming was based on make files (nmake files?). You would customise it to do exactly what was required, but when C++ and MFC/OWL came about, so did new tools.
...) for the colour highlighted bland editor. You don't have to configure it to get F1 help. It's got better over the years and it's available to everyone.
It's all about trade-offs. You can either require the developer to add a library every time he uses it, or add an unhealthy amount by default and allow the clever developer to remove the excess.
The IDE is about ease of use. You sacrifice your cool macro-language extended editor Brief, PE,
That is the point; availability to everyone. The tools lower the barriers to entry. It's much easier and much less frustrating to have Visual Studio create a running empty app that you can customise or prise apart, than it is create one from scratch using a set of disparate tools. (There's a lesson in here for Linux development somewhere.)
If you're knowledgeable enough to hate it, you probably know enough to work around it.