Cross-Platform Microsoft

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."

Comments

Excellent Development Ecosystem??

[oaklybonn]

Seriously, I've tried using the visual studio tools and I can't believe how mind boggling unproductive I find them to be.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.)

(FWIW, I use Xcode to manage my projects and I do a lot of editing with the editor since its there, but I do all my debugging in gdb/emacs since Xcode's debugger sucked ass the last time I tried it...)

Re:Excellent Development Ecosystem??

[Rohan427]

I think it's probably hard to design an IDE that appeals to everyone. Clearly VS appeals to some wide developer demographic, or else it wouldn't be the success that it is.

It's not necessarily that it's so good, I think it's that it's backed by M$ marketing, that it's for the most popular operating system, and it allows programming using MFC and everything else M$. It's one of the few choices for Windows application development.

I loath developing for Windows or on a Windows system. I've use many different IDEs and other development applications on different platforms (Windows, Linux, various UNIX systems, some mini and mainframe systems) including some applications for embedded development. There are a few things I like about the M$ IDEs (I started many years ago, so I have seen several versions of Vidual Studio and VC++), but I've found other IDEs much more useful. In addition, any time I can develop on a platform other than Windows, I will. I do not like the limitations the Windows environment places on me when I'm developing, not to mention I've always spent more time debugging OS and compiler problems than I have my own code problems.

I will continue to stay clear of anything M$ as much as possible until I see a clear history of them playing nice with everyone else on the block. I will also try my best to stay clear of Mono or anything not M$ but based upon M$ "IP" (it's bad enough I have to use Evolution because the company I work for insists on using the POS Exchange for groupware). To date they have never played nice with anyone. The aim of the company is to direct the world into paying them money for anything and everything possible. They have a clear history of coopting or killing competition, and there's no reason to think they've changed now.

Paul G. "I don't do Windows" Allen

Re:this might be good.

[Locutus]

gawd are you living in a dream world. Developers at Microsoft do not run the company and do not determine direction. Never have and never will so wake up and smell the acid that's eating your brain. Microsoft is out to terminate Adobe Flash, gain control of the cross-platform AJAX developers, stop Firefox growth, and force Google to work under Microsofts terms.

Microsoft is losing control of the development community. First it was Java on the servers, Then it was AJAX, and now with the addition of Adobe Flash and Flex. They are losing control and they know it. MS Silverlight is one attempt at bringing those all home to Microsoft and Microsoft's control. Watch for some massive campaign to tie MS Silverlight into college CS curriculum real soon. Remember all the financial deals MSFT was making which resulted in dropped Java courses and added MS .Net courses?

MS Silverlight is their golden egg laying goose. The world needs that goose to drop no egg. IMO.

LoB

Re:One word... ActiveX

[orclevegam]

Has the open source community ever NOT been slow at developing anything?

Fast, Secure, Reliable. Pick two.*

*This is a generalization, like all generalization not applicable to all cases, use at own risk, may cause cancer in lab rats, yada yada yada.

Re:Excellent Development Ecosystem?

[ad0gg]

Do you even use vs.net? Its one of the best IDEs on the market. Only IDE that i feel is better is intellij. Eclipse doesn't even come close to vs.net.

Re:bleh

[Miguel de Icaza]

just a reminder, if you are using the latest SuSe.NeT beta and having problems with moonlight.NET - specifically slow-ugly scalable font rendering - then you should try dowloading 'Microsoft Core Office-Open Access Fonts' using YAST.