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How Microsoft Dropped the Ball With Developers
cremou writes "As part of an Ars Technica series on how one developer migrated from Windows to OS X (and why), this second article concentrates on how Microsoft bungled the transition from XP to Vista. The author looks at some unfortunate decisions Microsoft made that have made Windows an unpleasant development platform. 'So Windows is just a disaster to write programs for. It's miserable. It's quite nice if you want to use the same techniques you learned 15 years ago and not bother to change how you do, well, anything, but for anyone else it's all pain... And it's not just third parties who suffer. It causes trouble for Microsoft, too. The code isn't just inconsistent and ugly on the outside; it's that way on the inside, too. There's a lot of software for Windows, a lot of business-critical software, that's not maintained any more. And that software is usually buggy. It passes bad parameters to API calls, uses memory that it has released, assumes that files live in particular hard-coded locations, all sorts of things that it shouldn't do.'"
"It passes bad parameters to API calls, uses memory that it has released, assumes that files live in particular hard-coded locations, all sorts of things that it shouldn't do."
Those are basically programming errors, not problems with the API. Don't get me wrong, I find Win32 to be a pain in the ass sometimes, but this article just reeks of flamebait.
The False God of Backward Compatibility has Microsoft by the short hairs. Even new programming environments like .Net have Win32, Win16, and DOS lurking right around the corner. There's no fresh start anywhere in the Microsoft environment, everything reeks of DOS.
Which would have been find if DOS (Win16, Win32, etc..) were a multi-platform, extensible OS to begin with -- but it wasn't. It was a quick hack that lives on and on.
I'm a developer that works primarily in Windows, with 15 years of heavy-hitting Unix programming experience behind me.
Get off my lawn.
Back before my current gig, I was a software developer for companies that hired me to do their work and for several packages I wrote for my own profit. This story comes from the programs I developed for my own profit.
Because the software I wrote was also licensed for source code if the user wanted it, I picked Visual Basic as the platform to use. I wanted to use Visual C, but you could more easly find programmers that could get by in Visual Basic than VC. I should have picked VC rather than VB for a lot of reasons, the main one being that if you had experience in VC, you were at least likely not to be a total idiot. Not so with VB. I found that VB programmers were idiots at the approximate rate of 7:10, while VC programmers were likely to be idiots at an estimated 1:10 ratio... which isn't to say that all VB programmers were idiots, only that they were cheaper labor, and therefore less likely to have a solid background in programming logic.
That said, we'll focus only on my own development problems, just so we are dealing with only one (possible) idiot... me. I started out with VB 2.x. The upgrade to 3.x went fine, with very few problems. When 4.0 came out, I found I had to rewrite about 20% of my code. Sure, there were conversion programs, but they didn't quite fit in with exactly what I wanted the program to do. It'd get it about 90% right, but then I'd have to slog through the rest of the automated code to correct that last 10%. It was faster to discard that code and re-write it.
Then 5.x came out. Only about 50% of my code still worked. And again, the automated process to "ease" transisition left something to be desired. When Visual Studio 6.0 came out, it was a nightmare. only 20% of the code ported. At that point, I sent the 5.x code out to all the people that bought the program (with source or not), and told them that the code was now moribund, I would not be maintaining it, and that I was releaseing the source code to the public domain (5 floppies included). As I recall, that was about 1998-1999 or so.
As late as March 2008, I've been contacted about the code. Of course, it's morphed far past anything I'd written, and I could only help with the general business case logic involved, not the actual code. But having to deal once again with Microsoft development tools, one would have to offer me far, far more money than it would be worth. No, I'm done with Microsoft "development" games. I'm done with school yard bullies trying to take my lunch money. I'm done, PERIOD, with closed source, whenever I have a choice.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Holy shit, you've got to be kidding me! Even VS 2008 needs Resharper to even be close to Eclipse in functionality. Have you ever used a different IDE?
One of the nice things from this article was actually this nice screenshot of a selection of current versions of MS software running on Vista. The thing to notice is that not a single one of those applications has a GUI the same as any of the others. There are different toolkits, completely different look and feel, some have menus, some don't; it's a horrible, horrible mess. And yet despite that, we still get people complaining about GNOME vs. KDE and the clash of different toolkits and how that's what is holding Linux back. You can run GNOME and KDE apps side by side and, while they'll have differences, they'll sit together far more elegantly than the mishmash that is Windows. I think I'll have bookmark that screenshot so I can bring it up the next time a Windows fanboy starts decrying the excessive number of GUI toolkits on Linux.
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I'm not big on the M$ love. I'm a mac/linux proponent. However, I think that M$'s current problem with a really horrible API (I'm saying this having programmed for win32, GTK, QT, WX, and Cocoa) isn't an easy to solve problem.
They could pull an Apple, and completely redo their windowing system. Apple benefited from using NeXT's system, which was well thought out, uses a language well suited to windowing systems (objective-c), and could be altered based on previous user experience.
However, in doing so they would lose all compatibility they current have. Keeping compatibility, even if it creates a developer's nightmare, is in the end what keeps them on top of the market.
That is not to say it's not impossible for them to do so. Apple did provide a virtual machine to run old OS9 software with the first releases of OS X. However, since both Mac and Linux machines also have the same options (currently running Parallels on my machine), it would still take the clear advantage M$ has in the market away.
It's not clear whether their bad API spells the eventual doom of the company. The more pragmatic developers will still value making products that more people can use over writing nice looking code. Additionally, wrapper libraries, such as WxWidgets or Qt can help hide much of the ugliness.
So, you problem is that programmers make use of undocumented API calls. While "undocumented" does not always equal "unsupported", using them is just plain stupid. Whether it is Windows, Linux, MS-DOS, DR-DOS, OSux using the system in an undocumented/unsupported way is well, U N S U P P O R T E D. Don't blame the OS or the those that coded it, blame those that wrote against the API in an unsupported way.
RTFA turns out to be a effort in slogging through another of the author's attempts to explain why anyone on Windows is just benighted. He blames HIS short comings on the OS.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Does he have a point though?
I think the giveaway is when he says a screen shot is worth a thousand words, then his screen shot is of vista with the taskbar at the top, Im not saying nobody has the taskbar at the top but its just one of many signs that hes a fan of apple.
Im no programmer but the article seams short on facts & details and high on ms bashing & skimming.
Is the article right or is it just well presented trolling?
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
I have my taskbar at the top, because it effectively reverses the order of the start menu. This makes shutdown the bottom option, which is where it should be, as i use it precisely once per session.
He has an axe to grind, but I'm not sure he has a point. For example, he talks about how .Net was supposed to insulate you from the vagaries of the Win32 interface,but failed. Then he talks about how the Win32 API returns the length of a file as two 32 values that have to be combined, instead of a 64 bit value. The part he leaves out is that .Net's system.IO.FileInfo does exactly what he wants... it returns the file length as a long 64 bit value. So why bring up the old 32 bit interface when you don't have to deal with it anymore? If that's the best he can do, his argument is in trouble.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
"He trumpets Apple for overhauling their platform and releasing a rapid succession of new OSes in order to advance the platform, which retaining absolutely no backwards compatibility."
This is a false statement. Or at best misleading. Yes, Apple did finally ditch OS 9 after many years of offering backwards compatibility. Their succession of OSes, or OS X as some of us call it, are all backward compatible. Unless I'm mistaking your definition of backward compatible.
Apple's decision to make a break with their old OS was a good one, and I'm sure just about anyone would agree with that. I liken it to when the camera manufacturer Canon abandoned their old twist-lock lens mounts in favor of the electro-mechanical mount. That allowed them to develop the best autofocus lenses on the market and to finally overtake Nikon in a big way, whom they'd been playing second fiddle to since forever.
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Everything I have read and heard about Microsoft suggests that they are cowboys.
Code first, design later. For example, I note with interest the amount of pain involved in trying to provide server protocol documentation for the EU. Some of the foot dragging is deliberate but some of it is that they don't have quality internal documentation.
There is a severe lack of direction and leadership at Microsoft. They are just not forward planning. As a result they are tearing themselves to pieces, doing the same work again and again.
meh
To make it more amusing those third party APIs slog through the win32 API hell so you don't have to.
I think that's why Microsoft is afraid of breaking the old APIs. Once you have to go through the pain of porting to a new API why not just go cross platform?
The problem is they know a lot of people aren't happy with Windows but it runs all their programs. Once the scrap that backwards compatibility and build something solid, despite the fact it may be their best OS ever, it's on a level playing field with the rest which means people have to find an alternative to their old programs and they might just pick something that isn't Windows and MS isn't having that.
You must have had access to the sooper sekrit article with all the illustrations in it. The Ars article I read a blatent Mac fanboy bragging about Cocoa, with an extra two tacked-on pages of hyperbole and baseless accusations about how much .NET sucks, backed up with exactly 1 concrete example: that you have to know which Windows Forms operations are thread-safe (hint: none of them). He even finishes that thought by pointing out that most other GUI frameworks have exactly the same problem. I can probably rattle two dozen cases from memory in the old Win32 API where MS made obviously retarded design choices, but he can't even come up with a single actual .NET class method that he doesn't like when he's writing an article about it?
.NET and I love it. I usually find that the Framework already does anything I'd expect a base class library to do and a bunch more. The code I write against it is way more elegant than what I typically see from, say, your random GTK app. Is that because .NET is inherently better than gtk, glib, glibc, etc? No, I don't sit around whining about how Microsoft "blew it with developers" because they didn't write all my code for me... I spend my time writing good code.
I am in that third group of developers this article was supposedly written for. I absolutely abhor poorly written code, cheap workarounds, etc. And I make a living off
I too have "been there, done that" on a lot of platforms.
The term you are looking for is "enabler" - Microsoft is an Enabler for other applications to engage in bad practices, for users to engage in bad security.
As you say it makes a lot of people happy now, but look what else it has given us - lots of decrepit systems, and hundreds of thousands of zombies that make our lives miserable in other ways.
Sometimes even a business can't just be about making people happy, it has to be about moving the market as a whole to dry land when they see the flood coming.
Just like the Spiderman quote tells us.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Having to drop into Win32 to call some legacy thing that no-one should really be doing but which you have to do for backwards compatibility, that I could sort of understand. But having to drop into Win32 to call new features that have only just been added? Anyone saying "stop using Win32, just use
According to the article there are three types of developers: (I) the ones who bang Excel macros and Access databases together with VB (not very many), (II) in-house developers for large companies who program in whatever language is in demand (the vast majority), and (III) craftsmen-programmers who look for clean orthogonal programming tools and also program in their spare time (a few).
The article goes on to argue that Microsoft catered very well for categories (I) and (II), and not at all for category (III.)
Since I believe that the programmers who make stand-alone third-party applications mostly belong to category (II) I absolutely don't see how or why Microsoft supposedly "dropped the ball" for any developers except category (III). The article points to the messy API's of Win32 and the shadows that projects unto the .NET framework. Ok, fair enough, but who cares?
Not the end-users and not the managers. And they're the ones who determine where the money, and hence the bulk of the development effort goes. That means that what end-users actually see and care about, their _applications_ will continue to be in plentiful supply for MS-Windows.
Sorry, but the author will have to do a lot better to convince me that Microsoft shot itself in the foot as regards development effort. It's not the smartest thing that Microsoft could have done to alienate the craftsmen-programmers but I don't see how that puts a dent in their business.
Well, there is a good reason why it's not valid: because it makes .NET developers give a damn about HWNDs, message pumps, and the interactions between the two.
Other than that, he points out a bunch of flaws in Win32 and implies that they "leak intoOff the top of my head we have, for example:
Win32isms are abundant.
Further, your arguments that somehow cutting edge enhancements like Vista's new TxNTFS should magically appear inLet's just recap the argument, shall we?
1) Claim: Win32 is clunky and horrible
2) Response: Write in .NET
3) Claim: .NET can't do everything Win32 can do, forcing me to use Win32
4) Response: "your arguments [...] make no sense to me"
Look, if the argument is going to be "Don't use Win32, use .NET" then .NET has to do all the things that Win32 can do. So which is it?
Either I should be using .NET--in which case MS's failure to add new Win32 features to .NET is a problem--or I should be using Win32--in which case "use .NET" is not a suitable response to cited flaws with Win32. You can't have it both ways, so which is it to be?
I really should leave this one alone, but I just can't. This article is so unbelievably biased, it is truly amazing that a site like ars allows a series like these to exist. The person who's written this series has obviously no real programming knowledge on any platform.
.NET lightyears ahead of the competition right now. Writing these little misinformed articles is not going to change that.
Moreover the way he drops in his little falsehoods borders on intent. Each and every paragraph contains one or more blatant falsehoods. Going through all of them would take way to much time.
Apparantly this Peter Bright's tried to build some winforms stuff (and failed) and he's tried to open a file (and failed somehow). These are his two major arguments against the platform.
Let's try to introduce some facts. First of all the winforms library is indeed not multithreaded. This goes for most windowing libraries. Swing is an example that springs to mind but there are many more. Making it totally thread safe would introduce a lot of overhead, making everything much slower than it needs to be. If you need to use additional threads, there are well documented ways to do this. Maybe Pater should try it... Second of all the winforms library is a very very small part of the total api. Just saying there's lot of little other things, without going into any detail is a cheap way of making a bad point. No API is perfect but I would say given the alternatives out there it's easily one of the cleanest and well thought out api's I've used in the last 6 years. Furthermore, it the author could get his head out of his nether regions he might look in to WPF, WCF, C# 3.0 etc etc. All technologies that put
This person comes across as a total beginner. You know the type, probably programmed some stuff in c++ and now thinks he's a guru on everything. In reality he's an armchair programmer, writing knee yerk articles because he coulnd't get his file to open. A lot of programmers (myself included) go through a phase like this, most move on and start seeing the bigger picture. I guess some don't and just write articles about it.
I know the average slashdotter probably won't care about an anti-microsoft hit-piece but if you're confident about using linux or mac-osx (both of which I think are perfect alternatives btw) ask yourself, why would you need lies and falsehood's to attack the 'competition'.