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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.'"
I am 'this' close to jumping ship. I use Ubuntu on machines at home and find it fast and clean, even on older hardware.
.Net developer. I don't know that it is that much better on the other side of the fence frankly, at least as far of the coding environments go. But I KNOW for a fact that I prefer linux to Windows.
I have access to all MS software as our MSDN and Gold Certified Partner plan administrator. I have tried Vista on a couple machines. Even on a brand new Dell dual core laptop with 2 gigs of ram, it was sluggish and still could not use the full aero interface. Yet I installed Ubuntu on a 4 year old 600m with 512MB ram and got a full interface with snappy performance.
I don't need aero to develop code. The features I was most interested in all got cut from Vista... most notably the filesystem upgrades. Now add frequent updates to the framework that require $1200 software packages to use to the fullest extent. Then add the insane cost of a legit SQL Server license on which to deploy it. Plus as a domain admin, I find the administration to be a drag. And I still don't trust them for a second on security. It all adds up to a monumental drag.
I am a frustrated
Microsoft has dropped the ball in a number of areas, particularly with regard to user-interface APIs which this article focuses mostly on, but in other ways it is far and away the easiest platform to develop for - mainly because of the quality of their development tools. Having done lots of development across Windows, Mac, and Linux with all kinds of editors, IDEs and debuggers, nothing comes close to Visual Studio in terms of functionality, quality, and just being solid. It's not perfect, but it's way better than anything else out there. For that reason alone Microsoft deserves some kudos from developers.
"how one developer migrated from Windows to OS X"
.NET
That pretty much says it all: "one developer"
The argument about old krufty code in Windows and the Win32 API has been around since.... the Win16 API! It didn't really seem to slow down Win32.
On the flip side is the argument that the need for backwards compatibility is holding back Windows - yet developers complain about the migration from XP to Vista?
All smells like we-will-find-anyway-to-condemn-Windows to me. Note: I do all of my development on LINUX, so I'm not a Windows booster. I think lots about Windows just stinks but there is an issue of credibility here.
If you want a clean new coherent API and you want to develop on Windows Microsoft has provided an option:
Using "Common Sense" is being either to arrogant or to ignorant to ask people who know more about something than you.
well, it does indirectly but not as blatantly as the article would have one believe. Don't forget that if the API's were properly designed to begin with, it would have been impossible to give invalid parameters to the function or allow the use memory that has been released.
I have no idea what hes on about with the hard-pathed file references.
The problem is so many corporate coders back in the day (and still) would use whatever shortcuts they could within the api including "undocumented features" like the former two issues. If Microsoft were to fix these issues without compatibility for these "features", it would break tons of legacy applications. Therefore, ongoing developing must include these already-incorrectly-designed portions of the API as well as whatever they really want to be working on.
Just because a company does something poorly to begin with and people adapted to it, doesnt mean the company isnt to blame for the issues.
Course that doesnt make this article NOT a flaming pile of rhetoric, it just makes it slightly less than complete and utter bullshit.
Ice Cream has no bones.
When articles claim Microsoft dropped the ball I think it's more wishful thinking than anything, because Windows programmers are in their Enterprise glory days right now, no longer restricted to VB and half-assed object models. Not anymore. We now have full OO features and much much more, and Java is playing cathup feature-wise. It's nice for a change.
I don't care how messy Microsoft's underlying code is, as long as they've tested it and ensure it works enough for me to program against it. The Microsoft security updates help a lot too. They're very frequent which means there are a lot of security flaws but they take care of them quickly (I'm sure I will get numerous examples where they didn't take care of security quickly but if you're on Windows update you see them coming thought all the time).
Yes, but making the hardware suck to scrape a couple of pennies off the price didn't help the BIOS. Actually, I blame IBM more for not choosing a better processor than the x86. There were sane architectures out there at the time (e.g., Motorola 68000). A lot of the craptacular nature of the BIOS (not to mention DOS and early Windows programming) came out of that particular decision. But, back then, IBM was a fairly craptacular company anyway. It seems to have improved a bit since then (although, it's hard to tell; with a company the size of IBM, you may be looking at the stern of the oil tanker and everything looks fine, while on the bow, fires are raging).
That is all.
No concept of what .NET really is, misleading users.
.NET/WPF is easy, transparent and has clear and easy paths for migration. (Let alone OS X is still a hybrid 64bit OS, using 32bit code throughout the OS, unlike Vista x64)
No mention or acknowledgement of WPF/WCF or the new APIs that are and 'set' to replace Win32/Win64
Completely misleads users about API concepts and features of OS X compared to Windows, for example XAML/XPS concepts compared to Display Postscript is a massive difference in display technologies that are part of the new Windows API sets, that Carbon or Cocoa cannot provide to developers. (Go to Channel 10 and watch videos on why XAML/XPS was created and how it trumps every aspect of other display/print technologies. - Let alone how it is an integrated aspect of the video API system in Vista, making programming freaky simple for advanced features and new UI platforms like 3D.)
The author then jumps into UI consistency with dialog wording, and doesn't mention OS Xs lack of keyboard support, consistency of delete/backspace or 100 other things more important than dialog wording which is also NOT PART of Win32 inherently.
Author doesn't realize Microsoft and IBM wrote most of the GUI and UI guidelines that OS X even uses today.
Office 2007 is a new direction in GUI paradigms, and is WELL accepted in the business world. Not something to make fun of when OS X is still using old MENU (textual word lists) concepts. Menus were a hack to make features available in a GUI context, but are a draw back to non-graphical UIs. Vista and Office 2007 moving away from word lists (MENUS) is the right direction, too bad Apple isn't innovating on UI and just keeps throwing the same UI slop at users and telling them it is good. (And don't even mention multi-touch UI, go watch the freaking TED conferences Apple ripped the ideas off from several years ago, let alone the MS multi-touch work that also preceded the TED conference. MS Research has and is doing more with UI than any other think tank in the world.)
Author also totally ignores Adobe not providing any 64bit support for OS X because Apple dropped the ball on Carbon x64bit support that has been promised forever from Apple. In contrast 64bit development on Windows in both Win32/Win64 and
So for 'real developers' like Adobe (OS X) is a failure, and has failed paths. Which means if you want a 64bit version of Adobe products, you will have to move to Windows for the peformance and benefits. Oh, how brilliant Apple and OS X is...
This brings up the horrid Carbon/Cocoa platforms and migration paths, and even then not even touching on the development tool constrast between the two platforms.
I challenge Mr. Bright to a real debate on the topics covered, maybe he can try to justify some of his misleading and outrageous claims.
Because programmers are, you know, just leaving the Windows platform in droves! Because it's annoying to develop on!
(sarcasm off)
Windows has always been annoying to develop on; when you've got the lions share of the market, and the customers want "windows," that where most programmers are, annoying or not.
So maybe they "dropped the ball," I say they never had the ball to drop, and they don't give a crap because if you want to make money, you work on Windows.
Now... how is this different than last year, or the year before, or ten years ago?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
You could call the BIOS interrupt function.
You could call the MSDOS Interrupt function.
You could detect the hardware and write directly to the hardware address.
Both the BIOS and DOS mechanisms were slow and broken and did not follow the conventions of any programming language. For example terminating strings with the $ symbol, FFS.
All commercial programs (and most hobbiest ones) wrote directly to hardware for speed.
DOS was not really an OS at all. It did very rudimentary memory management. About the only thing you'd really use DOS for was disk access and application launching, otherwise DOS applications were basically "bare metal" applications that managed just about everything (screen, keyboard, serial ports, mouse,...) internally.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This was modded as funny, but, as a .NET developer, I find it to be exceedingly true. I just made the switch to OSX, because I was unhappy with the stagnancy of windows. But, as we speak, I have windows running in a virtual machine almost solely for the purpose of running visual studio.
I find the articles critiques very hard to swallow. The argument that .NET is limited by the attempt to be simplistic is asinine. Just like java, there are high level "simple" functions that may or may not suit your needs. If they don't you have the capability to dig down into much lower level functions to do what you need to do.
He states several problems with the UI capabilities of .NET. Before I even get into the technical components of his argument, if he's trying to say that Java is better in this area, then he needs to get his eyes checked. Every single java app I've ever used is ugly as sin, and I've seen a lot. Sure, it's portable across environments, but that's not what .NET development is being used for. Aside from that...not happy with with the windows UI standards? Everyone else seems to be. You can write .NET apps that follow very closely to the common windows UI design standards. Not happy with the limitations on the UI? Write/use another UI implementation like GTK. And how do we not even mention that the UI layer has been completely overhauled with the advent of WCF?
I can say with experience that .NET is very powerful and can be very pleasant to work with. The ability to move from desktop apps to web apps to mobile development with very little effort has been great for me and my career. I'm sure that Java does a lot of things right, but as someone who has seen a lot of the terrible things microsoft has done, I honestly think that .NET is a crowning achievement of theirs.
According to the guys that created the IBM PC (Bill Lowe and Jack Sams), they did it this way because they thought they were running out of time in an important new market (PCs). The Apple II had been introduced in 1977 and was a runaway success. IBM noticed Apple IIs being used in the engineering departments of their clients.
IBM's top management met in August 1979 to discuss their "PC crisis." In another year, the PC industry might be too big for even IBM to take on. IBM chairman Frank Carey knew that it took "four years and three hundred people to do anything" at IBM. Bill Lowe, who would lead the IBM PC development team, claimed that his team could provide their product in a year. Carey gave Lowe two weeks to set up a proposal. Two weeks later, Carey bought it.
From the transcript:
- [Cringely narrating] He knew the company was in a quandary. Wait another year and the PC industry would be too big even for IBM to take on. Chairman Frank Carey turned to the department heads and said HELP!!!
The documentary goes on to describe how Microsoft (a computer language company at the time) ended up providing the operating system after the company that should have provided the OS (Digital Research) blew it when they met with IBM. Interesting documentary with interviews with the key guys involved.Bill Lowe: Head, IBM IBM PC Development Team 1980: He kind of said well, what should we do, and I said well, we think we know what we would like to do if we were going to proceed with our own product and he said no, he said at IBM it would take four years and three hundred people to do anything, I mean it's just a fact of life. And I said no sir, we can provide with product in a year. And he abruptly ended the meeting, he said you're on Lowe, come back in two weeks and tell me what you need.
[Cringely narrating] An IBM product in a year! Ridiculous! Down in the basement Bill still has the plan. To save time, instead of building a computer from scratch, they would buy components off the shelf and assemble them -- what in IBM speak was called 'open architecture.' IBM never did this. Two weeks later Bill proposed his heresy to the Chairman.
Bill Lowe: And frankly this is it. The key decisions were to go with an open architecture, non IBM technology, non IBM software, non IBM sales and non IBM service. And we probably spent a full half of the presentation carrying the corporate management committee into this concept. Because this was a new concept for IBM at that point.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
Couldn't they even keep backwards compatibility via virtualization? They can have all the new apps run natively, and run the old ones on a virtual OS. It would give new apps a nice degree of isolation from some of the old badness.
For anyone who has done programming between good languages and MS languages will know he's spot on
.Net libraries are far from perfect. There are weird versions of a lot of things left over for the VB6-VB.Net porting wizard to use. The selection of functions on the String class has some very strange ommissions (.Right(n) would be nice). The IO libraries need a smooth system to switch between strings and structured objects when dealing with paths and filenames. FTP is still way too difficult. If you don't want to deal with those infernal visual designers, ADO.Net seemed to take several of the bad parts of JDBC without the huge positive that Type 4 drivers let you avoid any local installations. The settings system they push doesn't work with multi-project solutions. Etc. But he lost any credibility trying to hold up Java as a better example.
Well, sort-of. He concentrates way too much on the Win32 API, which not too many people are using directly. His big complaint about Windows Forms was threading, which doesn't seem like a big issue (you may have multiple threads once-in-a-while, but will you have more than one working with the UI?) -- otherwise he just kinda says it sucks without suggesting anything better (SWT might be a possible candidate. Swing is not.).
And the
So let's hear it ... is xcode a real competitor to visual studio ?
Because let's be honest, while I use linux all the time, and I contribute every now and then to a number of linux apps. But I don't kid myself that anything that can run on linux (whether kdevelop or eclipse, or *even* vim) is half as good as visual studio.
And it's still the only real dev platform for smartphones and pda's. I have a maemo device, which is nice. But developing for it is a bitch to say the very least.
I agree. It sounds to me like this guy used .NET for a year or so around 2002 when it was brand new and then left and hasn't looked again for the last six (6) years. He is the first person that I have heard accuse .NET of being "too simplistic". The .NET class library (and Java class library as well) is the definition of everything and the kitchen sink. These are extremly powerful languages and libraries that are if anything too complex.
You seem to be confused between broad (.NET supports a lot of things, like sockets and cryptography and distributed transactions and GUIs and XML and oh my!) and powerful.
.NET does a lot of different things, but .NET doesn't have the greatest underlying abstractions. For example, to name a few:
Damn - what a list.
.NET one - why can't I do regular expressions on StringBuilder objects? I have to convert one to an immutable string, do my replacement that results in another immutable string. Just seems like an awful lot of copying, if I'm doing a lot of editing.
My own additions - from doing Sharepoint:
- Key classes (SPSite and SPWeb) that are IDisposable. That's not too much of a problem, except that the documentation is somewhat vague on how to handle them - calling some methods will e.g. initialize the RootWeb property of SPSite, which you have to dispose, despite never having called RootWeb yourself. And sometimes you have to take care _not_ to dispose, as you are handed a reference to a shared instance of an SPWeb or SPSite.
- Several nice components are sealed and/or internal - my current pet peeve is a webpart, which has its look and feel defined via XSLT-files (big poorly documented XSLT-files, that do a lot of scary things to dump a lot of ugly HTML), unfortunately these XSLT-files are used by several different webparts, and some of them have neither the ability to subclass the webpart to use another file, nor the option of configuring which file to use. The only way to change that look and feel is to change the standard files.
- Checking user permissions in some places requires you to call a boolean method and receive true for access (sounds good so far, right...) and an exception for access denied!
- Not only is the default rendering a load of IE specific crap, if you dig deep enough, you'll find hardcoded strings inside the core libraries that, to the best of my knowledge, are not valid HTML in any contemporary standard. And the only way to get rid of it is to capture the output stream and clean it up by hand, one string pattern at a time.
- And that reminds me of a
- And another Sharepoint gripe - why are all the interesting parts of my code inheriting stuff, that makes unit testing a real pain (I tried to mock my way through it once or twice, but the amount of code needed to test without invoking the database backend is beyond what I could justify even trying).
About the only thing I see VC++ having on Eclipse 3.3 for plain C++ development besides debugging is speed. Visual C++ is comparably fast, but Eclipse isn't slow in the "it takes a while to respond" sense, but rather in the "there is a 7 second splash screen when you start it" sense. I can live with that.
I was rather disappointed, really. I had thought that I had given up a great IDE (VC++) to go to a great OS (Linux) with a moderately decent IDE (Eclipse); in reality, looking back I have up a decent IDE to go to a great OS with a great IDE. A few years ago I loved Visual C++ 6, and I suppose I'm just sad to see its ancestor thwarted on my desktop so easily by a free program.
(Disclaimer: The statement above is merely my opinion. Your opinion may not match it.)
If there's anyone I hate more than stupid people, it's intellectuals.