Maybe Microsoft isn't open sourcing WPF because they know how bad it is. Only the.NET fanbois are still going on about how wonderful it is, even though the majority of UIs I've seen on Windows are using ASP.NET or Winforms.
I've seen a couple of WPF GUIs, invariably they're horrible - like what you'd write back in the 80s. I once saw a GUI that had orange and blue colouring with red highlight bars - yup, highlight the selected orange text with a red bar, reducing the distinction between the colourblind and those with perfect vision.
Its pretty slow too, a colleague had to drop it for his audio GUI as it simply did not respond quickly enough whereas the old C++ GUI worked perfectly well.
But its the latest cool thing so all the cool kids want to use it. I guess it's keeping them from node.js this week, so maybe its a good thing, but I can see why the Windows team says to write GUIs in html5 rather than WPF - if you need a plain LoB GUI, HTML works, if you need performance then you'll be doing it in C++ with something more akin to a game engine. WPF fails on both counts, and is too complex to boot.
Neither are quite perfect though - C++ has plenty of ancient cruft that;s there for C compatibility, but then, C# has plenty of cruft from its old 1.1 days (all those nasty, nasty functions taking char[] parameters for example.
But they're still better than the newcomers simply because the new ones are just as imperfect but without the benefit of a wide user base or tooling. Maybe one day Rust will become mainstream and we'll all start using it, and good luck for that day.
But, there's no reason not to use C++ now for Linux development. Moving people to C# on Linux is just wrong, not because C# is rubbish, but because it's not mainstream on Linux. The reasons not to use Rust or C or Go are the same ones to use when applied to C# on Linux. On Windows its a different matter of course, but Linux - stick with C++ and enjoy the benefits of the same codebases everyone else uses.
no, it'd take you 10 minutes in Visual Studio - not quite the same time as it takes using anything else, and VS doesn't exactly run on Linux or Mac which is the point of Mono and even then you get a very non-native GUI.
nevertheless you have to run it to give feedback - so run it, in a VM. Then you can legitimately say what you think of it, not what you'd like some imaginary OS to be.
one of the dlls is mshtml.dll and I know several applications that use it - anything that has an embedded browser for example, MS Money is one that uses a browser control as its entire display surface.
The other is ShDocVw,dll which is a browser control - Explorer uses this.
lol.The guy I sit opposite has to support a solution built around Biztalk. He continually says "it must have seemed a good idea at the time".
Unfortunately, he has to maintain it, the original weenies who wrote it have moved on to devastate other projects with some other cutting-edge, 'cool' new technology.
somebody else can do it - somebody who isn't trying to make a product that will last. Startup type people who will bang something out and then, if it proves successful, rewrite it in boring technologies anyway.
I think the simplest way is just to use boring technologies anyway, if you consider anything that has been around for a few years becomes either old and boring, or dead and unused.
like storing passwords in plaintext. That's just fucking stupid
not as stupid as you think. Sure, encrypting your passwords is another layer of security but really, if an attacker gets your password database, then they can (and will) crack them quite easily today. Given that all you're doing is slowing the attacker down, it can be better to store them in plaintext.
Because - if you know your passwords are precious and need to be looked after, you will take many more steps to ensure the attacker doesn't get them in the first place. Too many websites think that if the passwords are encrypted then they're all secure. They don't think the (small) effort to properly put the DB behind a middle tier layer and not allow any web application to directly access the tables is worth doing, and so they get hacked and the passwords get cracked.
I blame the web development frameworks, if your idea if security is running it all inside the webserver that's public internet-connected, then you're going to get hacked.
I think this shows the education of modern programmers.
Take a string, append 1 byte. Repeat a million times. Say "why is it so slow?".
Its probably because every time you write to most strings classes, you're making a copy and re-allocating the whole lot, and then deallocating the original.
If you knew C, you'd know what was happening here. This is why we need to teach C to programming students and not Java. Once they know C they can learn Java or whatever takes their fancy on their own time.
(although even Java and.NET programmers should understand what a stringbuilder is and why you'd use it)
FWIW, my current project fails since we only have one woman on the team.
right, Julie you can ignore this, but HR has said we have targets to meet so the rest of you have to nominate someone who's gong to have to wear a dress. Wayne, or should I say Waynetta, its probably going to be you.
Not douche, but an insighhtful person who thinks that such positive discrimination and gender bias such as the Bechel test can be so trivially circumvented.
In this case, 2 women talking to each other about.. well, women. Passes the test completely even though its not exactly feminist material (or is, depending).
The rest of us think that if women want to be programmers they will be. Same as if men want to be hairdressers, childcare workers or nurses.
The discrimination and supposedly anti-female culture in IT is really nothing of the sort - its equally pathetic when viewed from a male viewpoint. Me for example, I hate the industry because I am focussed on producing quality deliverables that fit the user's needs, and I can;t stand the so-called 'alpha geek' who thinks he's the best because he's googled the latest cool technology that will be obsolete in a week. That kind of bullshit affects me just as much as female workers.
But it is a very pertinent question - of all the things released, a huge amount of them are written with a win32 API and then wrapped with the WinRT API (or at least, it used to be that way).
For example, I'm looking at code to search through Word documents in.NET, and it appears Microsoft has catered for my needs - there's an IFilter API that is designed for exactly this, and yet its a native COM interface (and no.NET wrapper!!). I found the same for the transcription APIs and a few others. It seems the Windows team doesn't like.NET and only releases their features in native formats.
So, has this changed and the Windows team been kicked into developing WinRT only APIs, or will I still see native ones coming out with wrappers developed by the developer team?
I'm not convinced universal apps will create excitement - not if this is the 3rd API that devs have have to learn, you get bored with learning stuff that becomes quickly obsolete only so many times, and many users will still be developing for Windows 7, for many years to come. Universal apps are meaningless if Win7 still has to be supported.
such as restricting advertisers from working with rival search engines
Maybe there is no counter-argument here, and that they are guilty as sin. Just the cost of lawyering up is the only thing stopping them being brought to book. You make it sound like the allegations are just rumour and trivia.
Its pretty reasonable to suggest that justice is not being done at all here - despite what could easily be plain anti-competitive practices. That no-one will take it to court to test it means there is no justice for anyone, an allegation hanging over Google and whatever bad practices they perpetrate continue.
Well, it depends - which country, and who you owe to. If you owe the council for local taxes, you can (and people have) been sent to jail for a short time to name one, popularised case.
Similarly you can (in the UK) be sent down for not paying child maintenance payments.
I think the issue here is you don't know if the company you're buying services or materials from is owned by the same people who own the original company or isa real, 3rd party supplier.
eg. Google UK buys IP from Google Holdings Ltd Ireland, if you could somehow figure out that these 2 companies were related by ownership chains, then you could simply say that the IP licenced doesn't count as a business expense and so instead of making profit of 20p they'd make profit on the full sales (minus legitimate expenses).
I guess we could go with names, but that's not good enough, what we really need is transparency in ownership, so you can see that Google UK, Google Ireland are both owned by Google USA. You'd also be able to see all the holding and shell companies criminals use to hide their activities (eg Prenda Law).
Same policy happens in the US too - if you fail to repay $1000 the debt collectors come for you, your credit history is wiped and you could even go to jail. If you fail to repay $1bn the government gives you more money.
Anyway, I wonder if the Chinese can start selling their newly-legitimised copies of Windows 10 on ebay?
Its an imitation VMS of course - though I think Dave Cutler did learn some lessons about OS design that were improved when NT was made.
That they then gave it to the rest of the Microsoft dev team and said "write all manner of shitty UI and ill-conceived services on top of this new, well designed and thought out kernel" is another matter.
All we need now is for Facebook to release initial access to this app to users via CD distribution methods and the old internet will be new all over again!
I agree dynamic real time pricing would be 'teh win' if combined with smart plugs to use electricity when its cheap, so you'd put your washing in and the meter will run the washing machine when electricity is at its cheapest during the day, much like how we run storage heaters during the night when the price of electricity drops to the 'economy 7' rate.
Getting people to understand this is important, econony 7 is easy to understand, dynamic pricing needs good monitoring and reporting to make it work for the majority.
The way the world works is not to imagine a system where we create the battery before generating the solar power - instead we generate as much as we can and at some point, someone realises they can make more money out of battery tech than it costs them to research it, and that's when they start researching it,
In the meantime, there's a long time where we generate more solar power than we need - well, it makes no difference to me, they can sell it to whoever they can (maybe Californian plants can sell it to eastern states) meaning Californian solar has a better return on its investment, or they just dump it.
What is important to understand is that nothing will ever happen if no-one starts it somewhere. So we've started generating power from renewables, one day we'll be good at it and it'll power everything.
Slashdot Mirror
WPF is very over-rated. that has poor hardware rendering that doesn't work as well as old winforms
Maybe Microsoft isn't open sourcing WPF because they know how bad it is. Only the .NET fanbois are still going on about how wonderful it is, even though the majority of UIs I've seen on Windows are using ASP.NET or Winforms.
I've seen a couple of WPF GUIs, invariably they're horrible - like what you'd write back in the 80s. I once saw a GUI that had orange and blue colouring with red highlight bars - yup, highlight the selected orange text with a red bar, reducing the distinction between the colourblind and those with perfect vision.
Its pretty slow too, a colleague had to drop it for his audio GUI as it simply did not respond quickly enough whereas the old C++ GUI worked perfectly well.
But its the latest cool thing so all the cool kids want to use it. I guess it's keeping them from node.js this week, so maybe its a good thing, but I can see why the Windows team says to write GUIs in html5 rather than WPF - if you need a plain LoB GUI, HTML works, if you need performance then you'll be doing it in C++ with something more akin to a game engine. WPF fails on both counts, and is too complex to boot.
Neither are quite perfect though - C++ has plenty of ancient cruft that;s there for C compatibility, but then, C# has plenty of cruft from its old 1.1 days (all those nasty, nasty functions taking char[] parameters for example.
But they're still better than the newcomers simply because the new ones are just as imperfect but without the benefit of a wide user base or tooling. Maybe one day Rust will become mainstream and we'll all start using it, and good luck for that day.
But, there's no reason not to use C++ now for Linux development. Moving people to C# on Linux is just wrong, not because C# is rubbish, but because it's not mainstream on Linux. The reasons not to use Rust or C or Go are the same ones to use when applied to C# on Linux. On Windows its a different matter of course, but Linux - stick with C++ and enjoy the benefits of the same codebases everyone else uses.
no, it'd take you 10 minutes in Visual Studio - not quite the same time as it takes using anything else, and VS doesn't exactly run on Linux or Mac which is the point of Mono and even then you get a very non-native GUI.
nevertheless you have to run it to give feedback - so run it, in a VM. Then you can legitimately say what you think of it, not what you'd like some imaginary OS to be.
...after eating a thousand burgers.
one of the dlls is mshtml.dll and I know several applications that use it - anything that has an embedded browser for example, MS Money is one that uses a browser control as its entire display surface.
The other is ShDocVw,dll which is a browser control - Explorer uses this.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-...
lol.The guy I sit opposite has to support a solution built around Biztalk. He continually says "it must have seemed a good idea at the time".
Unfortunately, he has to maintain it, the original weenies who wrote it have moved on to devastate other projects with some other cutting-edge, 'cool' new technology.
Yes, but somebody had to do the proving
somebody else can do it - somebody who isn't trying to make a product that will last. Startup type people who will bang something out and then, if it proves successful, rewrite it in boring technologies anyway.
I think the simplest way is just to use boring technologies anyway, if you consider anything that has been around for a few years becomes either old and boring, or dead and unused.
like storing passwords in plaintext. That's just fucking stupid
not as stupid as you think. Sure, encrypting your passwords is another layer of security but really, if an attacker gets your password database, then they can (and will) crack them quite easily today. Given that all you're doing is slowing the attacker down, it can be better to store them in plaintext.
Because - if you know your passwords are precious and need to be looked after, you will take many more steps to ensure the attacker doesn't get them in the first place. Too many websites think that if the passwords are encrypted then they're all secure. They don't think the (small) effort to properly put the DB behind a middle tier layer and not allow any web application to directly access the tables is worth doing, and so they get hacked and the passwords get cracked.
I blame the web development frameworks, if your idea if security is running it all inside the webserver that's public internet-connected, then you're going to get hacked.
I think this shows the education of modern programmers.
Take a string, append 1 byte. Repeat a million times. Say "why is it so slow?".
Its probably because every time you write to most strings classes, you're making a copy and re-allocating the whole lot, and then deallocating the original.
If you knew C, you'd know what was happening here. This is why we need to teach C to programming students and not Java. Once they know C they can learn Java or whatever takes their fancy on their own time.
(although even Java and .NET programmers should understand what a stringbuilder is and why you'd use it)
Brokeback mountain was not a better movie by any standard despite being love interests.
FWIW, my current project fails since we only have one woman on the team.
right, Julie you can ignore this, but HR has said we have targets to meet so the rest of you have to nominate someone who's gong to have to wear a dress. Wayne, or should I say Waynetta, its probably going to be you.
Not douche, but an insighhtful person who thinks that such positive discrimination and gender bias such as the Bechel test can be so trivially circumvented.
In this case, 2 women talking to each other about.. well, women. Passes the test completely even though its not exactly feminist material (or is, depending).
The rest of us think that if women want to be programmers they will be. Same as if men want to be hairdressers, childcare workers or nurses.
The discrimination and supposedly anti-female culture in IT is really nothing of the sort - its equally pathetic when viewed from a male viewpoint. Me for example, I hate the industry because I am focussed on producing quality deliverables that fit the user's needs, and I can;t stand the so-called 'alpha geek' who thinks he's the best because he's googled the latest cool technology that will be obsolete in a week. That kind of bullshit affects me just as much as female workers.
But it is a very pertinent question - of all the things released, a huge amount of them are written with a win32 API and then wrapped with the WinRT API (or at least, it used to be that way).
For example, I'm looking at code to search through Word documents in .NET, and it appears Microsoft has catered for my needs - there's an IFilter API that is designed for exactly this, and yet its a native COM interface (and no .NET wrapper!!). I found the same for the transcription APIs and a few others. It seems the Windows team doesn't like .NET and only releases their features in native formats.
So, has this changed and the Windows team been kicked into developing WinRT only APIs, or will I still see native ones coming out with wrappers developed by the developer team?
I'm not convinced universal apps will create excitement - not if this is the 3rd API that devs have have to learn, you get bored with learning stuff that becomes quickly obsolete only so many times, and many users will still be developing for Windows 7, for many years to come. Universal apps are meaningless if Win7 still has to be supported.
But the offices you mention are all running windows 7 (with a fair few running XP).
None but a very few will be running Windows 10 for about 5 years.
such as restricting advertisers from working with rival search engines
Maybe there is no counter-argument here, and that they are guilty as sin. Just the cost of lawyering up is the only thing stopping them being brought to book. You make it sound like the allegations are just rumour and trivia.
Its pretty reasonable to suggest that justice is not being done at all here - despite what could easily be plain anti-competitive practices. That no-one will take it to court to test it means there is no justice for anyone, an allegation hanging over Google and whatever bad practices they perpetrate continue.
We'll just have to do it ourselves then, we need a massive internet campaign that reveals Google's new branding : "We do evil".
Well, it depends - which country, and who you owe to. If you owe the council for local taxes, you can (and people have) been sent to jail for a short time to name one, popularised case.
Similarly you can (in the UK) be sent down for not paying child maintenance payments.
your citation sir
http://www.findlaw.co.uk/law/b...
But still, my point is about the inequity of life - if you''re a big player things are applied differently to you.
I think the issue here is you don't know if the company you're buying services or materials from is owned by the same people who own the original company or isa real, 3rd party supplier.
eg. Google UK buys IP from Google Holdings Ltd Ireland, if you could somehow figure out that these 2 companies were related by ownership chains, then you could simply say that the IP licenced doesn't count as a business expense and so instead of making profit of 20p they'd make profit on the full sales (minus legitimate expenses).
I guess we could go with names, but that's not good enough, what we really need is transparency in ownership, so you can see that Google UK, Google Ireland are both owned by Google USA. You'd also be able to see all the holding and shell companies criminals use to hide their activities (eg Prenda Law).
Same policy happens in the US too - if you fail to repay $1000 the debt collectors come for you, your credit history is wiped and you could even go to jail. If you fail to repay $1bn the government gives you more money.
Anyway, I wonder if the Chinese can start selling their newly-legitimised copies of Windows 10 on ebay?
Its an imitation VMS of course - though I think Dave Cutler did learn some lessons about OS design that were improved when NT was made.
That they then gave it to the rest of the Microsoft dev team and said "write all manner of shitty UI and ill-conceived services on top of this new, well designed and thought out kernel" is another matter.
All we need now is for Facebook to release initial access to this app to users via CD distribution methods and the old internet will be new all over again!
I agree dynamic real time pricing would be 'teh win' if combined with smart plugs to use electricity when its cheap, so you'd put your washing in and the meter will run the washing machine when electricity is at its cheapest during the day, much like how we run storage heaters during the night when the price of electricity drops to the 'economy 7' rate.
Getting people to understand this is important, econony 7 is easy to understand, dynamic pricing needs good monitoring and reporting to make it work for the majority.
The way the world works is not to imagine a system where we create the battery before generating the solar power - instead we generate as much as we can and at some point, someone realises they can make more money out of battery tech than it costs them to research it, and that's when they start researching it,
In the meantime, there's a long time where we generate more solar power than we need - well, it makes no difference to me, they can sell it to whoever they can (maybe Californian plants can sell it to eastern states) meaning Californian solar has a better return on its investment, or they just dump it.
What is important to understand is that nothing will ever happen if no-one starts it somewhere. So we've started generating power from renewables, one day we'll be good at it and it'll power everything.