no, it does equal good documentation. What you seem to be wanting is a tutorial. Such things are adjunct to the documentation, and whilst they are very important, they are not the documentation itself.
no, sorry to burst your.NET bubble, MS is not going to make you as happy as a silverlight or VB6 dev, but their focus is no longer.NET
Go for a google to see what Herb Sutter has to say about it, its his turn to inform us this time round (until they change their mind again). Check his stats for costs.
I understand, and it does seem that a hierarchy of well-defined exceptions would be something the standard body could consider, but you'd still be stuck with backwards-compatiblity with throwing an int.
I guess you could attempt to build your own, rely on exceptions derived from std::exception, and then use a global handler to catch all other exceptions.
I'm a pragmatic chap, I know there is no perfect code, and that you can't build it in other languages that do have well-defined exception hierarchies (eg in.NET a StackOverflow exception cannot be caught and will stop your program, *without* reporting any error. Nice).
In most C++ apps, an exception is a way of specifying something terrible has happened that cannot often be handled except to log and halt. What you see in languages that have an exception top class is exceptions used for all kinds of program flow. Perhaps its a good thing C++ doesn't have such a construct given this.
C++ (even C++11) while being fun to code is awful for most things and inefficient where it really counts featured delivered per developer hour.
no, that was then. Today we're coding for cloud and mobile apps, and for these environments the thing that really counts is performance per dollar. (dollars measured in electricity). For mobile this means better battery life and for the cloud it means more concurrent users.
The old days where you could rely on having 3ghz quad core CPU all to yourself are over, so now the cost of the developer is minimal compared to the overall cost of running your apps. This is why C++ is back on the agenda at MS.
As it is, I never had much problem with coding C++, it's not that bad at all, and sometimes less wordy than the objects-and-properties-everywhere code that Java and C# use.
I think they still need a better UI toolkit though, and the C++ standards body needs to work on a modules system for it.
For the average user, all the Linux distros are fine choices.
For a corporate who (lets face it, no-one else buys support) needs that support checkmark, it matters. This is why I think Ubuntu should stay with its 1 option, its not as if there aren't many other distros available for the rest of us who want a different UI.
I think the native port of WPF was because they had nothing else anymore, which was a pity.
this goes into depth of why WPF is rubbish, and although they've made some changes for the native version, it's still not up to snuff. IE (and firefox) renders using Direct2d, and while I think it's only acceptable for LoB/web apps, I can see a reason why they'd want to push it for development over WPF.
Still, the big advantage of HTML over WPF is the cross-platform nature of it, that's probably a big thing with the level of acceptable Win8 seems to be getting.
actually the MSDN v4 help system was the dogs danglies, then v5 went all HTML and was... acceptable. The new one is a lot more rubbish... however, I was referring to the quantity of the stuff, they do not skimp on writing the stuff - and besides I use Google to search through the online version nowadays, that works:)
Ps. it used to bring up the Windows CE version first, every time.
Re:Let the bitching begin....
on
Windows 8 Is Ready
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I don't think they're killing it off, but it the "new VB". MS has rediscovered native code, so WinRT is entirely unmanaged, the.NET libs have been reworked to simply pass-through to the WinRT functionality and some minor parts removed.
All native and cloud development is moving towards C++ again, so.NET is left as a desktop development environment. Given the performance fixes are not making it back into the desktop versions of the old libs and I doubt any additional features will be ported there (except security), and that the concept is that your Metro code for the PC can also run on a table or a phone, and the native push for those environments, I think you can see how.NET development is now a 'you can, but...' partner, not the primary focus for development.
So is that why C++ was dumped in favor of Javascript? Because Javascript is faster?
It wasn't, you're confusing a few things. Javascript is used as the glue that ties a few events and methods together, but you still pass them down to your c++ program logic to do work. If you just need to change a radio button when another one is pressed, then that hardly needs and c++ logic, a little bit of js would be quite sufficient and make no noticeable difference to performance.
Firstly, MS would do well with it - there is a ton of old MFC code out there that will need to be updated to something jazzy, and with the MFC->Qt migration tools, all that old code could be made shiny and modern. This is especially important given MS's renewed interest in native development. Its also important given MSs current GUI technology WPF being a bit shit - using way too much resources and performing really badly, really so for anything using lots of fancy animation.
For all MSs faults, they do good documentation and put a lot of effort into making their tools work - remember the monkey dance to prove that! They also have a lot of developers who would love to be allowed to use it in corporate MS-only no-OSS environments. Suddenly Qt would get a lot of push forward to a lot of computers and developers and MS would get a really good GUI system (at last).
I doubt Google would put much effort into it, and might end up shelving it after a few years like a lot of their other projects. They might be interested in Wt though - that turns the Qt code into a web front end.
Except that preventing exceptions from crashing your program in C++ means preventing some exceptions from propagating -- and basically forces you to create programs that do not handle certain errors
I don't understand this - of course you have to prevent some exceptions from propagating - ie catching them. If you don't catch them anywhere, they end up in the default handler which usually stops your program by design.
Exceptions are seen as magic error handlers by some people, but the truism that you should never throw an exception you're not prepared to catch is valid. Similarly, you could say you should never return an error code if you're not prepared to check it. The only difference is really in that checking code - the exception handler can be placed in a different location to the error handler code, which can often help code readability. That's all there is to it though, if you ignore an error code - fine you know the call may not have worked. If you ignore an exception - fine, you know your program may stop.
So how to make exceptions opt-out rather than opt-in... the only way is to inspect all the exceptions a piece of code will throw (and the code it uses itself) and then create handlers for each of them, or just wrap all function calls with a generic catch(...) handler which will at least provide a quick and easy way to catch all those exceptions, unless you handle them first. So the best practice is really to write the equivalent of a switch's 'default' case every time.
well, I never did any silverlight stuff - it was obvious there was a lot of fragmentation in the MS world, although I didn't realise just how bad it was over there.
The biggest problem is WPF performance that's not getting fixed. All the MS resources seem to be heading towards HTML GUIs at the moment, which is fine - AFAIAK HTML is as good a GUI system as XAML, there's little difference only HTML based app can be ported to the real web so I can see the benefit.
The problem is when MS decides that it needs a few 'extra' mechanisms to be added to HTML that they couldn't emulate in javascript or WebGL. Or, if MS decides that all their curremt GUI tech is bad and buys Qt from Nokia... now that might actually be a good move:)
nobody bought a Wii just to use it as a paperweight.
The 'shallow crap' games are exactly what the majority of people want, like buying f**ing virtual sheep on a social network site. They may be shallow, but that means nothing if the money is rolling in from them.
I'd say the attach rate of those games are much higher than the complicated games, simply by virtue of their accessibility, but also because of the type of people who buy them - the gamerz who want the super-heavy graphics games are a real minority compared to everyone's mom and pop and grandma who want something to play at the holidays.
Oh, google says the attach rate of Wii turns out to be a lot more than the xbox.
I think it came about from the build presentations where Metro was announced, all the technical stuff was about how to write Metro apps using HTML and javascript - with one or two about how to do it in C++ or C#, and absolutely none using Silverlight.
From this people inferred that HTML+js was the preferred combo for Metro GUI development (and with some news about poor WPF performance) and good HTML perf, it seems this is the way MS wanted things to go.
As for js being bad for performance, yup, but if you only use it as glue then you'll be fine.
Hence my point, if you want to use Ubuntu, stick with the 'official' flavour only. If you want a non-Unity flavour, go with a different distro. Ubuntu wants to be a pre-packaged Linux, let it be.
Cinnabuntu sounds quite good... better than cubuntu (be very careful with that spelling now!)
However, putting a different front end on top of Ubuntu seems to be self-defeating, the whole point of Ubuntu is that is an all-in-one supported-with-default options thing. If you want configurability, there are plenty of alternatives. Ubuntu is a kind of 'Windows for the linux world' and tries to ape the things that made Windows popular.
it depends how you define "freedoms" here - you're using it in terms of the software being free, like a bird released from a cage.
BSD uses the term free as in "I have a load of birds in cages, cost 0p each".
Both are quite valid, which one you choose depends on your world-view and neither should be criticised. The GPL software puts an onus on the user that it, and his own code, be released similarly, and if the user doesn't like it he doesn't have to use it. Whereas the BSD user wants his code to be used even if that means it ends up in a proprietary, closed-source product. He's find with that, hence the BSD licence.
Saying the BSD freedom is lossy is just pointless ideology. The benefit of the BSD software MS and Apple took has actually contributed greatly to the world. If there wasn't a BSD networking stack for MS to take, we'd probably be using some shitty MS-only network driver stack across the world today and not TCP/IP ethernet.
If Apple hadn't taken FreeBSD (or whicheverone they took) to make iOS, we would still have Apple as a little company making Macs and we'd all be looking forward to the latest Windows Phone.
As it is, because those pieces of software were BSD, we still gained benefit from them being out there, so stop complaining about it, just accept its a valid licence and thank the people who release BSD for their contributions, just like we thank the people who release their stuff under the GPL.
sure, but if you don't fix things, they'll never get fixed. The OP seemed to just be too whiny about how things were difficult, boohoo.
In a year or two all those old Apache webhosts would be upgraded - or TBH, if he'd made the patch and added it they would pretty much all get upgraded in the next update release. And those that didn't, would be really insecure anyway due to other unpatched vulnerabilities. I think webhosts tend to update their servers reasonably regularly.
then why didn't you? Last time I checked Apache was open source so you could have submitted your required changes. I'm not quite so sure of PHP, but maybe there is a way to add an extension to it that grabs the unmangled header from your newly customised Apache.
as money loses its value over time, you need to do better than that.
From TFA:
Exhibit A: today the iPhone brings in more revenue than the entirety of Microsoft.... One Apple product, something that didnâ(TM)t exist five years ago, has higher sales than everything Microsoft has to offer.
So MS still makes money, but its a far cry from what it used to make or what it could be making.
In December 2000, Microsoft had a market capitalization of $510 billion, making it the worldâ(TM)s most valuable company. As of June it is No. 3, with a market cap of $249 billion. In December 2000, Apple had a market cap of $4.8 billion and didnâ(TM)t even make the list. As of this June it is No. 1 in the world, with a market cap of $541 billion.
I know some people point to facebook and say "shareprice means nothing", but those extremes just show the rest of the stock market gets it mostly right, a company's share price reflects what the market thinks the company will be worth a year or so down the line. They don't think Microsoft will be anything other than dull for the foreseeable future.
To highlight what this might mean in more practical terms, imagine if Apple came out with an office suite that was better (or nearly as good even) as Office. Given the quantity of coolness Apple owners think of themselves, they'd have to use it, and that could easily destroy one leg of Microsoft's revenue streams. There are products that are better than Office out there already, look at Scrivener for an example, just slap the Apple branding/marketing on it and bam... Microsoft would fall over. Its not hard to imagine at all.
This is why people are more worried than happy with the situation with Microsoft. I think tech players come and go all the time, its just that Microsoft's time is nearly up.
true, but sharepoint is a success (got help us all) in corporates that run Office everywhere, suddenly they have this totally crap bit of 'office on the intranet' that can be used to store documents and the like (and, if you're willing to spend the time, add crappy forms for stuff like expense reports and meetings).
So it is a success from a business and Microsoft-lockin PoV, But it is a nightmare in all other respects.
and I understand Lync is becoming a success simply because its an 'internal network' chat client, so the boss can read what you've been saying as it seamlessly integrates with Outlook and sharepoint and all that guff.
There are still a lot of people who use this crap, so it still has to be considered even though it is shrinking, slowly.
Slashdot Mirror
most games use SDL for the 'other stuff'.
no, it does equal good documentation. What you seem to be wanting is a tutorial. Such things are adjunct to the documentation, and whilst they are very important, they are not the documentation itself.
no, sorry to burst your .NET bubble, MS is not going to make you as happy as a silverlight or VB6 dev, but their focus is no longer .NET
Go for a google to see what Herb Sutter has to say about it, its his turn to inform us this time round (until they change their mind again). Check his stats for costs.
I agree with a fair bit of that, but you need to get up to speed on modern C++. Try this video, it's not too long but is very good for you.
I understand, and it does seem that a hierarchy of well-defined exceptions would be something the standard body could consider, but you'd still be stuck with backwards-compatiblity with throwing an int.
I guess you could attempt to build your own, rely on exceptions derived from std::exception, and then use a global handler to catch all other exceptions.
I'm a pragmatic chap, I know there is no perfect code, and that you can't build it in other languages that do have well-defined exception hierarchies (eg in .NET a StackOverflow exception cannot be caught and will stop your program, *without* reporting any error. Nice).
In most C++ apps, an exception is a way of specifying something terrible has happened that cannot often be handled except to log and halt. What you see in languages that have an exception top class is exceptions used for all kinds of program flow. Perhaps its a good thing C++ doesn't have such a construct given this.
C++ (even C++11) while being fun to code is awful for most things and inefficient where it really counts featured delivered per developer hour.
no, that was then. Today we're coding for cloud and mobile apps, and for these environments the thing that really counts is performance per dollar. (dollars measured in electricity). For mobile this means better battery life and for the cloud it means more concurrent users.
The old days where you could rely on having 3ghz quad core CPU all to yourself are over, so now the cost of the developer is minimal compared to the overall cost of running your apps. This is why C++ is back on the agenda at MS.
As it is, I never had much problem with coding C++, it's not that bad at all, and sometimes less wordy than the objects-and-properties-everywhere code that Java and C# use.
I think they still need a better UI toolkit though, and the C++ standards body needs to work on a modules system for it.
For the average user, all the Linux distros are fine choices.
For a corporate who (lets face it, no-one else buys support) needs that support checkmark, it matters. This is why I think Ubuntu should stay with its 1 option, its not as if there aren't many other distros available for the rest of us who want a different UI.
I think the native port of WPF was because they had nothing else anymore, which was a pity.
this goes into depth of why WPF is rubbish, and although they've made some changes for the native version, it's still not up to snuff. IE (and firefox) renders using Direct2d, and while I think it's only acceptable for LoB/web apps, I can see a reason why they'd want to push it for development over WPF.
Still, the big advantage of HTML over WPF is the cross-platform nature of it, that's probably a big thing with the level of acceptable Win8 seems to be getting.
actually the MSDN v4 help system was the dogs danglies, then v5 went all HTML and was ... acceptable. The new one is a lot more rubbish... however, I was referring to the quantity of the stuff, they do not skimp on writing the stuff - and besides I use Google to search through the online version nowadays, that works :)
Ps. it used to bring up the Windows CE version first, every time.
I don't think they're killing it off, but it the "new VB". MS has rediscovered native code, so WinRT is entirely unmanaged, the .NET libs have been reworked to simply pass-through to the WinRT functionality and some minor parts removed.
All native and cloud development is moving towards C++ again, so .NET is left as a desktop development environment. Given the performance fixes are not making it back into the desktop versions of the old libs and I doubt any additional features will be ported there (except security), and that the concept is that your Metro code for the PC can also run on a table or a phone, and the native push for those environments, I think you can see how .NET development is now a 'you can, but...' partner, not the primary focus for development.
So is that why C++ was dumped in favor of Javascript? Because Javascript is faster?
It wasn't, you're confusing a few things. Javascript is used as the glue that ties a few events and methods together, but you still pass them down to your c++ program logic to do work. If you just need to change a radio button when another one is pressed, then that hardly needs and c++ logic, a little bit of js would be quite sufficient and make no noticeable difference to performance.
In a way I hope Microsoft buys it.
no, wait!
Firstly, MS would do well with it - there is a ton of old MFC code out there that will need to be updated to something jazzy, and with the MFC->Qt migration tools, all that old code could be made shiny and modern. This is especially important given MS's renewed interest in native development. Its also important given MSs current GUI technology WPF being a bit shit - using way too much resources and performing really badly, really so for anything using lots of fancy animation.
For all MSs faults, they do good documentation and put a lot of effort into making their tools work - remember the monkey dance to prove that! They also have a lot of developers who would love to be allowed to use it in corporate MS-only no-OSS environments. Suddenly Qt would get a lot of push forward to a lot of computers and developers and MS would get a really good GUI system (at last).
I doubt Google would put much effort into it, and might end up shelving it after a few years like a lot of their other projects. They might be interested in Wt though - that turns the Qt code into a web front end.
Except that preventing exceptions from crashing your program in C++ means preventing some exceptions from propagating -- and basically forces you to create programs that do not handle certain errors
I don't understand this - of course you have to prevent some exceptions from propagating - ie catching them. If you don't catch them anywhere, they end up in the default handler which usually stops your program by design.
Exceptions are seen as magic error handlers by some people, but the truism that you should never throw an exception you're not prepared to catch is valid. Similarly, you could say you should never return an error code if you're not prepared to check it. The only difference is really in that checking code - the exception handler can be placed in a different location to the error handler code, which can often help code readability. That's all there is to it though, if you ignore an error code - fine you know the call may not have worked. If you ignore an exception - fine, you know your program may stop.
So how to make exceptions opt-out rather than opt-in... the only way is to inspect all the exceptions a piece of code will throw (and the code it uses itself) and then create handlers for each of them, or just wrap all function calls with a generic catch(...) handler which will at least provide a quick and easy way to catch all those exceptions, unless you handle them first. So the best practice is really to write the equivalent of a switch's 'default' case every time.
well, I never did any silverlight stuff - it was obvious there was a lot of fragmentation in the MS world, although I didn't realise just how bad it was over there.
The biggest problem is WPF performance that's not getting fixed. All the MS resources seem to be heading towards HTML GUIs at the moment, which is fine - AFAIAK HTML is as good a GUI system as XAML, there's little difference only HTML based app can be ported to the real web so I can see the benefit.
The problem is when MS decides that it needs a few 'extra' mechanisms to be added to HTML that they couldn't emulate in javascript or WebGL. Or, if MS decides that all their curremt GUI tech is bad and buys Qt from Nokia... now that might actually be a good move :)
nobody bought a Wii just to use it as a paperweight.
The 'shallow crap' games are exactly what the majority of people want, like buying f**ing virtual sheep on a social network site. They may be shallow, but that means nothing if the money is rolling in from them.
I'd say the attach rate of those games are much higher than the complicated games, simply by virtue of their accessibility, but also because of the type of people who buy them - the gamerz who want the super-heavy graphics games are a real minority compared to everyone's mom and pop and grandma who want something to play at the holidays.
Oh, google says the attach rate of Wii turns out to be a lot more than the xbox.
I think it came about from the build presentations where Metro was announced, all the technical stuff was about how to write Metro apps using HTML and javascript - with one or two about how to do it in C++ or C#, and absolutely none using Silverlight.
From this people inferred that HTML+js was the preferred combo for Metro GUI development (and with some news about poor WPF performance) and good HTML perf, it seems this is the way MS wanted things to go.
As for js being bad for performance, yup, but if you only use it as glue then you'll be fine.
I know there is, I'm saying its probably a bad idea, especially as kubuntu is not supported by Canonical.
Hence my point, if you want to use Ubuntu, stick with the 'official' flavour only. If you want a non-Unity flavour, go with a different distro. Ubuntu wants to be a pre-packaged Linux, let it be.
f**k me, you're saying the software is there for the benefit of its users and no the other way round?!!?!?!!
no way! As if! inconceivable!
Cinnabuntu sounds quite good... better than cubuntu (be very careful with that spelling now!)
However, putting a different front end on top of Ubuntu seems to be self-defeating, the whole point of Ubuntu is that is an all-in-one supported-with-default options thing. If you want configurability, there are plenty of alternatives. Ubuntu is a kind of 'Windows for the linux world' and tries to ape the things that made Windows popular.
You're gonna love Windows 8 then :)
it depends how you define "freedoms" here - you're using it in terms of the software being free, like a bird released from a cage.
BSD uses the term free as in "I have a load of birds in cages, cost 0p each".
Both are quite valid, which one you choose depends on your world-view and neither should be criticised. The GPL software puts an onus on the user that it, and his own code, be released similarly, and if the user doesn't like it he doesn't have to use it. Whereas the BSD user wants his code to be used even if that means it ends up in a proprietary, closed-source product. He's find with that, hence the BSD licence.
Saying the BSD freedom is lossy is just pointless ideology. The benefit of the BSD software MS and Apple took has actually contributed greatly to the world. If there wasn't a BSD networking stack for MS to take, we'd probably be using some shitty MS-only network driver stack across the world today and not TCP/IP ethernet.
If Apple hadn't taken FreeBSD (or whicheverone they took) to make iOS, we would still have Apple as a little company making Macs and we'd all be looking forward to the latest Windows Phone.
As it is, because those pieces of software were BSD, we still gained benefit from them being out there, so stop complaining about it, just accept its a valid licence and thank the people who release BSD for their contributions, just like we thank the people who release their stuff under the GPL.
sure, but if you don't fix things, they'll never get fixed. The OP seemed to just be too whiny about how things were difficult, boohoo.
In a year or two all those old Apache webhosts would be upgraded - or TBH, if he'd made the patch and added it they would pretty much all get upgraded in the next update release. And those that didn't, would be really insecure anyway due to other unpatched vulnerabilities. I think webhosts tend to update their servers reasonably regularly.
Go yell at the implementors of Apache and of PHP
then why didn't you? Last time I checked Apache was open source so you could have submitted your required changes. I'm not quite so sure of PHP, but maybe there is a way to add an extension to it that grabs the unmangled header from your newly customised Apache.
as money loses its value over time, you need to do better than that.
From TFA:
Exhibit A: today the iPhone brings in more revenue than the entirety of Microsoft. ... One Apple product, something that didnâ(TM)t exist five years ago, has higher sales than everything Microsoft has to offer.
So MS still makes money, but its a far cry from what it used to make or what it could be making.
In December 2000, Microsoft had a market capitalization of $510 billion, making it the worldâ(TM)s most valuable company. As of June it is No. 3, with a market cap of $249 billion. In December 2000, Apple had a market cap of $4.8 billion and didnâ(TM)t even make the list. As of this June it is No. 1 in the world, with a market cap of $541 billion.
I know some people point to facebook and say "shareprice means nothing", but those extremes just show the rest of the stock market gets it mostly right, a company's share price reflects what the market thinks the company will be worth a year or so down the line. They don't think Microsoft will be anything other than dull for the foreseeable future.
To highlight what this might mean in more practical terms, imagine if Apple came out with an office suite that was better (or nearly as good even) as Office. Given the quantity of coolness Apple owners think of themselves, they'd have to use it, and that could easily destroy one leg of Microsoft's revenue streams. There are products that are better than Office out there already, look at Scrivener for an example, just slap the Apple branding/marketing on it and bam... Microsoft would fall over. Its not hard to imagine at all.
This is why people are more worried than happy with the situation with Microsoft. I think tech players come and go all the time, its just that Microsoft's time is nearly up.
true, but sharepoint is a success (got help us all) in corporates that run Office everywhere, suddenly they have this totally crap bit of 'office on the intranet' that can be used to store documents and the like (and, if you're willing to spend the time, add crappy forms for stuff like expense reports and meetings).
So it is a success from a business and Microsoft-lockin PoV, But it is a nightmare in all other respects.
and I understand Lync is becoming a success simply because its an 'internal network' chat client, so the boss can read what you've been saying as it seamlessly integrates with Outlook and sharepoint and all that guff.
There are still a lot of people who use this crap, so it still has to be considered even though it is shrinking, slowly.