For anyone else who wants to verify for themselves, you check the Office 2003 schemas (web or download). The only binary types are the expected ones (picture, icon, movie, etc.).
If you're annoyed by the embedding of base64-encoded media, Office 2007 improves by using the Open Packaging Conventions format, which is basically a zipped collection of XML files and resources. Try it: Save any Office 2007 document and rename to.zip to view the contents. Content is stored in XML files, embedded images and fonts are stored in their own files.
You'll see that we really are trying to comply with the spec, and wouldn't have anything to gain by doing otherwise. Remember we are only a producer of this stuff (not a consumer), and doing anything non-compliant would just mean that our output would be flawed and not look right. That would of course undermine all the work we've done to build this support in the first place... we want people to use it.
I agree with HTML, but I beg you to name an instance where Microsoft has bastardized XML. They may make strange XML-based formats that you disagree with, but that does not imply screwing up XML itself.
Processor 800 MHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
System Memory 512 MB
GPU SVGA (800x600)
HDD 20 GB
HDD Free Space 15 GB
Optical Drive CD-ROM drive
I actually run Vista on an old 1.7GHz Dell with 512 MB of RAM and a GeForce MX 64 MB video card. Vista fits in ~5 GB of space, and the system is quite usable. So please don't treat the requirements you listed as OS-only requirements; they factor in applications and additional features as well.
Windows 2003 comes with.NET Framework 1.1 installed, and I believe XP SP2 comes with.NET as well. You can also freely download and install both.NET Framework 1.1 and 2.0. And guess what? They both come with C#, VB.NET, and J# compilers. The 2.0 Framework also includes MSBuild, which can compile VS 2005 projects without installing VS 2005. VS 2005 Express was recently made free forever.
So while earlier versions of Windows didn't come with a compiler, that changed with 2003 and Vista, and now you can also download a free IDE.
I do hope that MS continues to allow you the ability to work with the firewall on an application level. It's much simpler to browse to "program xyz" and tell the firewall to allow whatever ports this program needs. Determining and then defining UPD vs TCP and ranges of ports is just not going to work for most non-technical people.
That does seem possible; see this page for more detals on the Vista firewall (including screenshots). The configuration wizard lets you configure both inbound and outbound exceptions by program, port, from a predefined list, or a custom configuration.
Right....because code running on the users machine can't modify the Windows Firewall settings itself....
They cannot modify firewall settings if they're running as regular user. If they're running as admin, then UAC will display a dialog box requesting permissions before modifying them. Either way is better than silent modifications possible as admin in XP SP2.
Its all nonstandard and does not behave the way all of the other controls in windows do.
I'm not sure if you're implying Avalon will result in the same mess, but Avalon controls are stylable so that can look different but still behave the same. There've been complaints in the past about XAML lacking something similar to CSS, but it's there: styles are implemented through XML like everything else, instead of as another embedded language like CSS. AFAIK they wanted to avoid adding embedded languages to simplify XAML parsers.
I'd just rather use things ina simple elegent way without animated 3-d buttons.
<Button>Hello World<Button>
Simple and elegant is definitely possible with Avalon. The power to customize wildly is there; it's just that some people abuse it.
The "home" edition of Vista won't support the interfaces. So, any software oriented toward home use cannot depend on the feature.
That is incorrect. The grandparent was referring to Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, codenamed "Avalon"). You're getting it confused with the Aero interface, which is the glass effect and 3D-accelerated desktop.
WPF is the next-generation API for powering managed application UI and graphics (but not gaming graphics; Direct3D will handle that). WPF is something developers will use to create applications, while Aero is a Vista-specific enhancement that requires no additional work by applications.
WPF is already available in beta through the WinFX SDK, and runs on XP SP2 and Vista. There is no Professional requirement, and WPF is fully capable of rendering without hardware acceleration. Moreover, there's a subset of WPF called WPF/e that's crossplatform and will be available at least on Mac and Firefox.
Microsoft doesn't use MS Visual SourceSafe for some/many/most of their projects supposedly (I have no links handy to back it up), they use a customized version of Perforce.
It's actually an exception from what I can tell. They're intent on moving development to Visual Studio Team System, which'll provide integrated work item tracking and source control among other things for VS. Additionally, when I interned there people used Office, Windows, VS, etc. all the time, although there do exist some emacs users. SourceSafe was one thing I never heard mentioned:)
It's the database architecture and plumbing that really makes this stuff fascinating (and mysterious, if you don't work there).
There's an interesting video on Channel9 interviewing Omar Shahine that describes Hotmail internal architecture. Yup, Channel9 is a Microsoft sponsored site, and Omar is a lead program manager on a Hotmail team. He has a great blog that shows a love for devices; you'll find him talking about the iPod, Treo, PSP, etc. Channel9 also has a ton of videos on everything ranging from C# to recruiting at Microsoft.
This is Windows recommended UI behavior for MDI apps. Read the interface standard.
I probably wasn't clear, but JBuilder's Ctrl+Tab did not switch between MDI windows, but instead switched between docked windows. That's the problem, and goes against Windows UI standards.
That's funny: it works here.
Doesn't matter if it works for you, it doesn't work for me, regardless of the font I use. Furthermore I'm using a TT font (OCR A Extended), and it is rendered with ClearType in all apps I use except JBuilder.
You need to learn that there's a difference between being a stickler for detail and whining that things don't work the way that you expect for them to. One is born of familiarity with existing standards; the other is clueless self-aggrandizing pablum. It's not Borland's fault that you don't know more than the very basics of Win32 UI behaviors; every single one of their pane and task switching hotkeys, including f10 and f11, are standards that have been with us longer than a default Windows TCP/IP stack. Hell, Win/QVT supported these. Maybe you should watch that movie that comes with a fresh XP install.
I've used Windows for over a decade now, and believe me, I know Windows UI behavior. Apologies if I rambled too much, but when the basic behavior of Alt+tab, Ctrl+Tab does not match that of all other Windows apps, something's seriously wrong. BTW, this and other comments I'm getting makes me wonder if this has been fixed in a recent version. I believe I'm using JBuilder 2005 Community Edition; I installed it in January. What version are you using?
Or Win32 UI standards. Or JBuilder. You actually suggest that Eclipse is more configurable than JBuilder. Have you even looked?
Yes, I've looked. Just take a look at the Java code formatting options; there are significantly more configuration settings in Eclipse compared to either JBuilder or VS 2003.
In all seriousness, if you really want to give them feedback I suggest commenting on their various IE blogs. You can get in direct contact with the devs that way. On an amusing note, the IE blogs have the highest comment counts of all categories of Microsoft blogs. Interesting:)
I spent 2 years of my life as a UI guy and I have nothing but the utmost respect for "good" UI developers and designers. The parents comments about an IDE appear to come from someone who is a UI guy. To use an analogy though; it is kinda like a mechanic saying that they don't like a wrench because it looks ugly.
Oh my mistake if it sounded like I hated JBuilder because it looked ugly. What really made it terrible was its UI behavior. It absolutely sucks when every Windows program with multiple child documents uses Ctrl+Tab to cycle through them, and JBuilder uses God knows what key combo. It's also just as bad when Alt+Tab produces strange behavior in direct contrast to every other program I've ever used.
Good points on cross-platform compatibility. The way I see it, I can develop on one platform and debug on others as needed, so I don't need a full blown IDE on other platforms, just decent debuggers. Plus the reality is that projects such as Mono are behind Microsoft's.NET implementation, so there are bigger issues to worry about with cross-platform.NET.
And on UI loading times, I close and open IDEs more often, plus my laptop only has 512 MB of RAM so memory usage matters to me. Outlook currently only uses 10 MB of memory on my machine. *shrugs* There are always conflicting opinions in this area, so there's no real point in debating it.
Can anyone provide a good explaination as to which they prefere, Eclipse or Borland?
Are they more or less clones of one another, or do real differences exist?
I've used both for a research project. Bottom-line: JBuilder is absolutely terrible, Eclipse is great. I'm actually a C#/Visual Studio guy, so I can make comparisons with that as well:)
What makes JBuilder so terrible is its non-native GUI. The thing just looks bad with its GUI that's almost Win32, but not quite. Ctrl+Tab doesn't switch between code panes as you would expect in any Windows app; instead it uselessly switches between panes such as Project and Structure. If you Alt+Tab back into the app, it goes into menu mode so as soon as you start typing it executes menu commands. But by far the absolute worse was its ignorance of Windows' ClearType setting for font smoothing. I have a laptop running at high resolution, and code in JBuilder looked absolutely harsh to my eyes. It was bad enough that I started typing Java code in J# for a while just to get ClearType. There are other GUI differences but I'm a horribly nit-picky person when it comes to UI, so they probably won't bother normal people (menus are too wide, menu selections are rendered in an odd manner, etc.)
Eclipse, in comparison, doesn't have these problems. The UI works fine, none of the weirdass UI quirks of JBuilder, and it even respects my font smoothing settings. It also looks very nice, and there are a ton of configuration options. In fact, there are a bit too many, or they're organized in a slightly messy fashion (I recall seeing font color configuration in 3 different places). But it's not bad if you get used to it, so it's probably just that I'm unfamiliar with Eclipse. One thing I really like is its Software Update option. Turns out Eclipse doesn't come with a visual designer for Java, but you can install one pretty easily from inside Eclipse. Eclipse also has refactoring capabilities.
Both JBuilder and Eclipse feel slightly sluggish and can take quite a while to start in comparison to Visual Studio. (I know someone's going to say Eclipse is fast for them. I don't care what you say; it feels slower than VS to me). VS 2002/2003 lack refactoring capabilities for any of the languages it supports, but 2005 will have refactoring for the.NET ones. I think Eclipse might be more configurable than VS in terms of code formatting, but I'm not entirely sure. The rest of the differences that matter to me deal with the languages (Java/C#), which shows how nice both GUI's are: for the most part they don't get in my way, which lets me concentrate on coding.
To summarize, go with Eclipse if you're doing Java development. Avoid JBuilder at all costs, although I'm curious if anyone else has had the same experiences as me?
Here, take this FREE visual studio 2005 Extreme Edition with FREE donuts... write all the programs you want. You just need to pay $300 for windows 2003 to compile it.
You're closer than you think:) The Visual Studio 2005 Express edition betas (each geared toward a language such as C++, C#, VB.NET) are freely available at the moment, and final pricing has been set to $50 for each express edition, which is virtually free compared to the prices of past editions of VS.
Of course you can always go completely free (in terms of IDE price) with SharpDevelop or notepad, but VS is quite nice, especially at that price.
Actually, if you take a look at the article they mention using "Microsoft's API for rendering portions of components", which isn't the same as using Win32 widgets directly. Sure, they may look the same as Win32 widgets, but I'm willing to bet I can find behaviorial differences between their implementation and Win32 controls.
Very fascinating. Do you happen to know of articles or web sites on this topic? It'd be really interesting to read about the software development process for space systems.
If you didn't RTA, you may not have noticed that the *FIRST* thing on their list of improvements was improving the native look and feel for both the windows and gtk platforms.
But how close is it to the native Windows look? I've found that whenever someone does custom widgets that tries to emulate the native look, there's always something missing or slightly different that produces a disconcerting GUI feeling. Maybe a lot of people don't notice, but I'd rather it look completely different than almost the same but with quirks. Eclipse is good in this manner. It looks very nice and fits right in with other Windows apps.
Yeah, it's sad that a lot of gamers concentrate too much on graphics. I'd take Civilization 2/3 over most FPS games out there (1 is pushing it:). I actually like the simple graphics and windowed mode. Makes it easy to treat Freeciv and Civilization 1/2 as just another application you're doing work in.
Another thing to note is that even if it had excellent graphics I think a lot of people would be put off my its turn-based nature.
I used to preach the same "Don't run as admin" line, but eventualy I had to face the reality that the only other choice is a broken machine. See for yourself how many programs try to modify a file in the "Program Files" directory branch through normal usage.
Yeah, there are a bunch of crappy programs out there that require write access to Program Files, but I've found that treating them as a special case and allowing Users write-access to their directories is sufficient most of the time in letting them run as normal users. So give that a try before you run as Administrator and have write access to the entire system.
FYI, I've been running as a regular User (not even Power User) for a couple years now, and can do everything from homework to games to programming and debugging. I'm not saying I haven't had problems, but when I did they were solvable, either by allowing write access like I said or using something else.
Actually, this is happening on a laptop with no hardware modifications. I do not push the hardware in any of my computers. I'm guessing it's a flaky codec that's messing with WMP.
Slashdot Mirror
For anyone else who wants to verify for themselves, you check the Office 2003 schemas (web or download). The only binary types are the expected ones (picture, icon, movie, etc.).
If you're annoyed by the embedding of base64-encoded media, Office 2007 improves by using the Open Packaging Conventions format, which is basically a zipped collection of XML files and resources. Try it: Save any Office 2007 document and rename to .zip to view the contents. Content is stored in XML files, embedded images and fonts are stored in their own files.
How much do you want to bet Microsoft flatly refused to bind themselves to writing .pdf's readable by code implementing only Adobe's spec?
Microsoft PM Brian Jones wrote about this:
You'll see that we really are trying to comply with the spec, and wouldn't have anything to gain by doing otherwise. Remember we are only a producer of this stuff (not a consumer), and doing anything non-compliant would just mean that our output would be flawed and not look right. That would of course undermine all the work we've done to build this support in the first place... we want people to use it.
I agree with HTML, but I beg you to name an instance where Microsoft has bastardized XML. They may make strange XML-based formats that you disagree with, but that does not imply screwing up XML itself.
I see that you conveniently ignored the minimum supported system requirements page linked from the page you provided. It lists:
I actually run Vista on an old 1.7GHz Dell with 512 MB of RAM and a GeForce MX 64 MB video card. Vista fits in ~5 GB of space, and the system is quite usable. So please don't treat the requirements you listed as OS-only requirements; they factor in applications and additional features as well.
Why must they change the interface when the old one worked so well?
Office developer Jensen Harris explains in his series Why the New UI? Fascinating read. His blog is also a great source for Office UI discussions.
Visual C++ Express is free. The C++ compiler itself (not the IDE) has been free for even longer.
Windows 2003 comes with .NET Framework 1.1 installed, and I believe XP SP2 comes with .NET as well. You can also freely download and install both .NET Framework 1.1 and 2.0. And guess what? They both come with C#, VB.NET, and J# compilers. The 2.0 Framework also includes MSBuild, which can compile VS 2005 projects without installing VS 2005. VS 2005 Express was recently made free forever.
So while earlier versions of Windows didn't come with a compiler, that changed with 2003 and Vista, and now you can also download a free IDE.
That does seem possible; see this page for more detals on the Vista firewall (including screenshots). The configuration wizard lets you configure both inbound and outbound exceptions by program, port, from a predefined list, or a custom configuration.
They cannot modify firewall settings if they're running as regular user. If they're running as admin, then UAC will display a dialog box requesting permissions before modifying them. Either way is better than silent modifications possible as admin in XP SP2.
I'm not sure if you're implying Avalon will result in the same mess, but Avalon controls are stylable so that can look different but still behave the same. There've been complaints in the past about XAML lacking something similar to CSS, but it's there: styles are implemented through XML like everything else, instead of as another embedded language like CSS. AFAIK they wanted to avoid adding embedded languages to simplify XAML parsers.
<Button>Hello World<Button>
Simple and elegant is definitely possible with Avalon. The power to customize wildly is there; it's just that some people abuse it.
That is incorrect. The grandparent was referring to Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, codenamed "Avalon"). You're getting it confused with the Aero interface, which is the glass effect and 3D-accelerated desktop.
WPF is the next-generation API for powering managed application UI and graphics (but not gaming graphics; Direct3D will handle that). WPF is something developers will use to create applications, while Aero is a Vista-specific enhancement that requires no additional work by applications.
WPF is already available in beta through the WinFX SDK, and runs on XP SP2 and Vista. There is no Professional requirement, and WPF is fully capable of rendering without hardware acceleration. Moreover, there's a subset of WPF called WPF/e that's crossplatform and will be available at least on Mac and Firefox.
Microsoft doesn't use MS Visual SourceSafe for some/many/most of their projects supposedly (I have no links handy to back it up), they use a customized version of Perforce.
It's actually an exception from what I can tell. They're intent on moving development to Visual Studio Team System, which'll provide integrated work item tracking and source control among other things for VS. Additionally, when I interned there people used Office, Windows, VS, etc. all the time, although there do exist some emacs users. SourceSafe was one thing I never heard mentioned :)
It's the database architecture and plumbing that really makes this stuff fascinating (and mysterious, if you don't work there).
There's an interesting video on Channel9 interviewing Omar Shahine that describes Hotmail internal architecture. Yup, Channel9 is a Microsoft sponsored site, and Omar is a lead program manager on a Hotmail team. He has a great blog that shows a love for devices; you'll find him talking about the iPod, Treo, PSP, etc. Channel9 also has a ton of videos on everything ranging from C# to recruiting at Microsoft.
This is Windows recommended UI behavior for MDI apps. Read the interface standard.
I probably wasn't clear, but JBuilder's Ctrl+Tab did not switch between MDI windows, but instead switched between docked windows. That's the problem, and goes against Windows UI standards.
That's funny: it works here.
Doesn't matter if it works for you, it doesn't work for me, regardless of the font I use. Furthermore I'm using a TT font (OCR A Extended), and it is rendered with ClearType in all apps I use except JBuilder.
You need to learn that there's a difference between being a stickler for detail and whining that things don't work the way that you expect for them to. One is born of familiarity with existing standards; the other is clueless self-aggrandizing pablum. It's not Borland's fault that you don't know more than the very basics of Win32 UI behaviors; every single one of their pane and task switching hotkeys, including f10 and f11, are standards that have been with us longer than a default Windows TCP/IP stack. Hell, Win/QVT supported these. Maybe you should watch that movie that comes with a fresh XP install.
I've used Windows for over a decade now, and believe me, I know Windows UI behavior. Apologies if I rambled too much, but when the basic behavior of Alt+tab, Ctrl+Tab does not match that of all other Windows apps, something's seriously wrong. BTW, this and other comments I'm getting makes me wonder if this has been fixed in a recent version. I believe I'm using JBuilder 2005 Community Edition; I installed it in January. What version are you using?
Or Win32 UI standards. Or JBuilder. You actually suggest that Eclipse is more configurable than JBuilder. Have you even looked?
Yes, I've looked. Just take a look at the Java code formatting options; there are significantly more configuration settings in Eclipse compared to either JBuilder or VS 2003.
In all seriousness, if you really want to give them feedback I suggest commenting on their various IE blogs. You can get in direct contact with the devs that way. On an amusing note, the IE blogs have the highest comment counts of all categories of Microsoft blogs. Interesting :)
I spent 2 years of my life as a UI guy and I have nothing but the utmost respect for "good" UI developers and designers. The parents comments about an IDE appear to come from someone who is a UI guy. To use an analogy though; it is kinda like a mechanic saying that they don't like a wrench because it looks ugly.
Oh my mistake if it sounded like I hated JBuilder because it looked ugly. What really made it terrible was its UI behavior. It absolutely sucks when every Windows program with multiple child documents uses Ctrl+Tab to cycle through them, and JBuilder uses God knows what key combo. It's also just as bad when Alt+Tab produces strange behavior in direct contrast to every other program I've ever used.
Good points on cross-platform compatibility. The way I see it, I can develop on one platform and debug on others as needed, so I don't need a full blown IDE on other platforms, just decent debuggers. Plus the reality is that projects such as Mono are behind Microsoft's .NET implementation, so there are bigger issues to worry about with cross-platform .NET.
And on UI loading times, I close and open IDEs more often, plus my laptop only has 512 MB of RAM so memory usage matters to me. Outlook currently only uses 10 MB of memory on my machine. *shrugs* There are always conflicting opinions in this area, so there's no real point in debating it.
Can anyone provide a good explaination as to which they prefere, Eclipse or Borland? Are they more or less clones of one another, or do real differences exist?
I've used both for a research project. Bottom-line: JBuilder is absolutely terrible, Eclipse is great. I'm actually a C#/Visual Studio guy, so I can make comparisons with that as well :)
What makes JBuilder so terrible is its non-native GUI. The thing just looks bad with its GUI that's almost Win32, but not quite. Ctrl+Tab doesn't switch between code panes as you would expect in any Windows app; instead it uselessly switches between panes such as Project and Structure. If you Alt+Tab back into the app, it goes into menu mode so as soon as you start typing it executes menu commands. But by far the absolute worse was its ignorance of Windows' ClearType setting for font smoothing. I have a laptop running at high resolution, and code in JBuilder looked absolutely harsh to my eyes. It was bad enough that I started typing Java code in J# for a while just to get ClearType. There are other GUI differences but I'm a horribly nit-picky person when it comes to UI, so they probably won't bother normal people (menus are too wide, menu selections are rendered in an odd manner, etc.)
Eclipse, in comparison, doesn't have these problems. The UI works fine, none of the weirdass UI quirks of JBuilder, and it even respects my font smoothing settings. It also looks very nice, and there are a ton of configuration options. In fact, there are a bit too many, or they're organized in a slightly messy fashion (I recall seeing font color configuration in 3 different places). But it's not bad if you get used to it, so it's probably just that I'm unfamiliar with Eclipse. One thing I really like is its Software Update option. Turns out Eclipse doesn't come with a visual designer for Java, but you can install one pretty easily from inside Eclipse. Eclipse also has refactoring capabilities.
Both JBuilder and Eclipse feel slightly sluggish and can take quite a while to start in comparison to Visual Studio. (I know someone's going to say Eclipse is fast for them. I don't care what you say; it feels slower than VS to me). VS 2002/2003 lack refactoring capabilities for any of the languages it supports, but 2005 will have refactoring for the .NET ones. I think Eclipse might be more configurable than VS in terms of code formatting, but I'm not entirely sure. The rest of the differences that matter to me deal with the languages (Java/C#), which shows how nice both GUI's are: for the most part they don't get in my way, which lets me concentrate on coding.
To summarize, go with Eclipse if you're doing Java development. Avoid JBuilder at all costs, although I'm curious if anyone else has had the same experiences as me?
Here, take this FREE visual studio 2005 Extreme Edition with FREE donuts... write all the programs you want. You just need to pay $300 for windows 2003 to compile it.
You're closer than you think :) The Visual Studio 2005 Express edition betas (each geared toward a language such as C++, C#, VB.NET) are freely available at the moment, and final pricing has been set to $50 for each express edition, which is virtually free compared to the prices of past editions of VS.
Of course you can always go completely free (in terms of IDE price) with SharpDevelop or notepad, but VS is quite nice, especially at that price.
Actually, if you take a look at the article they mention using "Microsoft's API for rendering portions of components", which isn't the same as using Win32 widgets directly. Sure, they may look the same as Win32 widgets, but I'm willing to bet I can find behaviorial differences between their implementation and Win32 controls.
Very fascinating. Do you happen to know of articles or web sites on this topic? It'd be really interesting to read about the software development process for space systems.
If you didn't RTA, you may not have noticed that the *FIRST* thing on their list of improvements was improving the native look and feel for both the windows and gtk platforms.
But how close is it to the native Windows look? I've found that whenever someone does custom widgets that tries to emulate the native look, there's always something missing or slightly different that produces a disconcerting GUI feeling. Maybe a lot of people don't notice, but I'd rather it look completely different than almost the same but with quirks. Eclipse is good in this manner. It looks very nice and fits right in with other Windows apps.
Yeah, it's sad that a lot of gamers concentrate too much on graphics. I'd take Civilization 2/3 over most FPS games out there (1 is pushing it :). I actually like the simple graphics and windowed mode. Makes it easy to treat Freeciv and Civilization 1/2 as just another application you're doing work in.
Another thing to note is that even if it had excellent graphics I think a lot of people would be put off my its turn-based nature.
I used to preach the same "Don't run as admin" line, but eventualy I had to face the reality that the only other choice is a broken machine. See for yourself how many programs try to modify a file in the "Program Files" directory branch through normal usage.
Yeah, there are a bunch of crappy programs out there that require write access to Program Files, but I've found that treating them as a special case and allowing Users write-access to their directories is sufficient most of the time in letting them run as normal users. So give that a try before you run as Administrator and have write access to the entire system.
FYI, I've been running as a regular User (not even Power User) for a couple years now, and can do everything from homework to games to programming and debugging. I'm not saying I haven't had problems, but when I did they were solvable, either by allowing write access like I said or using something else.
!! Notify the MPAA!
Actually, this is happening on a laptop with no hardware modifications. I do not push the hardware in any of my computers. I'm guessing it's a flaky codec that's messing with WMP.