[Coco] Software offer and Drive Pak solution

[Mark McDougall]

On 17/09/2010 4:03 AM, Frank Swygert wrote:

> I really hate all this stuff that uses Microsoft proprietary components
> like the .NET frame work and Visual Studio.

I know exactly where you're coming from Frank, and I couldn't agree more.

At the risk of offending any Microsoft fanboyz out there, IMHO anyone who 
trumpets the benefits of the whole .NET, VS, C# whatever bloatware garbage 
development environment has lived a relatively sheltered life as far as 
development goes.

I suspect the majority of those use M$ exclusively and primarily for one 
particular type of development, be that desktop application, distributed 
web-aware applications, or other boring turnkey been-there done-that 
application. When you invest 8 hrs per day every day in using it, then it 
becomes less and less painful as the years pass.

OTOH, from the perspective of a developer who works on across a large number 
of platforms from PIC micros through to PCs and writing everything from 
embedded controllers through to linux/windows device drivers and 'desktop' 
applications, attempting development in M$ is one of the most painful 
experiences known to mankind.

Sure, fire up VS and with a "hello world" template you might have a basis 
for something in a few minutes. But try doing that on a machine with the 
Windows DDK, WDK, Platform SDK and VS all installed - and you want to port 
some existing code into that environment. Some of the problems hit you 
immediately, and it can take hours if not days just to get some "working" 
code compiling on your system. Conflicting headers is a great example. 
Cryptic compilation/link errors that take *hours* to find the one switch or 
header or whatever is another. What's this manifest garbage? What's all this 
managed bullshit? Just give me a frickin' exe I can run. Oh I need more 
DDLs? I can't run it from a network drive? Arrgghh!!!!

You may chuckle if you can resolve all these in seconds. But my job often 
necessitates doing quick, bare-bones testing/development on different 
platforms. I don't have TIME to spend 4 days on a program that would take 2 
hours to write under any other environment. It's laughable until I find I 
have no other choice for a particular job.

So fanboyz, boast away that in three lines of code you can launch an editor, 
play a movie and pull a web page off the other side of the world. No matter 
that source tree is 34MB and your app requires half of the entire windows 
distribution in memory. And only runs on machines with .NET framework 
installed and flash player 14 and IE and the latest hotfixes and whose 
owners have a cat named Felix.

Bleh!

-- 
|              Mark McDougall                | "Electrical Engineers do it
|  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug>   |   with less resistance!"