201–210 of 221 posts
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So true, but I think he meant "hack stuff together with the intention it will be thrown away in 2 years"
More like "hack stuff together because if we don't get more business quickly we won't be around in 2 years anyway"
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Nothing stopping you using another database - I've started using CouchDB with an ASP.Net MVC application and it all hangs together pretty well. You could use MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite etc. just as easily.
The drivers for MySQL / PostgreSQL are very slow, not to mention stuff like LINQ / Visual Studio integration which are piss-poor, making you wish for SQL Server. People are used to throw such examples in the air, like you forgot "hey, there's Mono if you want Linux" ... but how many real apps used by actual people diverge from the MS stack? Hint: it's not ignorance.
I've designed ASP.Net apps that have had back ends of various forms (everything from navigational databases to Oracle OLAP systems) and once you get over the need to have direct support in Visual Studio then it's not really that big a deal.
YMMV.
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I agree, but would add this. Microsoft's (development) tools have never had any underlying principles other than: enabling people with minimal knowledge to get stuff done. Thinking back through MFC, COM, VB v1-6, Access, SharePoint, WebForms and ADO.NET, none of them were characterised by any particular architectural purity or design aesthetic. But they enabled a generation of corporate developers to hack stuff toget…
> ...hack together stuff that will be thrown away in 2 years Hah! Just like those all those VB6 apps that have been thrown away?!
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There's a special place reserved in Hell for the management of Borland, right next to the management of Commodore A large part of their demise was due to their constantly pursuing the enterprise market (they even changed their name to Inprise for a few years) where they were largely ignored and unwanted, while ignoring the indie devs and smaller shops who loved them. In the end their developer tools went from best in…
I loved and used Turbo Pascal since the 3.0 days - 5.5 was probably my favourite, while 6.0 was real stable (bit bit bigger). Then I started learning Turbo C at the same time (was it 3.0), and TVision, Delphi for Windows. Really cool products, and then Microsoft hired the guy from Borland that was responsible for the Forms Editing and other things in the IDE, and Borland changed their trademarks from the cool Delphi/…
Built some pretty good stuff with Delphi, and I think sometimes that there's many cases where Delphi 7 is still one of the most productive desktop development packages of all time, even when compared to the latest Visual Studio.
and to those who doubt me - well, I like my rose tinted glasses, and I'm keeping them on :P
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Hint: you don't need to. Use what works for you.
I disagree. Or at least, you will cause problems for other people. One of my coworkers was delivered a Windows app by a third party - it was written using MFC. I said, "Seriously? In 2010, MFC? MFC was bad even before it became obsolete." My coworker said, "They used it once before and decided it works for them, so that's what they use." Here's the thing: part of being a developer is keeping up to date. If you find o…
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I see what you're saying but upgrading an OSS library is usually undertaken by somebody that thinks beforehand "I wonder if upgrading this will have any implications" whereas clicking "Express" on update.windows.com is billed as pain free, just like all things point and click. Plus I had followed the advice in MSDN concerning connection pooling which was a registry setting for ODBC NOT part of the framework I was usi…
You shouldn't be hitting 'express' on windows update on a live server just as you shouldn't be running 'update world' on a live linux server
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Too bad most mega-corporations aren't as concerned with writing good software as they are with staying on budget, meeting deadlines, and making money. Not to say the two are mutually exclusive, but BigCorp isn't going to want to pay for your time to learn how Apache's threading model works so that you can beat a race-condition bug in PHP's IMAP library (or whatever).
OK, a reality check. First, threading problems in Apache? That is something you report on a mailing list and it gets fixed fast . It is an actively developed application (-: at least last I looked, lots of years ago :-). Second, I am a consultant that do work for a mega corporation, which builds large systems. At least thousands or developers. I don't know (and am too lazy to Google.) I don't know because I work in a…
Finally, all of the big companies I've worked for have been MS shops for the reasons I've stated. Of course not every company is going to be the same. But every one I've worked for wants the MS "guarantee" because they'd rather pay their devs to build their product, not to fix bugs in someone else's software.
I'm pretty confused as to why these comments have been downvoted so much. Just because someone else's company uses OSS successfully doesn't invalidate the justifications for using MS that I've experienced.
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OK, a reality check. First, threading problems in Apache? That is something you report on a mailing list and it gets fixed fast . It is an actively developed application (-: at least last I looked, lots of years ago :-). Second, I am a consultant that do work for a mega corporation, which builds large systems. At least thousands or developers. I don't know (and am too lazy to Google.) I don't know because I work in a…
To be clear, the threading example was just something off the top of my head, not an actual real-life example. Though the PHP IMAP library is not thread-safe, so the problem would be fixing that library (or learning the guts of it to work around it in certain cases), not Apache. The point is that the example itself doesn't matter. Finally, all of the big companies I've worked for have been MS shops for the reasons I'…
That is OK, since I just skimmed the example and saw problems with Apache/PHP std lib.
It was just stupid. Lots of people use those -- and bugs are killed fast.
In absolute worst case, use an external program in another language for this. (Processes or threads doesn't matter.)
That works, since IMAP4 was new and shiny in the mid 90s(!) -- in the non-MS world, we don't replace functioning standards all the time so there are multiple implementations out there for e.g. email libs...
>>I'm pretty confused as to why these comments have been downvoted so much.
Because you only know one side of things -- and believe the propaganda about the other side.
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Actually, quite a few Haskell folks work for Microsoft Research. So it's more like the well-paid Microsoft employees are out there hacking on GHC. The broke mofos are the ones that are working on all that .NET stuff. Working for the government as a low-level programmer is not where the money is at.
> Actually, quite a few Haskell folks work for Microsoft Research What is up with that, anyway? Three of the most important people in Haskell -- the originators of the language and primary developers of GHC, and the foremost researchers in functional programming as I've experienced it who aren't employed by universities, Galois or wherever the fuck okmij works -- are employed by Microsoft Research [0] Seems like a ve…
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Hint: you don't need to. Use what works for you.
I disagree. Or at least, you will cause problems for other people. One of my coworkers was delivered a Windows app by a third party - it was written using MFC. I said, "Seriously? In 2010, MFC? MFC was bad even before it became obsolete." My coworker said, "They used it once before and decided it works for them, so that's what they use." Here's the thing: part of being a developer is keeping up to date. If you find o…
Sometimes the less dependencies factor matters too. Having to quickly develop a diagnostic application for users to download, a couple of years ago, guess what I chose: Visual Basic 6. Right, that ancient tool. No matter what, the application was easy to develop and the executable was a few kilobytes, with no requirements other than Windows 2000 SP4.