The Microsoft Empire Reboots • Hacker News Board

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#61

Post by woah » Sat, Oct 11, 2014, 4:16 PM UTC

demallien wrote: post #45

Immortalin wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I concur, the combination of css + js + html is an nightmare especially if you are are trying to design a simple database-backed website for your startup. Webforms might have been hard to maintain for some, but at least it worked well. There was no need to figure out all the background stuff if you are not a professional developer. If I need a fancier website based on mvc, I would have hired a fullstack django develo…

Yup, and if you are trying to do the full stack, you had better toss in some node.js or Ruby on Rails, plus SQL. Web development is really hard for non-developers to grok. I keep thinking back to an Access application that I threw together in a couple of days, back in the 90s for managing a team of about 40 technicians. It was being used for task tracking, and had some wiki-like features as well. When I started that…

You're idealizing Access for reasons unknown. If there actually was demand for such a tool, one would exist and would be making a ton of money. The fact that people use off the shelf SaaS is an indication of the fact that off the shelf SaaS is what they want. My suspicion is that Access is too hard for most business people, yet not powerful enough for actual developers to make something unique with.

Salesforce has made a huge business out of business apps in the same category as whatever would have been cobbled together in the basement with Access by some 'IT guy' 20 years ago. The fact that this is the case is a reflection of the fact that people prefer the hosted, turnkey, polished experience that web-based SaaS provides over some half-baked internal app.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#62

Post by wernercd » Sat, Oct 11, 2014, 4:17 PM UTC

ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #56

WorldWideWayne wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever been to corporate america? ASP.NET webforms is used heavily everywhere including but definitely not limited to marketing agencies, the financial sector (investment and banking down on through collection agencies), healthcare, call centers, etc etc etc. If you approach a lot of those places and show them something like AngularJS they'll be like "where are all of the high-level tags and rich components th…

Yes I work for a stereotypical .Net shop. Just because it's ubiquitous in the Enterprise doesn't mean it's not crap. I generally love MSFTs dev tools, but web forms are still a ghetto compared to MVC.

"Just because it's ubiquitous in the Enterprise doesn't mean it's not crap."

This. Look at Java, and the bloated mess it has become. Look at XML and the bloated mess it is.

Popular doesn't mean it's good. There are plenty of individuals at the top that don't know cisco from crisco.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#63

Post by ptx » Sat, Oct 11, 2014, 4:19 PM UTC

higherpurpose wrote: post #5

Oh, good. Because it's a corporate empire what consumers want.

What, aren't you excited to be "accessed" by Microsoft as they exploit the world that rightfully belongs to them, as the article puts it?

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#64

Post by wernercd » Sat, Oct 11, 2014, 4:24 PM UTC

alex_hitchins wrote: post #28

gurkendoktor wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a huge fan of Delphi 5 at the time, and hoped it would win over VB6 (I guess it's a Coke/Pepsi thing). Now I'm in the same boat as you, because it seems both Delphi and its competitor, VB, have lost. I'm not even sure if there are any winners. I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with developer tools...

I cut my teeth with VB 5/6. I still think there is nothing on the market that is as fast in creating applications. If you did things properly (MVP! remember that?) it was quite maintainable. I still know of several VB apps still in service.

If you do things properly, PHP is maintainable... C is maintainable...

The problem is "properly" is surrounded by a lot of people who slap stuff together, reinvent the wheel (NIH syndrome) or just plain don't know how to program.

I shudder when I look at old VB code... and thank God that I have VS2013, resharper and C#.

I think the issue people have is "it's never as good as it used to be". You remember the good, forget the bad and glorify what used to be the pinnacle of technology. Windows 75. XP. Blackberry. Palm. OH WHY CAN'T THEY HAVE JUST LET US STAY WITH PERFECTION!!!

Sorry... Let me get off your lawn before that becomes an issue as well. :)

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#65

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Oct 11, 2014, 4:43 PM UTC

alex_hitchins wrote: post #38

Immortalin wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true, I am a young programmer and I learned vb6 as my first language. It ran perfectly well on windows xp.

Out of interest, why did you choose vb6? I'd have thought you would need to go out your way to learn such an old platform.

[deleted]

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#66

Post by MichaelGG » Sat, Oct 11, 2014, 4:59 PM UTC

Immortalin wrote: post #15

Their greatest mistake(s) were the removal of visual basic 6 line of products and windows 10. Visual basic 6 is my first programming language and is probably still my favourite. The problem with lua and python and most other "beginner friendly" languages is that it is hard to do anything useful when u are just starting other than printing hello world to terminal. My intro to vb6 was creating a simple calculator, it w…

I've personally watched an essentially-non-programmer take VB.NET, drag-n-drop, write some event handlers, and have a functioning little app. So while VB6's IDE is faster than the ".NET" Visual Studios, most of your other complaints are really not valid.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#67

Post by demallien » Sat, Oct 11, 2014, 4:59 PM UTC

woah wrote: post #61

demallien wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, and if you are trying to do the full stack, you had better toss in some node.js or Ruby on Rails, plus SQL. Web development is really hard for non-developers to grok. I keep thinking back to an Access application that I threw together in a couple of days, back in the 90s for managing a team of about 40 technicians. It was being used for task tracking, and had some wiki-like features as well. When I started that…

You're idealizing Access for reasons unknown. If there actually was demand for such a tool, one would exist and would be making a ton of money. The fact that people use off the shelf SaaS is an indication of the fact that off the shelf SaaS is what they want. My suspicion is that Access is too hard for most business people, yet not powerful enough for actual developers to make something unique with. Salesforce has ma…

"You're idealizing Access for reasons unknown."

Well, you might accept that I'm "idealizing" Access because, you know, I had a decent experience with it 20 years ago, as described in my first comment. No need to go searching for mysterious ulterior motives when they're explained in the post!

For what it's worth, I do remember significant flaws in Access. For one thing, it was an absolute pain when we wanted to modify the database - we had to get everyone to log off, and then upgrade all of the clients at once. This is one of those problems that the web solves elegantly. Also, Access had major issues with concurrent users. Performance fell off a cliff, and from memory, certain operations were unsafe (I think you could set up a SQLServer which would address the concurrency problems, but we never bothered).

But these days we have better options available to us - app stores fix the updating problem, without introducing the css + html + javascript mess. We have decent, free web servers, and web application frameworks such as Django and Rails that make writing the server side code that drives the RESTful APIs used by the client relatively easy. But what we don't have is:

a) an easy way to create a server (this needs to be as easy as sharing an Excel spreadsheet) b) a coherent development environment from client to server code. Something that allowed you to write apps purely in Javascript (no css or html) with a GUI editor, and which also let you write the server code in node.js would be a close match to what I'm thinking of. Bonus points if most of the node.js code is derived from the client-side code, so that the novice programmer doesn't need to be aware that a server even exists, it just works.

The problem is, that's the kind of application that's really hard to write. It's big, an IDE in fact, and really Microsoft is the only game in town for making that sort of stuff. But they won't write Android / iOS / Mac clients, so it doesn't happen.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#68

Post by MichaelGG » Sat, Oct 11, 2014, 5:02 PM UTC

ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #37

Immortalin wrote: post #15

Their greatest mistake(s) were the removal of visual basic 6 line of products and windows 10. Visual basic 6 is my first programming language and is probably still my favourite. The problem with lua and python and most other "beginner friendly" languages is that it is hard to do anything useful when u are just starting other than printing hello world to terminal. My intro to vb6 was creating a simple calculator, it w…

I hear ya about VB6, I think that making it incompatible with VB.Net was a mistake. But ASP.NET webforms? Ugh. I maintain a slightly older website using webforms, and it feels like I'm in the web development dark ages. Its a literal ghetto of tech that is used no where else.

Dunno. There's certainly a large appeal in being able to drag-n-drop controls out, double click a button and write "someControl.BackgroundColor = Red" and having it all just work.

I agree it isn't a great way to develop for the web, as in embracing web tech, but it's a very convenient way to make forms. Even having your controls keep state (the terrible viewstate) is quite convenient.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#69

Post by WorldWideWayne » Sat, Oct 11, 2014, 5:02 PM UTC

ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #56

WorldWideWayne wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever been to corporate america? ASP.NET webforms is used heavily everywhere including but definitely not limited to marketing agencies, the financial sector (investment and banking down on through collection agencies), healthcare, call centers, etc etc etc. If you approach a lot of those places and show them something like AngularJS they'll be like "where are all of the high-level tags and rich components th…

Yes I work for a stereotypical .Net shop. Just because it's ubiquitous in the Enterprise doesn't mean it's not crap. I generally love MSFTs dev tools, but web forms are still a ghetto compared to MVC.

Sure, but it's crap that gets those Enterprises from A to B.

What I want to know is, what better crap is there that offers the ease of use that webforms does? If there's nothing better then this is the best crap we have.

It's kind of like how gas-guzzling, environment-ruining automobiles in general are crappy, but what practical alternatives exist that actually cover all of the use cases?

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#70

Post by monstermonster » Sat, Oct 11, 2014, 5:06 PM UTC

david927 wrote: post #19

Nitramp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with developer tools... I think that's the web. The development that used to happen in VB6 & Delphi simply has migrated there, desktop apps from that segment are dead.

I think you're right, and it's a huge indictment. The web, as an application platform, is worse than VB ever was. Think about that for a moment: We've regressed from VB. The usual tradeoff is: easy to write, hard to extend and maintain. But the web is hard to write and hard to extend/maintain. We have some of the smartest people in the world in our industry, and evidently we're all idiots.

This, a million times. I'm a bit further down the abstraction chain but I am thoroughly glad I sit there all day writing C/C++ for Windows native (win32) GUI applications.

I know once I've tested it on one machine it's going to work fine on all the other ones. It's the most stable API and platform I've ever seen. Code we wrote for Windows NT4 works fine on Windows 8.1 and behaves exactly the same.

Compare that to our poor web guy who spends at least 50% of his time trying to get everything working on a selection of browsers going from IE6 to the latest Chrome while necking red bull, using the F word a lot, smoking and going bright purple.