Actually I still argue that tabs are a Bad Thing. Developers have taken a thing that SHOULD be handled by the window manager, and written their own way of doing it -- every application slightly differently, naturally. It's not as big a deal on Windows where the look+feel of various applications was always inconsistent as hell -- remember when Trillian was the most popular IM client, it seemed like in those days virtu…
Apple has started to embrace tabs within the system, most notably by integrating them into Finder windows in Mavericks. I agree that they should make it a standard type of application and have a standard tab UI that is used in as many apps as possible.
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.
Yeah the complaint is ridiculous and this coming from someone who learnt on VB 6. VB 6's IDE cost $500+ at the time and even getting the education edition was a huge PITA (it was HEAVILY pirated by students). VB.net and C# (and F#) are free [legal] downloads from the internet and both just as capable as VB6 was back in the day (the things Visual Studio Pro and above add aren't really relevant to beginners, except the…
"Plus back in the day I found VB 6 quite limiting. "
This, exactly this.
The transition to .NET was a blessing, VB6 is really useless for anything else than "basic business apps" and even then!
IIRC you could only read/write a file (raw data) byte by byte (ok, that was before VB6, still...)
Actually I still argue that tabs are a Bad Thing. Developers have taken a thing that SHOULD be handled by the window manager, and written their own way of doing it -- every application slightly differently, naturally. It's not as big a deal on Windows where the look+feel of various applications was always inconsistent as hell -- remember when Trillian was the most popular IM client, it seemed like in those days virtu…
If you really want the window manager to handle your browser windows then just open new windows instead of opening tabs. All of your window manager's fancy window switching features, etc. will work.
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…
I used to work at Microsoft (SQL Server). It goes without saying, but getting here is an intentional, conscious thing Microsoft spends billions of dollars to achieve. Working in SF in earlier-stage companies, I've never seen anything even close to the rigor with which Microsoft approached testing. Definitely consider working there if you want to learn from some of the best QA/QE/verification engineers in the industry…
Sadly many of the recent layoffs from MS have been in their QA and SDET/test engineering teams. The days of a strong testing discipline might be over for the company.
The biggest shift I've noticed in Microsoft in recent years is its support and push for open source, cross platform components and projects. It seems that there may be a paradigm shift towards selling tools and an integrated platform while providing more choice and making inroads into the open source comminities. This is exciting for me because I absolutely love .net and friends, but I'm also a Linux engineer and lea…
I don't think it's a huge shift as much as it is getting back to its roots. MS got its start by being the company that supported the PC as an open platform. Anyone could build a PC, any individual, any OEM, and put DOS or Windows on it. And anyone could write an app to run on DOS or Windows. For the time it was a remarkably free wheeling and open system, especially compared to what other companies like Apple was doing. And let us not forget that it was the success and growth of the open PC which made it possible for linux to come along and put itself on the same hardware. MS has certainly been guilty of various unfair business practices from time to time, and from trying to use its power to gain unfair advantage in the market, but for the most part I think that behavior tends to be the exception over Microsoft's history. Most of the time they are trying to pull customers and developers to them by offering a good platform and at some times even facilitating their own competition. In that regard, embracing open source is very much in keeping with that spirit, updated to reflect the new norms for what openness means today.
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…
My first programming experience was in VB6. A local college had a week-long camp for middle-school kids to learn various things. A few of my friends and I took the programming unit as one of our two choices, and they taught VB6 (this was probably about 1999). We came back home with source code and executables, but missing the VB6 runtime and disappointed that we couldn't continue working on our programs. We even made screensavers! Anyways, one of my friends' uncles gave that friend a copy of VB6 that he pirated from the company he worked at. We made some other programs, but I haven't looked at them for a long time. Recently I found back the source code, but was disappointed to find that it could not be opened in VB.NET. Furthermore, it's stored mostly in binary files, so I can't even read much of the code.
It's probably for the best though - the code we wrote is almost certainly quite ugly and hacky, and I could certainly write the same programs much better today.
I can tell they brainwashed you well in Cupertino. ;) They probably left out the part where Jobs borrowed the ideas for the Mac from Xerox I suspect too. More accurately, there is probably a Mac here because they were building Office for it.
Nah. All the cool kids in the 80's wanted the Amiga. The Mac was a toy. The story of Jobs' visit to Xerox Parc is well documented. They paid a million dollars for the visits. http://www.macstories.net/linked/parc-scientist-larry-tesler... http://www.cultofmac.com/126863/in-defense-of-steve-jobs/
People tend to forget there were many players out there back in the day. Amoga was so far ahead in 'multimedia' infront of Pc and Mac that it's not even comparable until 486 era. Not to mention SGI and Sun machines. Pretending that Mac was some kind of single origin of everything or Pc being a toure de force is just wrong.
Actually I still argue that tabs are a Bad Thing. Developers have taken a thing that SHOULD be handled by the window manager, and written their own way of doing it -- every application slightly differently, naturally. It's not as big a deal on Windows where the look+feel of various applications was always inconsistent as hell -- remember when Trillian was the most popular IM client, it seemed like in those days virtu…
If you really want the window manager to handle your browser windows then just open new windows instead of opening tabs. All of your window manager's fancy window switching features, etc. will work.
I think the problem isn't that tabbed browsing exists, but that window managers are not good enough to handle user experience as well as tabbed browsing does.
The biggest shift I've noticed in Microsoft in recent years is its support and push for open source, cross platform components and projects. It seems that there may be a paradigm shift towards selling tools and an integrated platform while providing more choice and making inroads into the open source comminities. This is exciting for me because I absolutely love .net and friends, but I'm also a Linux engineer and lea…
I don't think it's a huge shift as much as it is getting back to its roots. MS got its start by being the company that supported the PC as an open platform. Anyone could build a PC, any individual, any OEM, and put DOS or Windows on it. And anyone could write an app to run on DOS or Windows. For the time it was a remarkably free wheeling and open system, especially compared to what other companies like Apple was doin…
Sure, you could choose your hardware as long as you were running Windows. This is a new, different type of choice that MS is backing. ASP.NET(and MVC) vNext is goingt to be tested against mono. And mono represents code running on non-Windows platforms. I certainly view this as a shift; how large a shift is rather subjective.