The Microsoft Empire Reboots • Hacker News Board

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#171

Post by dredmorbius » Mon, Oct 13, 2014, 5:41 AM UTC

Roboprog wrote: post #57

dredmorbius wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why I say Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem. I wish pretty much every damned site in existence rendered as on Readability.

There is something to be said for getting to HTML paragraphs and lists, and then stopping. None of this "Everybody has a 2048 pixel wide monitor to view my 4 huge columns in" (I used divs instead of tables, so it's OK that it takes 2 K pixels to render, right? Right?)

I also like headings, tables of contents, and super and subscript.

LaTeX equation input is also something that's creeping up my "must have" list.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#172

Post by radmuzom » Mon, Oct 13, 2014, 9:21 AM UTC

eldavido wrote: post #98

monstermonster wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Reminds me of the great talk by Joel Spolsky[1].

Perhaps automated systems have become much better since Joel wrote this, but something from the talk I really liked -

"The old testers at Microsoft checked lots of things: they checked if fonts were consistent and legible, they checked that the location of controls on dialog boxes was reasonable and neatly aligned, they checked whether the screen flickered when you did things, they looked at how the UI flowed, they considered how easy the software was to use, how consistent the wording was, they worried about performance, they checked the spelling and grammar of all the error messages, and they spent a lot of time making sure that the user interface was consistent from one part of the product to another, because a consistent user interface is easier to use than an inconsistent one."

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/12/03.html

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#173

Post by MikeTV » Tue, Oct 14, 2014, 2:00 PM UTC

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #92

MichaelGG wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a counterpoint, since doing anything advanced in VB6 (game-making-wise - that's what I learned it for) required low-level calls to GDI, OpenGL, or DirectX libraries, I feel I obtained a better picture of how the OS operates at that level than if I had started on C#. C#'s nicer, for sure, but if you're just doing it to learn how computers work anyway...