8 ms·

I really enjoyed that. When Bill talks about growing Microsoft, and the early days, it always make me remember really great products like early Excel and Word,

I really enjoyed that. When Bill talks about growing Microsoft, and the early days, it always make me remember really great products like early Excel and Word, and the sheer excitement when MS Access (Cirrus) came out. It's kind of a shame that BG kinda let the technical aspect get out of control. The state of current MS tools, critical stuff like VS2005, is deplorable in comparison to the tight good performing code that MS used to have. I remember laughing at early versions of NetBeans, but slightly clunky though it is, I would much rather be in NetBeans than in VS. This sloppiness is all over the most recent versions of Office also, and it seems pretty clear that the race to the bottom in software hiring has really hurt Microsoft, especially with the devastating mess that was the Longhorn 'reboot' and Vista mess.

ComputerGuru 18y ago
That's rather unfair. Visual Studio 2008 is several orders of magnitude faster, more powerful, and much more responsive than NetBeans. NetBeans is cleaner, but once you get used to VS you'll realize it's the best IDE. This, coming from someone who used to live and die by IntelliJ & NetBeans. Visual Studio is a really great IDE, and togther with the .NET Framework is one of Microsoft's greatest achievements and a huge boon for coders working on MS' platforms. I agree with the rest of what you said though, but I don't think it's applicable to VS.NET. For instance, you could have talked about how bloated Office has become; while it still has tons of good new features, they're inefficiently done. You could have discussed how while Windows is a decent design/principle it has an increasingly more shitty implementation with each and every revision. But Visual Studio?? Well, I wish I could use it on Linux right now!
- watmough 18y ago
  Well, I came from VC 6.0, and I found that VS 2003 wasn't too bad, but VS 2005, on a 2 Gig dual proc Dell laptop runs like crap. I get frequent pauses and delays while typing, and it just breaks your flow. (to be fair NB can sometimes do this too) However, the worst aspect for me with VS2005 is the brain dead UI. Example 1. Pop-up tabs next to the scroll bars. Nuts. Example 2. The remove the output window by hitting escape that was in VC6.0 is gone. Nuts. Example 3: Horribly slow output window and constant unnecessary redraws. See next para. Try this and let me know if it works. Run any app over remote desktop, like Word, Outlook etc, then try running VS. At least on my setup, RDP is great over broadband running almost anything, but when I run VS, I get bizarre slow bottom to top refreshes about every 5 seconds, or when I type. This makes it almost unusable unless you look away from the screen when typing. I used to do quite a lot of development on a server box running VS, rather than run it locally and have to go to Oracle over a VPN connection. This is now almost unbearable. To be fair, I think .NET is at least decent, and C# is a friendly enough language, with delegates and some nice things in 3.0. (and really nice in 3.5!), but development of anything outside the MS ecosystem is like living in a vandalized neighborhood. e.g. Most cool stuff is broken on Windows. I shouldn't disparage Windows. I think the kernel is decent. I know how to program GUIs. XP has always been rock solid for me. But ... Windows has been left behind by most of the fun stuff, and it's just irrelevant to most interesting development outside of a corporate environment.

ComputerGuru 18y ago

That's rather unfair. Visual Studio 2008 is several orders of magnitude faster, more powerful, and much more responsive than NetBeans. NetBeans is cleaner, but once you get used to VS you'll realize it's the best IDE. This, coming from someone who used to live and die by IntelliJ & NetBeans. Visual Studio is a really great IDE, and togther with the .NET Framework is one of Microsoft's greatest achievements and a huge boon for coders working on MS' platforms. I agree with the rest of what you said though, but I don't think it's applicable to VS.NET. For instance, you could have talked about how bloated Office has become; while it still has tons of good new features, they're inefficiently done. You could have discussed how while Windows is a decent design/principle it has an increasingly more shitty implementation with each and every revision. But Visual Studio?? Well, I wish I could use it on Linux right now!

watmough 18y ago
Well, I came from VC 6.0, and I found that VS 2003 wasn't too bad, but VS 2005, on a 2 Gig dual proc Dell laptop runs like crap. I get frequent pauses and delays while typing, and it just breaks your flow. (to be fair NB can sometimes do this too) However, the worst aspect for me with VS2005 is the brain dead UI. Example 1. Pop-up tabs next to the scroll bars. Nuts. Example 2. The remove the output window by hitting escape that was in VC6.0 is gone. Nuts. Example 3: Horribly slow output window and constant unnecessary redraws. See next para. Try this and let me know if it works. Run any app over remote desktop, like Word, Outlook etc, then try running VS. At least on my setup, RDP is great over broadband running almost anything, but when I run VS, I get bizarre slow bottom to top refreshes about every 5 seconds, or when I type. This makes it almost unusable unless you look away from the screen when typing. I used to do quite a lot of development on a server box running VS, rather than run it locally and have to go to Oracle over a VPN connection. This is now almost unbearable. To be fair, I think .NET is at least decent, and C# is a friendly enough language, with delegates and some nice things in 3.0. (and really nice in 3.5!), but development of anything outside the MS ecosystem is like living in a vandalized neighborhood. e.g. Most cool stuff is broken on Windows. I shouldn't disparage Windows. I think the kernel is decent. I know how to program GUIs. XP has always been rock solid for me. But ... Windows has been left behind by most of the fun stuff, and it's just irrelevant to most interesting development outside of a corporate environment.