5 ms·

MS is effectively switching sides from developers who have invested in exclusively MS tech to those who are far less partisan, and it hurts. Microsoft does see

by ern 15y ago

MS is effectively switching sides from developers who have invested in exclusively MS tech to those who are far less partisan, and it hurts. Microsoft does seem to be inching away from its traditional developer base to broaden its appeal. Lightswitch seems to be another example. I doubt that it will be as empowering for non-developers as the marketing suggests, but it should reduce the effort/expertise required in creating well-architected CRUD apps, making in-house development easier and exerting downward pressure on project costs. This will hurt some consulting shops. But Microsoft's duty isn't to look after its loyal developers, it is to maximize shareholder value.

teyc 15y ago
Lightswitch is Silverlight wrapped in a good practice framework, just like Wavemaker generates code on Spring. I had a play with Lightswitch and I liked it. It is like MS Access. I'm surprised they positioned this at the developers rather than power users though. Perhaps there is a wall between the tools division and the Office division. On the topic of loyalty, platform companies are like the Mafioso. Loyalty or the lack of it cuts both ways. MS tech is not the easiest to learn. The reason MS got away with it for years is because Sun was even worse.
- ern 15y ago
  I had a play with Lightswitch and I liked it. It is like MS Access. I'm surprised they positioned this at the developers rather than power users though. They are positioning at power users, but it does seem like more of a developer tool. I think it will appeal to less-skilled or time constrained developers more than to power users. I've turned down side projects, where Lightswitch would have been extremely helpful because of time constraints. I have worked in consulting places where income is generated, especially during lulls, with the sort of apps that Lightswitch is supposed to generate. I expect, if Lightswitch works as advertised, to see less of those projects. MS tech is not the easiest to learn. The reason MS got away with it for years is because Sun was even worse. My personal hope is that Microsoft feels threatened enough to produce some silver bullets for business application development, or at least to try.
  - eropple 15y ago
    I dunno - .NET has long felt like that silver bullet to me. It's rare for me to enthuse over a programming language, but C# is fantastic and F# great in its own niche, and .NET tends to have all the bells, whistles, and gongs that I feel benefit me as a developer.
    - jules 15y ago
      That is the problem. The system is very complicated and verbose to use. Lets say you want to write a program that extracts all links from a web page. How would you go about this? First, you look up in the documentation how to load a web page over http. This requires several lines of code, and it's complicated enough that you don't know it by heart after the first time you've done it. From there on it gets easier: you get a library and read the documentation to parse HTML and use an xpath or css selector to load all the links and then read of the href attribute. All of this probably requires around 15 lines of code, with various method calls that you have to look up. In Ruby, I do this: doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open('http://google.com')) urls = doc.css('a').map{|link| link[:href]} I know how to do this by heart because there are just a couple of things to remember. Not having to look at any documentation to do simple stuff like this saves a lot of time.
      - eropple 15y ago
        I rarely use the MSDN, because I have the important parts in Visual Studio. I don't have to look up a bunch of methods as you assert, because I know (roughly) what objects I'll need and I actually have working, effective intellisense and detailed inline comments. And I only have to look it up once or perhaps twice--I am not, you might be surprised to know, limited to remembering two-line snippets by heart, but perhaps even stretches of code. I can do your rather contrived example in about five lines with recursion and LINQ, but I wouldn't because I have Perl and Python (both in cygwin and IronPython) on my machine, which are better-suited to the task of simple text processing. If it were part of a bigger project, then it'd be reusable code and as such writing those five lines (or even--gasp--fifteen, as if that's such a travesty!) is very much No Big Deal. You're making up problems that don't exist.

by ern 15y ago

teyc 15y ago

Lightswitch is Silverlight wrapped in a good practice framework, just like Wavemaker generates code on Spring. I had a play with Lightswitch and I liked it. It is like MS Access. I'm surprised they positioned this at the developers rather than power users though. Perhaps there is a wall between the tools division and the Office division. On the topic of loyalty, platform companies are like the Mafioso. Loyalty or the lack of it cuts both ways. MS tech is not the easiest to learn. The reason MS got away with it for years is because Sun was even worse.

ern 15y ago
I had a play with Lightswitch and I liked it. It is like MS Access. I'm surprised they positioned this at the developers rather than power users though. They are positioning at power users, but it does seem like more of a developer tool. I think it will appeal to less-skilled or time constrained developers more than to power users. I've turned down side projects, where Lightswitch would have been extremely helpful because of time constraints. I have worked in consulting places where income is generated, especially during lulls, with the sort of apps that Lightswitch is supposed to generate. I expect, if Lightswitch works as advertised, to see less of those projects. MS tech is not the easiest to learn. The reason MS got away with it for years is because Sun was even worse. My personal hope is that Microsoft feels threatened enough to produce some silver bullets for business application development, or at least to try.
- eropple 15y ago
  I dunno - .NET has long felt like that silver bullet to me. It's rare for me to enthuse over a programming language, but C# is fantastic and F# great in its own niche, and .NET tends to have all the bells, whistles, and gongs that I feel benefit me as a developer.
  - jules 15y ago
    That is the problem. The system is very complicated and verbose to use. Lets say you want to write a program that extracts all links from a web page. How would you go about this? First, you look up in the documentation how to load a web page over http. This requires several lines of code, and it's complicated enough that you don't know it by heart after the first time you've done it. From there on it gets easier: you get a library and read the documentation to parse HTML and use an xpath or css selector to load all the links and then read of the href attribute. All of this probably requires around 15 lines of code, with various method calls that you have to look up. In Ruby, I do this: doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open('http://google.com')) urls = doc.css('a').map{|link| link[:href]} I know how to do this by heart because there are just a couple of things to remember. Not having to look at any documentation to do simple stuff like this saves a lot of time.
    - eropple 15y ago
      I rarely use the MSDN, because I have the important parts in Visual Studio. I don't have to look up a bunch of methods as you assert, because I know (roughly) what objects I'll need and I actually have working, effective intellisense and detailed inline comments. And I only have to look it up once or perhaps twice--I am not, you might be surprised to know, limited to remembering two-line snippets by heart, but perhaps even stretches of code. I can do your rather contrived example in about five lines with recursion and LINQ, but I wouldn't because I have Perl and Python (both in cygwin and IronPython) on my machine, which are better-suited to the task of simple text processing. If it were part of a bigger project, then it'd be reusable code and as such writing those five lines (or even--gasp--fifteen, as if that's such a travesty!) is very much No Big Deal. You're making up problems that don't exist.