5 ms·

The whole Windows ecosystem is a huge mess for developers right now. Visual Studio 2012 often crashes, the API documentation is often incomplete and not helpfu

The whole Windows ecosystem is a huge mess for developers right now. Visual Studio 2012 often crashes, the API documentation is often incomplete and not helpful, there are quite a number of incompatibilities between W8 and WP8, XAML has mediocre performance on ARM and can't be accessed from C++ on WP8, the list goes on and on. If anything, Microsoft managed to make most Windows developers I know want to work on linux/Android or OSX/iOS instead - the rest are blissfully unaware of what UNIX is in the first place. Sure these things may improve over time, but right now developers are nothing more than beta testers. For us, the possible profits are not worth the efforts to deal with the mediocre development experience.

meaty 14y ago
Vs2012 crashes less than vs2010 though. Hand over your cash now for the new feature! We've bailed and moving to java on the server and web and android apps for mobile.
- jeremiep 14y ago
  I used to write Java on the server-side and hated it. It felt like mindlessly writing boilerplate code for a living with a language assuming I'm an idiot who can't be trusted with more than one paradigm at a time. The last backend application I wrote was entirely written in CoffeeScript running on node.js. While it doesn't get the performance of the JVM, the development experience has been some of the most fun I've had in years. For future backend projects, especially if they're big in scale, I'm looking at either Haskell or the D programming language.
  - meaty 14y ago
    Java on the server is fine if you know how not to poke your eyes out with context reloading and avoid jsp and jsf like the plague :) I find coffeescript/node.js to be a bit too trendy to trust and Haskell to be perl for computer scientists. If I had my way, I'd write everything in RPL
    - zensavona 14y ago
      "a bit too trendy to trust" I imagine java was trendy also when everything was written in C++
      - jeremiep 14y ago
        Back then, Sun had to spend a fortune to push Java down the throats of developers. Mostly by selling it to their clueless managers instead. Java was born out of a trend and still lives as one to this day, good thing only the corporate world really bought into it!
        meaty 14y ago
        The reason its so popular with corporates is that most of the expensive problems are already solved so building software is sticking a few well proven components together with some glue. It's also good at managing memory for you, which is not something that can be said for most languages.
      - meaty 14y ago
        When java turned up, we were all still writing c. C++ was still fairly unstable then. Microsoft's compiler was actually probably the best on the market and it was still a hunk of shit to the point that most people just did win32+c. On UNIX it was always C.
    - jeremiep 14y ago
      I'd rather avoid Java itself like the plague :) The JVM may be great, but the language itself is mediocre at best! Maybe if it someday gets type inference, removes the null pointer (and therefore the stupid NullPointerException in "memory safe" code), adds lambda expressions, adds compile-time function evaluation, doesn't try to wrap everything inside a class and a few more improvements especially to limit the god-awful verbosity, I might give it a try again - but by then we'd call it Lisp. The D language has completely replaced C/C++/Java/C# for me, it's not as portable yet but it's getting there. You should give Haskell a try, I don't use it much yet but merely understanding concepts such as monads, type classes and applicative functors have completely changed my perspective on software development. It's just like learning Lisp; it's enlightening to say the least.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- MattHarrington 14y ago
  VS2012 for Windows Phone development is free: http://aka.ms/winphone8sdk http://aka.ms/winphone8sdk
  - meaty 14y ago
    You still have to pay for it if you want extension support.
jcromartie 14y ago
Of all of the problems I have with Windows development, Visual Studio is the least of them. I think 2012 is pretty darn good as far as IDEs go.

meaty 14y ago

Vs2012 crashes less than vs2010 though. Hand over your cash now for the new feature! We've bailed and moving to java on the server and web and android apps for mobile.

jeremiep 14y ago
I used to write Java on the server-side and hated it. It felt like mindlessly writing boilerplate code for a living with a language assuming I'm an idiot who can't be trusted with more than one paradigm at a time. The last backend application I wrote was entirely written in CoffeeScript running on node.js. While it doesn't get the performance of the JVM, the development experience has been some of the most fun I've had in years. For future backend projects, especially if they're big in scale, I'm looking at either Haskell or the D programming language.
- meaty 14y ago
  Java on the server is fine if you know how not to poke your eyes out with context reloading and avoid jsp and jsf like the plague :) I find coffeescript/node.js to be a bit too trendy to trust and Haskell to be perl for computer scientists. If I had my way, I'd write everything in RPL
  - zensavona 14y ago
    "a bit too trendy to trust" I imagine java was trendy also when everything was written in C++
    - jeremiep 14y ago
      Back then, Sun had to spend a fortune to push Java down the throats of developers. Mostly by selling it to their clueless managers instead. Java was born out of a trend and still lives as one to this day, good thing only the corporate world really bought into it!
      - meaty 14y ago
        The reason its so popular with corporates is that most of the expensive problems are already solved so building software is sticking a few well proven components together with some glue. It's also good at managing memory for you, which is not something that can be said for most languages.
    - meaty 14y ago
      When java turned up, we were all still writing c. C++ was still fairly unstable then. Microsoft's compiler was actually probably the best on the market and it was still a hunk of shit to the point that most people just did win32+c. On UNIX it was always C.
  - jeremiep 14y ago
    I'd rather avoid Java itself like the plague :) The JVM may be great, but the language itself is mediocre at best! Maybe if it someday gets type inference, removes the null pointer (and therefore the stupid NullPointerException in "memory safe" code), adds lambda expressions, adds compile-time function evaluation, doesn't try to wrap everything inside a class and a few more improvements especially to limit the god-awful verbosity, I might give it a try again - but by then we'd call it Lisp. The D language has completely replaced C/C++/Java/C# for me, it's not as portable yet but it's getting there. You should give Haskell a try, I don't use it much yet but merely understanding concepts such as monads, type classes and applicative functors have completely changed my perspective on software development. It's just like learning Lisp; it's enlightening to say the least.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
MattHarrington 14y ago
VS2012 for Windows Phone development is free: http://aka.ms/winphone8sdk http://aka.ms/winphone8sdk
- meaty 14y ago
  You still have to pay for it if you want extension support.

jcromartie 14y ago

Of all of the problems I have with Windows development, Visual Studio is the least of them. I think 2012 is pretty darn good as far as IDEs go.