For the Windoze haters - VS2005

Curious: what is "very simple and limited" to you?

Half-life2? X(The GUI)? Distributed routing engine?

Have you tried Linux? It comes with an incredible programming suite, all the way from shell scripting, which is a lot like a .bat file but orders of magnitude better, to perl, 386 assembler, C, C++, pascal, fortran, java, bison, lisp, python, pretty much pick your poison. You also have your choice of about a half-dozen shells to do scripting in. And if you're screen-oriented, there are at least a couple of GUI interface development toolkits that I know of.

The only thing I haven't been able to do in Linux is AutoCAD, and according to the WINE website, it supports that - I have to learn how to configure WINE, so I'll be RTFM on that from time to time. :-)

Good Luck! Rich

If you like Microsoft, and like easy GUI programming, there's Visual Basic. I got VB4 "Standard Edition" in about 1995 for $99.00, and still have it - I could put a CD image on my website if you'd like. ;-) It's probably illegal, but I could put a disclaimer: "If you download this, please send Microsoft ninety-nine dollars American." ;-)

Or, I could put Linux on my website and you could download it for free. Or from any of the Linux websites. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

I see in the news today that Google is negotiating with Dell, to put the "Google Operating System" on their computers,

Anyone know any particulars? Probably a Unix derivative?

Don

Borland C++ 5.5, command line tools only, free download from Borland.

[snip]

As a user, my foremost consideration is whether the app. is any good or not. Low cost and time to market are generally signs of poorly designed applications.

As a s/w developer, the point and click development environments tend to encourage inexperienced people to crank out apps. Most of the resources consumed in a s/w project are in the initial requirements analysis and application architecture tasks. Most of the high end tools for this don't run on Windows. The GUI is the easy part.

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Paul Hovnanian     mailto:Paul@Hovnanian.com
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If you can\'t beat them, arrange to have them beaten.
                                -- George Carlin

Microsoft c# compiler and command line tools, free when you download the dotnet framework.

As a applications developer, my foremost concern is that the customer gets what they want. However, if I were to offer you a solution that is much higher in cost just so it runs 0.1seconds faster, then you will probably sacrifice the speed.

I have seen this all to often. In fact you can usually use the GUI to guage what the underlying code is going to be like. Considering that the User is going to be looking at, and using the GUI i tend to be fairly critical in this area.

In fact, after my initail play with C#, i have spent around another 8 hours developing a navigation control that looks like outlook 2003, and i will probably spend the next few days on it. IT is reusable, so i figure I might as well get it working properly now.

Whilst i am still learning, i can assure that I am going to avoid visual c++ like the plague now :)

I disagree. I think the whole process is complicated. If you dont get the gui right, the product looks crap from the very beginning.

And, there is an every increasing trend these days to use MS for application architecture. In fact i know of a very large investment bank (on of the biggest) that is currently recruiting to build a new architecture on Windows.

Python is something i do plan to look at. The only thing that puts me off is that we have a super genius at work who is a 100% linux person and he keeps telling me that python is crap. Then again, i qualify him as an academic programmer with no commercial programming skill or value at all.

Perhaps I should combine python with linspire, which I am also very keen to use.... I can see me buying a new computer soon :)

It's not necessarily Microsoft alone: These days people expect that your programs will have a GUI, and if you think about it, the difficulty in creating some simple GUI with the Microsoft (and other OS') tools is trivially easy compared to what it was historically back in, e.g., the Windows 3.11/95 days, Unix/Linux's X-Windows, the Amiga, etc. I think the main problem is a lack of a decent piece of documentation that covers -- in 100 pages or less -- basic programming with VB.net, C##, or whatever, kind of like the old manuals that came with Apple II's and Commodore 64's many years ago.

The other problem was that, 20 years ago, if you wanted to sent data to a printer over a parallel port from your GW BASIC program, you'd decide what printers you wanted to support and just code up software to deal with that small handful of printers. You might even just write to the parallel port hardware directly, given how slow going through the BIOS was. These days, you have the all-singing, all-dancing Windows printer driver to talk to, and while it does make your software necessarily more complex, once you get it working with the DeskJet 550 on your desktop it'll also work to print to a printer in some other state that's a 60 page per minute Xerox docuwriter or somesuch -- pretty impressive.

I do somewhat agree with your sentiment, though, that Microsoft and "the computer industry" in general seem to try to force continued changes in programming languages, development systems, etc., even when it doesn't seem as though such changes objectively are any better, but are really just different. (Microsoft Office being a good example here -- I'd estimate that for 90+% of users, Office 97 works as well as Office 2005.) I honestly believe that they do this to fuel the "IT economy," and thereby indirectly elevate their own returns.

All the "Express" versions of the .Net languages (including "C++.Net", which is still just "C++" if you only use "unmanaged" code and will compile to a native executable), with full-blown GUI development environment/debugger, free downloads from Microsoft

Granted, they haven't promised these will _remain_ free, but you might as well get'em while they are!

---Joel

I'd be curious to hear what he considers a good "high level scripting" kind of language is? (Not intending to start any flame wars here, I know you can use Python to write a full-blown web server or other applications if you like, I'm just classifying Python based on what I see most people using it for.)

[...]

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Last month after fitting a new motherboard and a nightmare waste of my life. I discovered I could no longer use win98. Was forced to load something called windowsXP. Other than a moronic cartoon dog attached to the 'search' feature (now disabled) and (I've read) loss of direct hardware control, I can spot no difference at all between the 2 programs. john

In article , Rich Grise wrote: [...]

I don't do a lot of CAD so QCad is quite good enough. It has both a Windows and Linux version and handles huge DXF files without trouble.

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kensmith@rahul.net   forging knowledge

Looks like a lot of scuttlebutt, but nothing really definitive-sounding in the first 25 or so hits:

I've also seen "Linspire", which seems to be some kind of proprietary suite on a Linux core, but there's no source code on their website - you have to pay for it. Yech! Blech! Ptui!

Thanks! Rich

Good Luck! Rich

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"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo Possum

What I mean by 'any good' is getting the correct answer.

Not really. In anything more than the simplest applications, there is rarely a 1:1 mapping between the UI and the underlying data and process models.

By the way, how much is Microsoft paying for promotional posts these days?

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Paul Hovnanian     mailto:Paul@Hovnanian.com
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How do I set a laser printer to stun?

Thanks for the link. I should have Googled for the subject. I think it's funny as hell that Google is developing the GooOS, while Microsoft is developing a search engine.

Don

To bad if you present your data incorrectly, which is so often the case.

Nothing unfortunatley. I just like to present the case, becuase unfortunatley i think many engineers (not all) still think that giving dos tools to the customer is satisfactory. These days it is just too easy to generate really powerful GUI apps with minimal effort. Mind you in saying that, i am not sure what the cost of a vanilla Visual Studio costs. I pay the big bucks for the Enterprise MSDN subscription, which included a vanilla version of the VS2005 in my current subscription.

MS has a nasty habit of buying out all the smart guys too, so perhaps MSSearch will turn out to BE MSgoogle.

How *dare* you make things simple? Hire ten thousand programmers to do small bits of the project and dump the results into the MS grinder and $ell it! Then $ell patches, then patches to the patches, then ad infinitum. Who cares if it grows beyond reason (remember MP/M which ran 48K TPA programs?) - after all, larger programs means more $ales of more RAM, larger hard drives, faster CPUs to make up for the sluggishness, etc. And all that added stuff gives a good excuse to add more junk.