Re: For the Windoze haters - VS2005

"The Real Andy" <will_get_back_to_you_on_This@> wrote in message
news:r8aiu1h8r363gb5t2pdqpfkmjn89484ka8@xxxxxxxxxx
On 7 Feb 2006 11:20:53 -0800, onehappymadman@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Rich Grise wrote:
On Tue, 07 Feb 2006 08:00:52 +0000, Paul Burke wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
In the DOS days, anybody could hack out a GW Basic program with minimal
training, in a few minutes. Microsoft is increasingly putting
programming out of our reach.

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.

Borland C++ 5.5, command line tools only, free download from Borland.
Microsoft c# compiler and command line tools, free when you download
the dotnet framework.

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
(http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/default.aspx). Granted, they
haven't promised these will _remain_ free, but you might as well get'em while
they are!

---Joel


.

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