Tony Goodhew - The path to Orcas, (future Visual Studio), studying the market research

shooby wrote:

Otherwise, its just another dead end deveoper tool.  No project manager who values his career would choose Microsoft stuff unless he was ordered to.

For a dead end developer tool, Visual Studio has given me surprisingly good revenues and some very prestigious jobs as well.

On a related note, Rory Blyth made a very interesting comment in a recent .NET Rocks (www.dotnetrocks.com), and I quote:
"PHP is free, well, so is Syphilis"

shooby wrote:

I'd be interested if it ran on Linux, and was free.
Tony, you want my advice?  Sell your stock, quit the monopoly, and go work on Eclipse...

Why don't you quit your job and work for free on Eclipse.

shooby wrote:

Otherwise, its just another dead end deveoper tool.  No project manager who values his career would choose Microsoft stuff unless he was ordered to.

If do you think VS.NET is just anoder dead end developer tools, what are you doing here?

Why did you see this video?
Are you interested in dead end things with no future?

I mean something must have interested you, doesn't it?

I think MS has done a terrific job with its products since 2000. Win2k, WinXP, SQL2000, ISA2004, VS.NET/.NET Framework the whole office line... among otheres.  And it has been so that other vendors from all platforms are now trying catch up.

While I agree with MS surveying the developer comunity to reach a good level of quality and features.  But I must add that it doesn't must restrain their developers imagination on new features.

My tip for Orcas: Do it as light as posible (I think that something already happening with Whidbey)

I didn't watch the video but here's my feedback... don't take this the wrong way, but how about stopping with the constant re-engineering for awhile? I am sick and tired of having to re-invent myself every time Microsoft decides to completely change the way we are supposed to write software. Lets see... Ive been through C, MFC/C++, VB, COM, ATL, .NET, and now here comes Avalon. Great! *sigh*. Ya know, these Linux dweebs haven't changed their basic development platform since the 1990's and even then it was only a shift to C++ and that was the only change since the 70's. Must be nice.

Can you just give us some time to become experts in the stuff we have now so my resume wont go completely out of date if I miss a couple issues of MSDN magazine. I just cant handle this constant churn anymore.

Maybe you're just getting old gman?
Yeah, you really represent a minority with your thoughts, you make me think of that TV show "Grumpy old men".

Personally, I feel that things should go faster! Innovation is key in our business, and look at how long it took Microsoft to come up with an update to VS.NET 2003!! That leaves us more than time enough to learn all the new stuff.  Oh, how I wish that Avalon was here already...

edit: after reading your message once again I honestly believe that you should think about retiring! Man you sound depressed, I pity the people for whom you have to write software!!! How on earth can you deliver good work if you're not able to stay up to date? You would sell people old technology! Please, if you're not able to keep up to speed, let other people take over and give a new turn to your life instead of blaming Microsoft!!!

dotnetjunkie wrote:

Maybe you're just getting old gman?
Yeah, you really represent a minority with your thoughts, you make me think of that TV show "Grumpy old men".

Personally, I feel that things should go faster! Innovation is key in our business, and look at how long it took Microsoft to come up with an update to VS.NET 2003!! That leaves us more than time enough to learn all the new stuff.  Oh, how I wish that Avalon was here already...

edit: after reading your message once again I honestly believe that you should think about retiring! Man you sound depressed, I pity the people for whom you have to write software!!! How on earth can you deliver good work if you're not able to stay up to date? You would sell people old technology! Please, if you're not able to keep up to speed, let other people take over and give a new turn to your life instead of blaming Microsoft!!!

Way too harsh!

If I had a dollar for every time I've been involved in trying to rescue a mess of a project that's arisen as a result of enthusiastic young things who are only interested in learning the latest cool stuff at the most rudimentary level, keen to rush onto the next before they've had any kind of depth in what they're doing, I'd be a millionaire by now.

Yes, things need to move forward but too often it seems that it's just change for change's sake, and the MTV generation seem to have the attention span of a newt! Too much is being rushed out without being properly thought through - hence the constant re-engineering, when it should have been done properly in the first place if a bit of thought had gone into the process instead of this obsession with being "cool". Net result stronger developers have to pick up the pieces in delayed projects or complete failures (over 65% of software projects are regarded as a failure the last I heard).

The old stuff still works and the new builds on it/abstracts it.. And I am totally buying the argument that if I code 1 line which runs 40000 lines of Microsoft's code.. Well if its not working I know who to call

I wouldn't say "it's just change for change's sake"... if you look at it fairly, I think the biggest change came at the turn of the century with .NET. The next big change - Avalon and Longhorn - which by the way are OPTIONAL (at least for the next few years) - is going to come at LEAST 5 years after the last one (.NET). I think that is the perfect pace. Sure, there are lots of smaller changes coming in during the period in between, but they are not so hard to learn nor required to most of the time.

This industry is getting SO competetive that you NEED to stay on top - and I'm not just talking us mortal developers - I'm talking, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, etc. Besides, especially when you're in the retail market, the bells and whistles in your app really cash in - if you're NOT in the retail area, then no one is stopping you from using old technology.

At the end of the day, it's your choice. Backward compatibility still exists. No one is forcing you to learn new stuff. VB 6 is still supported (just not freely) and will be for some years still - and its almost a decade old! And at the end of the day, its the overall/majority developer community that is pushing for upgrades and newer technology.

This goes back (tho not directly) to what I say about anti-MS sentiment - if you dont like it, stop using it and then rant about it - I wont agree with you, but then I can at least respect you.

I for one can't see the new stuff come in fast enough. My one issue with the new is how to deploy to something that only now, got the old. (How can I justify to my clients that the need exists for a rollout of the 2.0 framework when they only recently got the 1.1 framework and all its patches in place, is one example.)

By an large the new stuff coming in the next VS and perhaps the one to come after that on the surface appear to be pointed at coding style rather than methodology. Doing things with generics or partial classes rather than learning a whole new language and api. The framework is still there, there is just some new stuff along with it. Some if the NEW stuff is really compiler tricks (ie Partial Classes) not really new paragigms for development. Really now the .Net framework and the C# language is approaching 5 years in the wild now. I hardly think that its been radically changing overnight.

I'll work on it! Thanks for the compliments, we're trying hard to come up with great content and it's hard.

Lwatson wrote:

I for one can't see the new stuff come in fast enough. My one issue with the new is how to deploy to something that only now, got the old. (How can I justify to my clients that the need exists for a rollout of the 2.0 framework when they only recently got the 1.1 framework and all its patches in place, is one example.)

By and large the new stuff coming in the next VS and perhaps the one to come after that on the surface appear to be pointed at coding style rather than methodology. Doing things with generics or partial classes rather than learning a whole new language and api. The framework is still there, there is just some new stuff along with it. Some if the NEW stuff is really compiler tricks (ie Partial Classes) not really new paragigms for development. Really now the .Net framework and the C# language is approaching 5 years in the wild now. I hardly think that its been radically changing overnight.

Well to be honest, I think that a lot of the stuff (like generics, like a designer that doesn't screw up your HTML and generates XHTML) should have been in a first cut of the product. Look at the pain that's been caused with DDA etc through Microsoft bringing VS.Net to market without thinking through all the issues - too obsessed with rushing out new "cool stuff" instead of fixing the basics first. New stuff is fine but Microsoft seem happy to flood us with new stuff and then abandon it after a few short months usually the day we've deployed it to production. Remember IDC/HTC before ASP? Remember their first rush to do XML schema's (obsoleted a year later) SOAP, WSE, AJAX (correct me if I'm wrong but we seem to have had ADC then RDC and then XML Data Islands all trying to do the same thing and all pretty much broken on first release) Get the basics sorted out first instead of obsessing over being cool.

Some examples: Who in the world ever thought that a designer that screwed up your HTML was a good idea? and why has it taken so long to fix? Why do so many of the class libraries break Microsoft's own programming guidelines and are now having to be replaced? How can we have a "we bet the company on it" product that even in its second incarnation shows up some pretty fundamental flaws within minutes of using it: Try knocking up a form with a text-box label that is right-aligned in a bold font and marvel at how the font gets truncated mid-character on the right regardless of the video driver you're using - this is pretty basic functionality! I would argue that basic bugs like this arise because of the obsession with delivering gimmicky "new" functionality that doesn't actually work instead of focussing on the basics that most of us need to deliver solid, performant and reliable solutions.

Of course if I were a rather naive student with no real job to worry about then I'd probably be raving about cool new stuff and complaining about old farts working in the real world too

Visual Studio Team System is, from what I've seen, a good example of this rush to deliver stuff without properly thinking through the requirements. At the roadshow day it was scary how often in answer to a question (the event was attended by IT professionals not over-enthusiastic students!) the answer invariably appeared to be "We'll be looking at that in the release after the next one" (ie the THIRD release) - we're talking pretty basic requirements - and that's several months before even the first retail release is out the door! In the meantime we'll no doubt spend the first few years of release 1 and release 2 battling our way around incomplete products, appalling bugs or lapses in functionality, getting up to speed with things that just don't work waiting for the version that should have been released to come out. It's such an unproductive waste of time.

I remember the time wasted writing my own web farm session management, trying to work around all the bugs in MDAC that stopped ADC or RDC working - pain and long, long wasted hours that could have been saved with just a bit of thought about what the real world requirements were.

OK, I'm playing devil's advocate a bit here (as evidenced by the fact I've been playing with Beta 1 and am downloading Beta 2 as I type) but attitudes like that of dotnetjunkie, to me, smack of naive hobbyist rather than realistic IT professional. It was frightening how many times the answer to some pretty basic questions at the recent VSTS roadshow seemed to be NOT that it would be in the retail releas, or even in the next release after that, but in the release after that. And in the meantime we'll have to jump through all the same time-wasting hoops, learning and unlearning tricks that wouldn't be necessary if someone just said "What is that the business NEEDS for this to work?"

I thought this video would be about stuff that's going to be in Orcas. It isn't. It's actually about how they are going to try and work out what's going to be in Orcas. Let me summarise, Microsoft either:-

• Has no ideas for future versions.
• Doesn't trust that the ideas it does have will be popular enough.
  
• Just isn't saying.

So they are doing lots of survey work and analysing survey data that's been taken over a long time to try and decide what to do. See, that didn't take an hour! OK, there are a few mildly interesting anecdotes, but not many - this is no Bill Hill video. Oh, and Robert does use the word "blogosphere" a few times which makes me want to hit someone everytime I hear it. He does however redeem himself by pointing out that bloggers live in a cosy fantasy world where they think their views actually matter to anyone just because people read their blogs and quote them, with his story about Howard Dean.

It must be really depressing managing a product in the way Tony describes. It's like the way network television decides what comedy shows to make. They have to get the viewing figures to satisfy the advertisers and so they do tons of research and what you end up with is paint-by-numbers shows. There's no strong vision and no desire from the people who make the decisions to have a strong vision because their responsibility is solely to come up with the numbers to satisfy the advertisers. It looks like Tony's job with Orcas isn't that dissimilar.

I wonder if .NET would have happened at all if this approach was taken before. Microsoft would have surveyed people and they'd have asked for improvements in all sorts of areas. I doubt anyone would have suggested completely changing to a new technology. I know Microsoft wouldn't have bet on Windows with this approach. All their research would have told them that OS/2 was exactly what business wanted and that the partnership with IBM a good thing. Just as well for Microsoft that one guy had the vision to port the Windows 2 code (which up to that point was just shelfware) to run in protected mode and that BillG had the good sense to switch strategy when he found out.

This is why innovation comes from startups - they're run people the people that came up with an idea and they have the arrogance to think that their ideas are actually worth something to someone. Some startups produce stuff that it turns out people don't want, but others produce something that turns out big. Then large companies acquire the sucessful startups. Microsoft is pretty unique in that even as a large company it still comes out with innovative stuff  without having to acquire it (sure it does acquire companies but that's mostly portfolio padding rather than major new products). If Microsoft stops trusting it's developers to do what they think is cool and have some conviction about it then it will change and end up like IBM or ComputerAssociates.

Please make 2.1 a “learning free” release, like 1.1 was.  Version 1.1 was good as it sorted out a lot of miner problems that most developers had not yet pushed 1.0 hard enough to hit.  In 2.1 I would like to see a lot of the “little” requests on lady bug being done, making every bit of the product a bit better.

Then given as a version 3.0 2 or 3 years later that solve some big problems, by that time most developer will have got up to speed on version 2.x

I do not see the new Longhorn bits of interest to most developers for a long time, as Windows 2000 is still very common and will not run application that take advantage of it.  Therefore please spend as much time making .NET/MSDEV better for WinForms and Asp.Net developers as you spend on the “Longhorn Wave”.  Most of us already have .NET code and can’t just change the code overnight to do things in a different way.

Data access is a big problem today.  Just to send a dataset to a database when it contains changes to more then one table, mean writing update code by hand that calls the data adaptor for each table in the correct order.  Making C# 3.0 as good as a 4GL for data base work would be of great benefit.   I am looking forward to when C# integrates into a database as well as PLSQL does.

I am most looking forward to generic types in C# 2.0, as I will be able to use them from day one for new code without having to convert my application to a new style.  C# 2.0 gives me back everything that I had to give up (and wanted to keep) when I moved from C++.

Ian Ringrose

Will Orcas be 8.1, 8.5 or 9.0 version of Visual Studio?

Andre Da Costa wrote:

Will Orcas be 8.1, 8.5 or 9.0 version of Visual Studio?

It will be 9.0, considering the massive changes it's supposed to have.

Could you possibly come up with some videos about the Windows team, what some of the roles are in the team, and some videos of labs that compile builds of windows, that would be great

I have to agree with irascian, MS does tend to go for the 'wow whee' eye candy features, instead of  improving the core features, but we also have the nice marketing people to thank for that.

I think MS could really do with playing a few games of Jenga.

And as for Gman,  nobody (at least I hope not) is standing with a gun to your head forcing you to use MS, if you don't like it, jump ship and join your 'Linux dweebs'  I for one work in both environments and you will find many of the same problems/complaints in tux land.

Winston: in fact, I was just interviewing the Windows Build team (and the Whidbey build team too). Tours coming!

Ulster: what do you call generics? Oh, I guess that is just a superficial change, right?

UlsterFry wrote:

I have to agree with irascian, MS does tend to go for the 'wow whee' eye candy features, instead of  improving the core features,...

I'm sure Microsoft keeps improving the kernel and other deep stuff but you have to admit that you can't keep repeating that over and over again. Now that Windows XP has a decent stability you can concentrate on other stuff like security and eye-candy.

If Tony really is watching this feedback, what I would love to see in Orcas is a document-based windows form designer.

The current form model is absolutely (pixel) positioned - with a few 'tricks' like the (fairly limited) new flow control panel.

I've needed time and time again a true "web-like" document container for WinForms apps - similar to Lotus Notes or InfoPath but built into the framework.
I want to be able to create a WinForm, drop a special 'design time document' control onto it and add some text, controls, formatting, etc into it. Or maybe Avalon already does this? If that's the case I'd sure love a design-time editor

ShadowChaser wrote:

If Tony really is watching this feedback, what I would love to see in Orcas is a document-based windows form designer.

The current form model is absolutely (pixel) positioned - with a few 'tricks' like the (fairly limited) new flow control panel.

I've needed time and time again a true "web-like" document container for WinForms apps - similar to Lotus Notes or InfoPath but built into the framework.
I want to be able to create a WinForm, drop a special 'design time document' control onto it and add some text, controls, formatting, etc into it. Or maybe Avalon already does this? If that's the case I'd sure love a design-time editor

ShadowChaser, you'll be happy to know you won't have to wait for ORCAS for this feature. If you check ou Visual Studio .NET 2005 Beta (http://labs.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/get/) or even the Express edition of VB or C#, you will see a few new controls like the FlowPanelLayout which has improved in Beta 2, as well as the Table layout.

Also, if Whidbey still doesn't suit your needs, then you will get these features in a more web-like nature with Avalon. The Avalon documents and in fact, the entire Avalon/XAML programming model resembles ASP.net development. Check out the NavigationApplication samples in the WinFX SDK. They show how you can have BACK/NEXT navigation as well as flow documents.

scobleizer wrote:

Ulster: what do you call generics? Oh, I guess that is just a superficial change, right?

Note that I said "MS does tend to go for the 'wow whee' features"
and not.. "MS does go for the 'wow whee' features" 

There is a lot of non-candy that I'm looking forward to, improved data binding, generics, debugging without stopping, Team Sys to name but a few.

BTW:  Would you like a postcard from Belfast..?

[quote user="scobleizer"]Winston: in fact, I was just interviewing the Windows Build team (and the Whidbey build team too). Tours coming!
[quote]

Oh awesome! Can't wait, post them fast ... Keep up the good work.

Yes, a postcard from Belfast would be cool!

I like the way this thread opened with a bang. The hooray for everything kids versus the pissed off realists...

So I too want to see a harmonious balance between wild innovation and tame incremental progression. I hate working with Microsoft tools when I begin to suspect they are not working as advertised. A perfect example is opening up a 1.1 Windows Form and having a control just vanish and the briittle, auto-gen code get mangled in the process. And I am not going talk about the failure of the ASP.NET DataGrid. I think Scott Guthrie respectfully recognized this issue.

Another example of tool hate is the current release of VSTO which should have been released with warnings and promises of brighter future. Every single time it is mentioned it should come with heads bowed and profuse apologies. Version 2.0 of VSTO will actually be version 1.0 so version 4.0 promises to be the version 3.0 sweet spot mentioned in the video. (This same pattern applies to the .NET Framework in general and VS.NET in particular.)

So we need strong conservative voices at Microsoft that detail how broke stuff is being fixed with more warrior shame instead of emperor bravado. We need to be completely confident that what is going on under the MS hood is a fine-tuned machine of elegant, solid design.

One item on my VS.NET wishlist: A Rich Text box control like the one in InfoPath but with more control over how XHTML is generated. I do not see why this gizmo is such a big, Office-System-Word-threatening deal.

By observation I conclude that decisions made in Redmond are based on the idea that the ENTIRE customer base has the enthusiasm for product churn that dotnetjunkie embraces.  The young, enthusiastic lions in Redmond steep in a go-go atmosphere and come to think that the go-go atmosphere exists everywhere.  Well, it doesn't.  I love new technology that adds value.  New technology that is simply recycled old technology is a marketing trick, not an advancement (e.g. renaming OLE COM and COM ActiveX controls).  It is strange to think .NET is now considered "old" technology.  From a teaching and learning and doing point of view, .NET has got COM beat hands down.  Now we are to jetison .NET for something bigger, beefier and bouncier.  If so, let it be.  But first, figure out how those of us who prefer to take our lessons gradually and systematically can ease into it.  It is valuable to see the taxonomy of technologies both from a historical perspective and to arrange one's teaching plan so that the true core technologies are introduced first.  Or not.  I could be way off base here. 

Whoo-eee! This thread gave me a good laugh several times. It is quite funny to hear the young whippersnappers give it to the old cooters -- and the cooters snap right back.

It is not about age or conservativism. It is about listening to the customer, instead of the geeky developer playing video games. The customer often does not give a hoot about the fancy features that developer has planned -- and the developer does not feel like working on that code his successor left behind. So there is a fundamental conflict. At MS, I would argue for development tools, the developer, not the customer, often wins these days.

The customer is more important, always. Avalon has a horrible API, eats far more memory than it should, and is essentially useless on older machines or small devices. Every time someone points out a problem there it is explained away as a "feature" or a "revolution". This is a general trend I think at Microsoft. Sorry to bash but... there are dull, boring tasks that need to be done (for the customer) and someone has to do them.

   I don't know who the interviewer in this video was, but did a reaaaaly poor job of interviewing. (I've also watched the Rick LaPlante videos and they were good.) 
   The interviewer kept wandering off topic and continuously tried to present his view on different subjects, while Tony Goodhew tried to keep it on topic. Ridiculous! 
   To the interviewer: If the interview is with Tony Goodhew, then the people watching the video will obviously be interested in what he has to say, and not the person behind the camera, so please bear that in mind next time.




 

To the interviewer, regarding rapid trend changes: it is important to distinguish between "hype" and real trends. Hype would be the marketing buzzwords, or trendy blog topics. A true trend is a steady, long term change in the industry. The hype comes and goes, and doesn't necessarily address any real need. The trends do address real needs. So true trends rarely change quickly, as I am sure Tony is aware of. Blogs are not trends at all.

The interviewer was Robert Scoble. Both in the Rick Laplante videos and the Tony Goodhew videos.

"I didnt watch the video but here's my feedback"... Something about that statement sounds a-moral to me.

-Brian