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?"
