The Visual Studio Documentary - Alan Cooper, the Father of Visual Basic

Hey Now Tina,

Another Great One!

Thx 4 the info,

Catto

2.24GB? Surely no VB connection...

file downloads keep truncating

Tina,

Truely brilliant interview.  Mr Cooper, you are a force to be reconned with.  I appreciate your unbiases opinion of all things Microsoft.  It's nice and refreshing to hear that the sky wasn't always blue and that people didn't always do the right thing. 

Great interview but i gotta say i disagree with what Alan says about microsoft tools beeing just optimized for doing things one way and if you dont you're screwed. He makes an exampel that if you use the ms database and the ms datagrid and so on you get done very fast but if you want to do something a little bit diffrent, you're toast.

I can agree that it used to be a little like that in the days before linq, wpf and rx.. but now? wpf is nothing if not flexible.. linq can be used with anything, not just msSql.. wcf can connect to anything in pretty much any way..

Twitter could easily be written in .net so i dont see how twitter can be so innovative and .net so restricting at the same..

The large application frameworks (java/.net/whatever) we have to day build innovation, because you dont have go in and move bits around, you can focus on whatever problem you're trying to solve.. Twitter isnt written in assembly code, they didnt roll their own database, they didnt write their own database driver, they built on something that exsisted before. and yet its innovative.. i think the same is true for java and .net

its easy to say everything sucks and not go into exactly in what way..

but hey.. maybe im just a fanboi

This was great! I can't wait for the next interview. I would also like to hear more from Cooper; very interesting.

The first time that I remember seeing Alan Cooper, was an exit interview here on C9.  He was talking about how experts should be the people designing software since users do not know what they want.  That notion seems a little strange with this historical recount of Tripod/Ruby, specifically the notion that it was to be a non-programmers toolkit.

I really enjoyed this - some great insights into what went on back in the day.

The big-endian/little-endian thing that Alan mentions is even more entertaining when you realise the words actually come from Gullivers Travels, where the people of Lilliput go to war over the choice. 

When listening to this intervew I was like: "Halleluja! Amen Brother!"

I saw Alan speak at CodeFreeze 2009. He's one of the true software luminaries out there. Thanks for this interesting documentary.