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Merry Christmas 2018![^] - now there is a role I recognise! 
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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xkcd: Christmas Plans
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Soooo, I don't know if any of you remember, but I showed up a couple of weeks back and started a discussion here in which I blasted Microsoft and talked about my refusal to use their products whenever possible. Many of you pointed out how I was missing out by ignoring Visual Studio, which you lauded as a superb IDE.
Since then I've found that you are all absolutely right. I was initially hesitant to just give in and switch my IDE because people told me I was wrong. Made me seem kinda wishy-washy. What broke the camel's back for me and made me switch from SharpDevelop to VS was SharpDevelop's inability to find one single file.
I was attempting to follow the directions found here but ran into trouble as MSBuild kept returning an error of "Cannot find AxImp.exe". AxImp was precisely where it needed to be for the system to find it, there didn't seem to be anything in the PATH variable to cause the problem and, seeing as I've never worked with this type of thing before, I had no idea what this meant or how to fix it. Some suggested editing the registry, some suggested installing the Windows SDK.
What I did instead was install Visual Studio. Building under VS returned no AxImp errors, either because it actually knows how to find the necessary file or because the installation itself installed whatever I needed to get things going.
So now I had VS and I couldn't very well go back. I mean, I didn't know if the AxImp error would still pop up if I tried to go back to SD, and I didn't feel it was worth the trouble. I had an IDE that was giving me none of the problems that SD did.
No offense if anyone here volunteers their time writing SharpDevelop source code, but it really was slowing me down. Here's a question: If you're writing a program visually, drawing buttons and drop down menus and whatnot, what do you expect a visual IDE to do well? I would expect it to do exactly what common sense says: handle the code in the Designer.cs files and keep track of changes.
I lost count of the number of times that SD actually wrote those changes incorrectly. There is an ironic multi-line comment in each and every one of those cs files that says:
private void InitializeComponent()
I say it is ironic because SD actually corrupted the code at this very place many times. That "private void InitializeComponent()" line would simply disappear, written over by something else (or sometimes nothing) and then the editor would complain that it couldn't load designer support because there was an error in the underlying code. That isn't my fault, is it? So I'd have to stop everything that I was doing and try and figure out what changes were made incorrectly and what the changes were SUPPOSED to be. This process could take from a couple of minutes to upwards of a half an hour, depending on the severity.
VS doesn't do that. It hasn't done that to me. Not once. And I expected it to be bulky and slow. It is a massive program, far larger than SD, and SD was unbearably slow. To my amazement, it actually turned out to be faster! I can now edit at speeds I'd only wished for but a month ago. It has amazing features that I don't have to jump through hoops to access. SD could do a lot of the extra things that VS does natively, but it was sometimes a chore making it happen.
What I've found, overall, is that I made an irrational judgment. I've never moved past the Microsoft of the 90s, when their Windows OS was an unstable train wreck and their unethical business practices landed them in an anti-trust lawsuit. For the longest time, I've refused to acknowledge that they have gotten better. That their operating system has vastly improved. That their products are often quite good. One could argue that the Xbox One was another of those train wrecks, but that's a discussion best left on video game forums.
And then there was the Zune...
Visual Studio is a sleek, polished and impressive IDE, and the one that I should have been using all along. Is it perfect? No, but where will you find flawless software? If you find an absolutely perfect piece of software with no design flaws that shines as a paragon of programming excellence, you're running TempleOS.
Thank you all for your very blunt but extraordinarily helpful advice. I was wrong, and I can admit that. All I can do is try to be better in the future.
-Turtle
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SharpDevelop has basically been abandoned, unfortunately. The team stopped working on it around the time Visual Studio Community Edition was released. It still has some good code (the AddIn system is excellent), and I'm using it for some personal projects that may or may not get released. One thing I like about SD is the fact that it has a WiX Dialog Designer built in.
What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?
The metaphorical solid rear-end expulsions have impacted the metaphorical motorized bladed rotating air movement mechanism.
Do questions with multiple question marks annoy you???
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The latest anything .NET by Microsoft is not only good, it is excellent!
Continuously outdoing itself for 18 years has led to amazing results!  
To be fair I think one must thank the competition for putting Microsoft under pressure to excel. But excel it has!
I hope it will continue to do so!
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Kudos for your honesty. 
I've been using Visual Studio for 25 years (it was Visual C++ 6.0 back then) and have never looked back. MS' tooling is the primary reason I stuck with them (and since moved to C# in 2003). So much so, that I use Xamarin/C# to build native Android apps, instead of Eclipse or Android Studio and Java.
/ravi
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I applaud your willingness to take another look at a product that you believed to be inferior. I, too, detest Microsoft - they were the first to sell defective products and charge for fixes, the first to eliminate product manuals, and the first to abandon any semblance of customer support. Since then, many other producers and programmers have adopted their user-hostile business model to everyone's loss. But the Visual Studio IDE has been from the beginning, and remains, one of the best tools available for the job. Since they introduced the Community Edition, and stopped charging an obscene price for the most rudimentary version, there has been no equivalent product for small developers, and I honor them for that.
Thanks for giving them a second look; I don't think you'll be disappointed. I don't do much programming anymore, but when I do, VS is the first IDE I open.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Congrats for being open minded … I use C#/VS for about 18 years now in various projects/teams, underway had an opportunity at least 2x times to work with Java/Eclipse/Tomcat stack, and so far my preference goes to C#/VS environment. I guess it depends a lot on the project what to choose. Anyway being open minded and curious helps to make informed choices  (if they are possible of course),
BR
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Visual Studio is an amazing tool, as you are realizing. But if you still want to bitch at MS, feel free to bash the ribbon to high heck! Working with Word, and continually finding the icons disappearing and not where you expect them is frustrating, to say the least. (Just because you don't have the window wide enough.) 
And for extra emphasis:
I could go repeat the emojis many more times, but you've probably gotten the idea. The old menu system was far superior.
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I remember when I forced some Java guys to use it for C++ (and I really had to force them!)
They were absolutely blown away by Intellisense, compared to the cheap knock-off in Eclipse.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I think you eventually realize that there are great Microsoft projects and bad ones. VS is a great one, although it varies (the help system used to be great, now it sucks). A good example of a bad one is Orca, the msi decompiler, which I eventually found out was written by a Microsoft intern. (To be fair, the mess that is the msi internals was probably a lot of the problem.) Orca helped in Wix installer development, but only after beating your head against the desk for a prolonged period.
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Well, the great news is that the guys who've spent the last 13 years "improving" ms office are being transferred to the VS team.
So the kind of great "fixes" that have made ms office the pile of cr@p that what it is today will also be implemented in VS, to **ck up everyone's productivity make sure that coders, too, can profit from the way of the future.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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As I'm in Australia Christmas Day is in full swing. Up at 6:00 and lunch for 13 will be at our place today by the beach. The forecast is 32C which should please most. I have a 4kg fish and roast potates and pumpkin to cook and that combined with what others bring should make for a pretty good feed. Yes we do live in a lucky country, if only others could enjoy the same.
Please enjoy your Christmas.
Peter Wasser
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
modified 24-Dec-18 19:15pm.
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Lucky you, our weekend was drowned in the rain. Saw a nice documentary about Australia by Simon Reeves some time ago, must say it's an impressive country ! 
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And please enjoy yours!
The menu is sorted:
Prawn cocktails, with homemade bread.
Sous Vide turkey, with roast, Hasselback, and Dauphinoise potatoes; chestnut stuffing; roast sprouts with bacon and chestnuts; cauliflower and roasted onion purees; pigs in blankets.
Christmas pudding with cream.
Home made chocolates to follow ...
And the spreadsheet is up and running for when I need to do what...
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Getting my coat, coming for dinner 
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I can stretch it to another serving, no problem!
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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pwasser wrote: The forecast is 32C
OK, where's that list of top 10 reasons to hate Australians?
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Forecast here is about 24C
Happy holidays all.
If you can keep your head while those about you are losing theirs, perhaps you don't understand the situation.
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Merry Christmas from 9800 ft up in the Colorado Rockies where it's 10 degrees with fresh snow like it should be. But I could do a beach today. That sounds nice
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A 3,5 kg goose and 15 big rabbit legs for yesterday. Finished with sharing Goldwasser with friends.
pwasser wrote: in a lucky country
Lucky? Did our country get here by throwing dice?
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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