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Mr Simmons says, ".NET is .CRAP from my viewpoint as a hobby programmer."
The quote as well as the bigotted "C++ is the only possible solution, ever" stance explains a lot. As a PROFESSIONAL programmer of 14+ years writing exceptionally large and complex enterprise solutions across a wide breadth of development requirements and environments I can only call .NET a godsend.
Mr Simmons says, "I haven't heard anything good about VS .NET 2002 yet"
Closed minds will only hear what they want anyway. Try this on for size: Prior to the move to .NET I spent 6 months just engineering and creating proofs of concept for a particularly complex enterprise application before even beginning production development. 2 weeks at a .NET bootcamp and 3 weeks of coding later and I moved the completely reengineered .NET version of my app into beta testing (did I mention I'm also the only developer with my company?) The timesavings alone will save $45k on the project and allow me to deliver the solution at least 8 months ahead of schedule when it had been behind schedule prior to making the switch. VS.NET 2002 paid for itself 40 times over in just about 35 days....
For the hobbyist .NET is not probably the right answer at all. As with any skill, you have to use the right tools for each job. Most hobbyists' needs can be met quite easily with the host of free, open source community tools and technologies that are everywhere to be had. But for the bread and butter, meat and potatoes development staff, overworked and often with enormous business pressure behind them to get it done fast, cheaply, and as bug-free as possible, .NET IS the right tool, and only tool that I now use by and large. MS isnt spending the money and effort they do on R&D so they can give the stuff away. If they were they'd still be hobbyists in Bill Gate's garage...
After reevaluating my project list for the year based on the .NET-enabled ability to quickly build fast reliable solutions, I will be completing projects this fall that werent even slated to begin until 1st quarter 2005. It has effectively tripled the value my company receives from the substantial salary they invest in my skills each year. I can go home and spend time with my family each evening instead of slaving away on a laptop or over VPN late into the night, regularly hitting 80 hours a week just to stay on track with projects. Its nice to actually enjoy the fruits of success instead of worrying about the next project coming down the 'pike...
Crap? .NET is exactly what corporate, professional developers have been dreaming of. Is it expensive? Yes. Is it worth it? HELL YES! Would I pay for it out of my own pocket if my company wouldnt? You better believe it!
My hobby is handcrafting acoustic guitars. The exotic woods are expensive and very time consuming to manipulate into a worthy piece, and the specialized tools are often very expensive as well. But at the same time they help make all the difference between a $150 "special" and a "$3500" original. It's all on what your expectations are... yours are laughable, make your arguments transparent, and do a diservice to the number of hobbyist developers out there who can also conceive of real-world, in-the-trenches development requirements and dont expect every tool to be the Nirvana to their particular techno-religion...
-=[ A. W. Ford ]=-
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I must be missing the baot but I still don't see a Unique Selling Point of VS.NET 2003 for me to upgrade from VC6.00
I mean what is the must have feature ?
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Anonymous wrote:
I mean what is the must have feature ?
It's a zen thing. It's simply a must have.
Marc
Help! I'm an AI running around in someone's f*cked up universe simulator.
Sensitivity and ethnic diversity means celebrating difference, not hiding from it. - Christian Graus
Every line of code is a liability - Taka Muraoka
Microsoft deliberately adds arbitrary layers of complexity to make it difficult to deliver Windows features on non-Windows platforms--Microsoft's "Halloween files"
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It really depends when "you" want to be obsolete in the Microsoft development technologies.
Learn and do now and keep your skills current (VS.NET 1.0 and 1.1) or else slowly obsolete yourself into obscurity (like I nearly did in 2000 when my awesome C language skills whose damand-for by 2002 was virtually nil except to the tiny specific industry market who are not hiring anymore).
-ken 
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I'm tired of having to make use of the special work-arounds that some libraries have to use in order to work with VC6. In particular, VC6's lack of partial template specialization seems to be a serious problem for some libraries.
Examples are boost and libsigc++.
And the improved standard library means I won't have to use STLport anymore.
Tom.
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I totally agreed with you, being 98% conformanced is really a big help here. However, having using VS 2002 for sometimes and reading the product features of VS 2003, it is clear to me MS is FORCING Visual C/C++ programmer to .NET language. MS knows dam well seasoned VC++ engineer won't accept so call "managed" C++ (till date, I still don't get it... __gc??), which to most of us: clumsy and stupid 
Hence we see NO new features NO new class being added to MFC/ATL 2003, not to mention WTL. For VS 2002, at least there is an ATL ISAPI Web server template classes  , which is new and has a lot to learn from. For VS 2003? Should there be a least a proper grid and chart class in MFC/ATL??
Also notice a heavy shrink of VC++ samples on MSDN website, this form of knowledge sharing is extremely important to keep VC++ alive.
Well, maybe it is time to shift to VB.NET, huh??  NO WAY! I would rather go to JAVA..ha..ha..!
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Lets face it you going to use VS.NET or you're going to be out of work in 2-3years time, I'm a season VC++ programmer and I have resigned to the fact .net is here to stay, whether it be good or back. I'm going to learn FCL and CLR inside out, that keeps me in a job for a long time, because all the newbies to .net don't and won't like to understand the underlaying technology of .net. I'd did the same with windows 12years ago and thats keep the paychecks coming in for 12years
To iterate is human, to recurse is devine.
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Sorry pal, beside MS, there is still a whole lot to do in other platforms. It seems to me the only thing you can do is be a MS PUPPET.
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I've got no strings
To hold me down
To make me fret, or make me frown
I had strings
But now I'm free
There are no strings on me.
To iterate is human, to recurse is devine.
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There will be a day when there is no more windows API as you know it today - everything will be managed. I could be wrong (nothing is set in stone), but it's not likely that I am.
It's not that far off - Longhorn should show it's head in the next year or so, and within a couple of years of that it'll have significant market share. There'll be a large installed base of legacy Windows systems for a long while, but that's not where the interesting, leading edge work will be done.
One can wait to start learning, choosing instead to be one of the complaining zealots clinging to the standards of today (which many seasoned engineers complained about being forced into from DOS - the horror!) Or one can leverage one's skills and ability to learn to stay ahead of the curve.
Those of us who go ahead and embrace the new technologies will evolve from the engineers of today into those of tomorrow. Those who wait will eventually either retire, eat thier words and pick up the new technology, or write interesting oddities that run on obsolete platforms.
Many people derive great joy and happiness by rejecting change. Others complain less and get paid more, leaving more time to fish, and more money with which to aquire better gear.
Eric F. Vincent
In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man 1871
You can complain because roses have thorns, or you can rejoice because thorns have roses.
Ziggy
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TW wrote:
NO WAY! I would rather go to JAVA..ha..ha..!
LOL! You will find that the "problems" you see in .NET are twice as "bad" in Java.
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Oh come on. We'll wait for ya.
--
If it starts to make sense, you're in a cult.
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What do you do in, lets say, four years from now?
Still program using VC6, or using the newest and hottest on Linix (which, then, I guess is like VC6 is today)
Hmmm, how did you switch from DOS to Windows?
- Anders
Money talks, but all mine ever says is "Goodbye!"
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Interestingly, I know people who still use Visual C++ 1.5. (Mostly for writing 9X drivers, since that was the last compiler that supported 16-bit programming.)
I guarantee there will be people programming in VC 6 four years from now, especially anyone who does development for 9X/Me (which also will still be around four years from now.)
"When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity." - Albert Einstein
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Navin wrote:
I guarantee there will be people programming in VC 6 four years from now, especially anyone who does development for 9X/Me (which also will still be around four years from now.)
You can easily make programs for Win9x/ME with VS.NET, ever heard about remote debugging?
Most people I know that still supports Win9x, does the development under Win2k or XP, and tests their programs on Win9x.
Of course there wil be people using VC6 in four years from now, today some people still use Borland C++ 4.0, because they say it's the best compiler ever written. But there is not many jobs today, where they want you to use Borland C++ 4.0.
- Anders
Money talks, but all mine ever says is "Goodbye!"
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Anders Molin wrote:
You can easily make programs for Win9x/ME with VS.NET, ever heard about remote debugging?
Have you ever suffered thru the hell of using it?
I have, on multiple - painfull occasions, and it totaly blows chunks.
I would rather develop on the OS that >50% of my users are running use that junk again.
Eating your own dog food is a "good thing(tm)".
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Jason De Arte wrote:
Have you ever suffered thru the hell of using it?
Yes.
Jason De Arte wrote:
Eating your own dog food is a "good thing(tm)".
I do agree
I guess I'm just lucky, I only have to support Win2k and WinXP for 90% of what I do. (I'm working with voice-based Windows logon)
- Anders
Money talks, but all mine ever says is "Goodbye!"
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Yes, I've heard of remote debugging. It sucks. I can't ever get it to work. And even if I could, it still sucks in comparisoin to actually stepping through a program with a debugger rather than running it, attaching to it, and going from there.
And that's not to mention all the inane external requirements that MFC 7.0 has (that the old MFC did not.) You can build the exact same program in VC 6 and VS.NET, and the one from VS.NET will depend on more DLLs than the one built from VC6.
"When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity." - Albert Einstein
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Remote debugging:
I've tried it. It's a lot more painful than it needs to be: there should have been a setup package containing the right components that you can just pick up and copy to the remote machine. Once it's going it doesn't seem too bad, but then I'm mostly a Windows CE developer; the VC remote debugging is more reliable than the eMbedded Visual C++ (did MS want us to call this MVC rather than eVC?) implementation.
IIRC, you can start a new process on the remote machine: choose 'step into' or 'go' as usual. You don't have to attach to a running process.
External requirements:
I built a program (John Robbins' CrashFinder[^] utility) with both VC6 and VC7, since projects for both were available. So far as I can see, the additional components are:oleacc.dll, the Active Accessibility DLL, has shipped with versions of Windows since Windows 98 and also shipped with NT 4.0 Service Pack 6. shlwapi.dll, the 'shell light-weight API' ships with Internet Explorer 4.0 and higher. I got this information from Microsoft's DLL Help Database[^].
Most of the other DLLs that the MFC DLLs rely on are delay-loaded or dynamically loaded; they are also all system DLLs. They won't be needed unless your program actually calls an MFC function that uses them.
--
Mike Dimmick
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I found out about oleacc.dll the hard way... and did some research and found that you could turn it off if you statitally linked your MFC and manually set it as a delay-load DLL. (I pity the poor saps that link dynamically - according to what I read, they'd have to rebuild their entire MFC!)
I don't like having to ship extra DLLs, especially when I don't need them. Amazing as it sounds, even a "modest" requirement like IE 4 will draw complaints from some customers.
"When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity." - Albert Einstein
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Anders Molin wrote:
You can easily make programs for Win9x/ME with VS.NET, ever heard about remote debugging?
You are using some strange new definition of the word "easy" that I wasn't previously aware of.
Sure, to do a remote debug, you "only" need: two computers, two monitors, some kind of networking between the two boxes, and the patience to figure out the remote debugger. I have the first, none of the rest.
--Mike--
THERE IS NO THERE IS NO BUT THERE IS
MAGIC PIXIE DUST BUSINESS GENIE CODE PROJECT
Homepage | RightClick-Encrypt | 1ClickPicGrabber
"You have Erica on the brain" - Jon Sagara to me
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I do a lot of remote debugging, usually on a Virtual PC running on my devbox.
- Anders
Money talks, but all mine ever says is "Goodbye!"
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I voted 2002 -> 2003 by June as
A/ Its supposed to be $30 for an upgrade
B/ My VS2002 disk1 got sat on by a 5 year old
C/ I just cannot stop upgrading stuff, its' a curse!
I like c#, very productive , but i miss change , compile, continue
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... which might affect my decision to upgrade to VS.NET 2003. What is wrong with 2002, you may ask?
![Green Alien | [Alien]](https://www.codeproject.com/script/Forums/Images/alien.gif) Still can't figure out how to debug on 98. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but the remote debugging component just don't work. And even still, attaching to a process is much more painful than just firing up a debugger and running with it.
INTERNAL COMPILER ERROR. Nuff said.
Other than that, I really like VS.NET. I am very disappointed, though, because these two issues above have cost me a lot of wasted time. It is almost a toss-up at this point as to whether I've saved enough time with new features to offset the lost time with these two problems.
I have a feeling from what I've heard in the Lounge and so forth that VS.NET 2003 won't be much better.
"When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity." - Albert Einstein
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