You genuinely surprise me. I've always found it the other way. In
particular, it takes me significantly less time to *debug*,
particularly if I stick mostly to managed classes.
But he wrote "develop", not "debug".
Fact is, I can relate. I've only been doing .NET stuff for about a year.
I've been doing Windows programming for almost twenty. I find that much
of my time writing .NET stuff is spent poring over the documentation
trying to figure out just what .NET class, method, and/or property I need
to use in order to do what I want. If I were doing the same thing in the
native Windows API, I would already know how to do what I want, and mostly
I'd just have to type it in.
Obviously this will change over time, as I become more familiar with
..NET. And obviously for someone with enough experience in .NET
programming, development can go much more quickly. Certainly for me, I
expect that once I've had a lot more experience writing .NET, development
will go much more quickly than the native Windows programming, since I
have found that writing native Windows stuff I spend an inordinate amount
of time just hooking up the UI, implementing all that stuff that goes into
a window proc. .NET has lots of other time-saving stuff in it as well,
but frankly the native Windows API has IMHO done a decent job of
simplifying a lot of the other stuff already. It's mostly in the UI stuff
that very little has changed and been streamlined over the years, and so
the ease with which a user-interface can be put together in .NET is a huge
boon and time-saver.
But for now, because of how hard it is to find what one's looking for so
often, I find .NET development goes fairly slowly a lot of the time,
relative to what would be possible for me in native Windows.
Maybe that's what he meant.
Pete
(sometimes I wish the .NET documentation had some kind of native Windows
cross-reference, where I could just look up the function I'd use in the
native Windows API and it would tell me the equivalent in .NET. Heck, if
they'd just add a .NET link to each of the regular Windows API doc pages,
that would be good enough for me).