Trivial question - Visual C# .Net vs Visual Studio .Net

[Jon Skeet [C# MVP]]

Yes you have a very good point there. very good indeed. best thing i heard
all week. It's messy. Hell, it scared me and then i blamed it on HTML.
The bandwidth point is good in a class room but it's pointless in a
practical world. There's dsl and cable and satellite. These things are
non-issues. But I suppose it's still an academic point and i'll give it to
you.

Yes, some people have DSL and cable. Are you sure that *all* your
customers do? Bandwidth is still very important in the real world.

It's time to get dsl, is what i say to them. if all you can afford is dial
up, then you aren't part of my target audience.

There are many places in the UK (and the rest of the world, I'm sure)
where people can't get broadband for various reasons. Many of them are
easily able to afford broadband, but it's just not available to them.
Why alienate them?

well said. it's abuse of knowledge and i need to be careful here with what i
say but it drives me up a wall and straight to the toilet to puke when i see
developers using and swearing by primitive tools all because they 'own the
code'.

That's a problem with the developers, not the knowledge though - and
that's why I said you had "bad apples" in your team.

That's using knowledge in the reverse. Its rather obvious now that i
have issues with this because i keep having to fight with 'developers' about
going the more productive way. it's not right. and i've largely given up. i
let them do what they want to do and have late projects. I swear i am
telling the truth when this developer decides to build a button control
using GDI instead of dragging and dropping a button on a form. I'm not
making this up. It probably doesn't happen in your world, but it's rotten
here. and you need to be sympathetic to it.

I'm sympathetic to it, but as I said before, it's a mistake to throw
the baby out with the bathwater. Creating your own control is foolish,
but I wouldn't have particularly blamed him if he'd wanted to create
the code himself rather than get VS.NET to do it for him. I find I get
a much better degree of control *and* a much better sense of
understanding the app when I write the GUI part myself.

(In Java, where you pretty much always use a layout manager, it also
means you don't get lulled into a false sense of security.
Unfortunately .NET doesn't currently have a very rich layout engine -
I'm hoping this will change with Whidbey.)

 

[Ed Courtenay]

That's the point I am making, you gain no advantages. Ok, so they know HTML
and I don't. Big deal. If you are still coding HTML you are wasting your
time.

So if I'm writing XSLT transforms from XML to (X)HTML for rendering purposes
I'm wasting my time am I? How would I even begin to be able to do this
effectively if I had only a rudimentary knowledge of HTML? A deep knowledge
of HTML has been an *advantage* not the other way around.

 

[Ed Courtenay]

Yes you have a very good point there. very good indeed. best thing i heard
all week. It's messy. Hell, it scared me and then i blamed it on HTML.
The bandwidth point is good in a class room but it's pointless in a
practical world. There's dsl and cable and satellite. These things are
non-issues. But I suppose it's still an academic point and i'll give it to
you.

Hardly, the vast majority of internet users are still accessing via 56k
dial-up modems. It's a *very* practical issue.

 

[Chris Tacke, eMVP]

certainly not. you never have to muck with wizard code most of the time so

that kills the question of maintainability.

Sorry to be argumentative, but Studio's wizard-generated code for Form
loading is about 60% slower than hand-coding if you're using the CF.

In Studio 6, the ATL wizard puts in several known bugs that must be fixed by
hand (it may be fixed in the new versions, but should one just assume so
without checking?)

I'm sure there are other examples as well. Trusting that a Wizard generates
good code can lead to maintenace problems, performance problems and/or bugs.
Generate a few Excel VBA macros from the recorder and you'll get a good idea
as to why wizards are far from magic.

 

[Alvin Bruney]

you never have to muck with wizard code most of the time
most of the time is the operative word here. you are talking about a small
portion of time when you actually have to. IMO

 

[Alvin Bruney]

Hardly, the vast majority of internet users are still accessing via 56k

dial-up modems. It's a *very* practical issue.

not where i live. where did you pull that from anyway

 

[Alvin Bruney]

So if I'm writing XSLT transforms from XML to (X)HTML for rendering
purposes

I'm wasting my time am I? How would I even begin to be able to do this
effectively if I had only a rudimentary knowledge of HTML? A deep knowledge
of HTML has been an *advantage* not the other way around.

I haven't written transforms, that is outside of the scope of my knowledge.
If it helps you there, fine. I'll take your word for it

 

[John Tobler]

That's not the fault of the extra knowledge,
OK, guys, I'll play moderator here, since I kind of started this thing.
Please note that you saved me a lot of writing to clarify some of the
underlying issues. Now, I have gone back and edited my little article a bit
and you can see my changes at

http://weblogs.asp.net/jtobler/posts/35600.aspx

Note, particularly:

Context: we are discussing the needs of someone who wants to learn .NET
programming.

and

Warning! When you are behind on a project with a hard deadline, forget
all of this nonsense
and make your company buy Visual Studio.NET for you.

I know that one of you has a perceived serious management problem. This
article is not about that. This article has nothing directly to do with you
or your problem. Some people will never be efficient or effective software
engineers either with or without an IDE.

There are cookbook engineers and the ones who figure out why the bridge fell
down when a cookbook engineer misused a formula.

There are code crankers and those who clean up after them; they are
different breeds of software engineer, different sorts of being, and both
kinds have value. There are software architects and software construction
workers; the architects do not have to be the king of the hammer and the
construction workers do not necessarily need a deep understanding of CLR
internals.

Please remember, this article was directed toward someone who wants to
*learn* .NET programming. It is really about a lot of very cool free tools.

Thanks for the feedback!

CSharpener

 

[Alvin Bruney]

Very good. very good indeed. That rewrite is much better.

I know that one of you has a perceived serious management problem

*pointing to skeet*

they are
different breeds of software engineer, different sorts of being, and both
kinds have value.

Thats an important point. In all this bickering we forgot this. I certainly
did. After the day was over, I find I've softened up a bit about my hard
line stance. I do tend to see only black and white, color is for whimps.

 

[Ed Courtenay]

You could start by having a look at:
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0301.html

 

[John Tobler]

I do tend to see only black and white, color is for whimps.

Ah, but any serious B&W photographer can wax philosophic for hours about
those beautiful shades of grey in between the B and the W!

I have had a lot of fun with my little article
(http://weblogs.asp.net/jtobler/posts/35600.aspx) and your collective
responses.

Bottom line, my thesis is simply that it is nearly impossible to stop, or
even slow down, a sufficiently motivated engineer!

Thanks!

CSharpener

 

[Jerry III]

No, you don't need html for that. You need javascript. You absolutely need
to learn Javascript. Javascript knows how to talk html so you don't have

to.

Eh, how are you going to use JavaScript if you don't know what you're
accessing? The fact that you can write code in JavaScript (or whatever
script) does not give you the understanding how HTML objects are accessed.

You can do this from the itemdatabound in codebehind.

Sure you can do it with html, but you don't need to now because .net has
provided more options which are easier and require less programming effort.
I'd rather use attributes and server side event handles to impose my will on
the browser than having to muck with HTML clientside to do it. There are
solid reasons why microsoft is scraping the HTML standard.

From what I see and what Microsoft posts on their sites they're actually
trying more and more to adhere to standards. Whidbey is going to have new
"targets" for pages - standard XHTML and HTML code. Would you care to
explain why would they add dead technology into their newest product?

As for not needing to understand HTML when developing a web app - you're
like those VB programmers who can only drag and drop components to a form
without understanding what's actually going on. And you know what happens
when you have programmers like that (can anyone say Deibold? Using an access
database to count votes in an election? What were they smoking?).

Jerry

 

[Alvin Bruney]

HTML is not a pre-requisit for javascript. Never was never will be. You need
to understand that javascript abstracts this layer away.

As for not needing to understand HTML when developing a web app - you're
like those VB programmers who can only drag and drop components to a form
without understanding what's actually going on.

I've never worked for you so you wouldn't know who am I like. VB programmers
are real programmers as well. I'm not one, but I reject your condescending
behavior to programmers who choose to develop in visual basic. They far out
number you and what ever you choose to program in, make a lot of money at
it, and are some of the best programmers I've seen. Stop talking down to
people who choose not to use your language of choice. What's the matter with
you?

The point of using tools is to free you from the drudgery of understanding
the underlying layer because, as you pointed out, you don't need to
understand what COM processes are involved in the drag and drop or how the
HTML gets written out as a result of that process. Your job is to implement
business logic, not to show off your knowledge of the underlying process, or
to sound smart to others who don't know. You seem to be afraid to learn new
technology. Don't get left behind hanging on to dead technology because you
are afraid to learn something entirely new.

In today's world, if you aren't learning something new, you are committing
career suicide. You should understand that HTML is an ad hoc standard that
has been patched and band-aided in order to get it to do what it wasn't
meant to do. Just like COM. It has to go. Just like COM. Learn to deal with
it. It's hard, but the future requires these standards go away because they
can no longer sustain the momentum of the new drive. learn to deal with it
because it won't get any easier.
--


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No, you don't need html for that. You need javascript. You absolutely need
to learn Javascript. Javascript knows how to talk html so you don't have

to.

Eh, how are you going to use JavaScript if you don't know what you're
accessing? The fact that you can write code in JavaScript (or whatever
script) does not give you the understanding how HTML objects are accessed.

You can do this from the itemdatabound in codebehind.

Sure you can do it with html, but you don't need to now because .net has
provided more options which are easier and require less programming effort.
I'd rather use attributes and server side event handles to impose my

will

on
the browser than having to muck with HTML clientside to do it. There are
solid reasons why microsoft is scraping the HTML standard.

From what I see and what Microsoft posts on their sites they're actually
trying more and more to adhere to standards. Whidbey is going to have new
"targets" for pages - standard XHTML and HTML code. Would you care to
explain why would they add dead technology into their newest product?

As for not needing to understand HTML when developing a web app - you're
like those VB programmers who can only drag and drop components to a form
without understanding what's actually going on. And you know what happens
when you have programmers like that (can anyone say Deibold? Using an access
database to count votes in an election? What were they smoking?).

Jerry