B
Bogdan Nedelcu
Hello all,
Few days ago I participated in a conference here in Bucharest, about .NET -
CLR and Forms - where we had the pleasure to meet some people from
Microsoft (Jason Zander (PUM CLR), Brandon Bynum (Test Manager .NET Client),
Ronald Laeremans )
It was a nice evening, we had the chance to put a lot of tricky questions
and valuable answers were offered. Thanks guys !
Well, in the mean while I realised one interesting thing I would like to
share with this newsgroup.
Brandon presented the new achievements of the Froms in .NET 2.0 with VS2005.
Quick tricks, nice things. One of which was the new splitter control. I
didn't had the chance to use the splitter before but, from what I've seen,
it was quite an progres from the previous version. Cool features indeed.
The problem is that we have splitters for let's say 7 years. Lots of
splitters. Everbody had or invented a splitter.
I'm not a fan but if I look at the things Delphy had 7 years ago, they go
way beyound of what's inside VS.NET in terms of UI controls.
It is a common mistake not to look at what other people have already done.
Maybe that was the case when the guys at MS created the splitter in 1.1.
Instead of focusing on tasks such as user experience , I am stucked with
splitters, toolbars not flexible enough, tree controls which are hard to
manage and other similar things. However I can't say I miss the Spy++ and
the WM_MESSAGES from the old days. It's an improvement, nobody can argue
with, but still: a splitter is a splitter.
It seems that in 7 years nothing happened, like everything was wrong and we
have to do it all over again. Rewriting is good for making better software,
but in this case it seems not - the 1.1 splitter was bad, they hade to make
a better one in 2.0. When the .NET UI was written, seems like nothing has
been leared from the 3rd party control makers. The grid is an awesome
example in .NET 1.1. Did somebody manage to do something usefull without
doing hard work to customize it? What happened from the experience acquired
with FlexGrid ot other fine controls available back there as an ActiveX.
One other thing, in the projects MS has (Project Server, Sharepoint,
Exchange for Web) there are 3 totally different date-time picker controls.
While I can explain how this happened, the reason for why the guys at MS
don't pay attention to the basic user controls escapes my understanding. How
hard it is to make a simple user guideline for the controls and stick to it
whenever you deliver a new platform.
I put a lot of questions...
Maybe it's just me, upset on the damn splitter.
Regards,
Bogdan
Few days ago I participated in a conference here in Bucharest, about .NET -
CLR and Forms - where we had the pleasure to meet some people from
Microsoft (Jason Zander (PUM CLR), Brandon Bynum (Test Manager .NET Client),
Ronald Laeremans )
It was a nice evening, we had the chance to put a lot of tricky questions
and valuable answers were offered. Thanks guys !
Well, in the mean while I realised one interesting thing I would like to
share with this newsgroup.
Brandon presented the new achievements of the Froms in .NET 2.0 with VS2005.
Quick tricks, nice things. One of which was the new splitter control. I
didn't had the chance to use the splitter before but, from what I've seen,
it was quite an progres from the previous version. Cool features indeed.
The problem is that we have splitters for let's say 7 years. Lots of
splitters. Everbody had or invented a splitter.
I'm not a fan but if I look at the things Delphy had 7 years ago, they go
way beyound of what's inside VS.NET in terms of UI controls.
It is a common mistake not to look at what other people have already done.
Maybe that was the case when the guys at MS created the splitter in 1.1.
Instead of focusing on tasks such as user experience , I am stucked with
splitters, toolbars not flexible enough, tree controls which are hard to
manage and other similar things. However I can't say I miss the Spy++ and
the WM_MESSAGES from the old days. It's an improvement, nobody can argue
with, but still: a splitter is a splitter.
It seems that in 7 years nothing happened, like everything was wrong and we
have to do it all over again. Rewriting is good for making better software,
but in this case it seems not - the 1.1 splitter was bad, they hade to make
a better one in 2.0. When the .NET UI was written, seems like nothing has
been leared from the 3rd party control makers. The grid is an awesome
example in .NET 1.1. Did somebody manage to do something usefull without
doing hard work to customize it? What happened from the experience acquired
with FlexGrid ot other fine controls available back there as an ActiveX.
One other thing, in the projects MS has (Project Server, Sharepoint,
Exchange for Web) there are 3 totally different date-time picker controls.
While I can explain how this happened, the reason for why the guys at MS
don't pay attention to the basic user controls escapes my understanding. How
hard it is to make a simple user guideline for the controls and stick to it
whenever you deliver a new platform.
I put a lot of questions...
Maybe it's just me, upset on the damn splitter.
Regards,
Bogdan
