Dvorak: Vista helps developers (what is he talking about?)

[raylopez99]

Dvorak is always interesting, albeit speculative. What hidden gem has
he found in Vista that helps developers? It can't be .NET/CLI, that's
been out forever.

RL

Vista rollout hides reality
Commentary: It's not about customers, it's about developers
By John C. Dvorak
Last Update: 2:44 PM ET Jan 31, 2007

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/stor...yhoo&dist=yhoo

The real winning aspect of Vista seems to be under the hood. NOT from
the users perspective, but from the developers perspective. This is
the untold story of Vista that makes it a powerful real winner for
Microsoft in the long run.
What I'm told is that true the underpinnings of the API (applications
programming interface) make it so easy to code fancy-looking and
powerful programs to work with Vista that the developers should be
able to implement ideas now that they never could before.
This should guarantee continued dominance by the company because
developers are the ones who make the applications that people buy to
make computers useful. Developers have always been attracted to the
Microsoft platform because of the size of the market. Now if their job
is made even easier they can develop more products thus assuring
continued domination of the platform.
This is not rocket science. Steve Ballmer knew this when a few years
ago (available to witness on a much traded YouTube video) when he went
into a frenzied chant for a large audience shouting, "developers ,
developers, developers!" over and over. This, of course, mimicked the
old retail adage "location, location, location."
Question what are the three most important things to make Microsoft a
success?
If what everyone says is true, then Vista is a huge winner -- for
developers. In many ways this has always been the untold secret of
Microsoft's success with Windows and its domination. Windows itself
began as a concept to make things easier for developers.
The idea was to create a system whereby the developers did not have to
code drivers for the different devices to be used by the software. The
OS would do that work for you.
In fact Windows was originally called Interface Manager until a
marketing guy came along (apparently long gone) and called it Windows.
Vista will not be a winner because of its new features or fancy
looking user interface. It will be because the next must-have software
packages will be running on it and it will be something you'll have to
have. That's a lock.

[William DePalo [MVP VC++]]

"raylopez99 " <ra********@yah oo.comwrote in message
news:11******** **************@ m58g2000cwm.goo glegroups.com.. .

Dvorak is always interesting, albeit speculative. What hidden gem has
he found in Vista that helps developers? It can't be .NET/CLI, that's
been out forever.

He's talking about the Windows Presentation Foundation aka WPF aka Avalon,
no?

Regards,
Will

[raylopez99]

On Jan 31, 3:20 pm, "William DePalo [MVP VC++]"
<willd.no.s...@ mvps.orgwrote:

"raylopez99 " <raylope...@yah oo.comwrote in message

news:11******** **************@ m58g2000cwm.goo glegroups.com.. .

Dvorak is always interesting, albeit speculative. What hidden gem has
he found in Vista that helps developers? It can't be .NET/CLI, that's
been out forever.

He's talking about the Windows Presentation Foundation aka WPF aka Avalon,
no?

Regards,
Will

Ah yes, Wikpedia also calls it .NET 3.0. Yet another language to
learn, as soon as I'm done learning .NET 2.0.

RL

[=?Utf-8?B?QnJ1bm8gdmFuIERvb3JlbiBbTVZQIFZDKytd?=]

Ah yes, Wikpedia also calls it .NET 3.0. Yet another language to

learn, as soon as I'm done learning .NET 2.0.

..NET 3.0 is literally .NET 2.0 + WCF, WPF, WCF
installing .NET3.0 will install 2.0 + the new frameworks.

--
Kind regards,
Bruno.
br************* *********@hotma il.com
Remove only "_nos_pam"

>

[raylopez99]

Thanks Bruno!

Please don't go out of your way to even answer this, but if you think
the .NET 3.0 is available now for C++ let me know. A quick Froogle
search showed it's out for C# and Visual Basic, but nothing yet for C+
+ (or, if so, it was buried beyond the first two pages of the Froogle
search menu). Seems like C++.NET is becoming the unwanted bastard
child of MS Visual languages, notwithstanding what the creator of C++,
B.S., says about all languages being roughly equal.

I hate upgrading since I have to beg for academic only evaluation
copies (I'm not spending more than $150 for any compiler, especially
when they change flavors every other year). Besides I code for fun,
not for a living.

RL

On Feb 1, 2:24 am, Bruno van Dooren [MVP VC++]
<bruno_nos_pam_ van_doo...@hotm ail.comwrote:

Ah yes, Wikpedia also calls it .NET 3.0. Yet another language to
learn, as soon as I'm done learning .NET 2.0.

.NET 3.0 is literally .NET 2.0 + WCF, WPF, WCF
installing .NET3.0 will install 2.0 + the new frameworks.

--
Kind regards,
Bruno.
bruno_nos_pam_v an_doo...@hotma il.com
Remove only "_nos_pam"

[Carl Daniel [VC++ MVP]]

raylopez99 wrote:

Thanks Bruno!

Please don't go out of your way to even answer this, but if you think
the .NET 3.0 is available now for C++ let me know. A quick Froogle
search showed it's out for C# and Visual Basic, but nothing yet for C+
+ (or, if so, it was buried beyond the first two pages of the Froogle
search menu). Seems like C++.NET is becoming the unwanted bastard
child of MS Visual languages, notwithstanding what the creator of C++,
B.S., says about all languages being roughly equal.

..NET 3.0 is not language specific - the features are accessible from any
..NET language, including C++/CLI. You';; have a hard time finding C++
examples, I expect, but it's not because it won't work - it's simply a
matter of catering to the largest audience. The IDE extensions that are
currently available do only support C# and VB.NET, but you can use WPF or
WCF without using those IDE extensions (although it's potentially quite a
bit more tedious).

-cd

[raylopez99]

On Feb 1, 7:15 am, "Carl Daniel [VC++ MVP]"
<cpdaniel_remov e_this_and_nos. [e-mail] pamwrote:

.NET 3.0 is not language specific - the features are accessible from any
.NET language, including C++/CLI. You';; have a hard time finding C++
examples, I expect, but it's not because it won't work - it's simply a
matter of catering to the largest audience. The IDE extensions that are
currently available do only support C# and VB.NET, but you can use WPF or
WCF without using those IDE extensions (although it's potentially quite a
bit more tedious).

Tx CD. I kind of understood what you're saying, but the devil is in
the details. Any time there are no examples, the language falls into
disuse IMO, for the Average Joe (if you're Bjorn Stroustrup of course
you can opine in your ivory tower and have industry worship you).
This creates even more incentive to switch to a language that has
examples. For example, in C++.NET, I could not find an example for a
generic SortedList, so I had to play around, from scratch and somebody
else's code, to find the right format for the itterator "IComparabl e"
and the "CompareTo" overridden method for sorting, until it was
working. Took me over an hour (I'm not a pro, but still) and it was
not time productive, though I got it to work and added it to my list
of example code in my directory. But it would have been better if the
Help menu of C++.NET 2.0/CLI had a specific example on this collection
class. Increasingly I find MS Visual Studio Help has examples for C#
and VB, but nothing for C++. Seems like C++ is increasingly becoming
like Pascal.

RL

[William DePalo [MVP VC++]]

"raylopez99 " <ra********@yah oo.comwrote in message
news:11******** **************@ j27g2000cwj.goo glegroups.com.. .

Any time there are no examples, the language falls into
disuse IMO, for the Average Joe (if you're Bjorn Stroustrup of course
you can opine in your ivory tower and have industry worship you).
This creates even more incentive to switch to a language that has
examples. ... Seems like C++ is increasingly becoming
like Pascal.

Perhaps, but I doubt it. Until something better comes along to displace it,
C++ will be used in the kind of applications for which it has always made
sense - especially those with hard performance or scalability constraints
which need to hug the hardware or the platform (in the case of this
discussion Win32).

IMO, C++/CLI and MC++ (the two managed "dialects" of C++) find their
usefulness in applications that need to be a little bit country and a little
bit rock-n-roll <g>, i.e. those that have both managed and native sides.

Regards,
Will
www.ivrforbeginners.com (Speech enabled telephony without tears)

[Tamas Demjen]

raylopez99 wrote:

Tx CD. I kind of understood what you're saying, but the devil is in
the details. Any time there are no examples, the language falls into
disuse IMO, for the Average Joe

As far as I can see, most of the .NET examples on msdn are present in
C#, VB.NET and C++/CLI. They can't document everything in every
language, though. Most authors choose C# for library documentation and
examples, because it targest the widest audience. If you want to learn
about C++/CLI, you buy a book discussing the language. If you want to
learn about a spcific API, you buy a book discussing the API, most
probably using C# examples. That's just the way it is.

The only big feature in .NET that's absolutely not supported in C++ is
ASP.NET Web Forms development. I'm not sure if this will be covered in a
future version, but C++ is just too complex for simple scripting, methinks.

The rest is just syntactic sugar. For example, LINQ is very nice, but
the lack of C++ support is not a major issue, as the same SQL queries
can be performed in C++ rather easily, just using a different syntax.
Since C++ supports RAII, it doesn't require that much syntactic help as
other languages.

RAD developers will often choose C#, even the C++ fans, at least for the
GUI, at least until Microsoft provides a better designer. C++ still has
a place in solving large, complex problems, legacy and portable code,
and in programming the back-end in general. You can do everything except
Web Forms applications and scripting in C++ -- including Web Services.
C++/CLI won't be dropped so quickly as MC++ was.

Tom

[Gerry Hickman]

William DePalo [MVP VC++] wrote:

>Dvorak is always interesting, albeit speculative. What hidden gem has
he found in Vista that helps developers? It can't be .NET/CLI, that's
been out forever.

He's talking about the Windows Presentation Foundation aka WPF aka Avalon,
no?

The original article is silly, and it's even sillier to cite it. Why?
Because it's saying nothing. Pure speculation and guesswork. What exact
"hidden" developer treasure is he talking about? He's got one thing
right, it's not about the customer!

Regarding WPF, it's flawed because it's not an open standard and it's
not cross-platform. Same limitation as ActiveX running within IE, same
security issues, same problems too with the constant nagging about not
having the correct permissions, or the correct version of the binaries
to make it work.

The nice thing with the W3C model is that it "just works", and it does
not require special permissions and does not put your computer at risk.

--
Gerry Hickman (London UK)