Re: C# & VB-> General Questions

From: Tom Dacon (tdacon_at_community.nospam)
Date: 10/26/04 

Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 23:08:55 -0700

Goodness - ruffled a C# feather, didn't I? I certainly didn't intend any
offense (I was, after all, speaking to the OP, not to you), but I'm a
plain-spoken man and I calls 'em as I sees 'em, although perhaps I should
have sprinkled some smileys around my comments to put across the notion that
I was aiming at irreverence rather than vitriol. In any case, I don't agree
with your responses, although I respect your right to hold them.

As to edit-and-continue, surely you do deep-path inspection of your code
during testing, don't you? Isn't it a pain when you're deep in a debugging
session, hit a show-stopper, and have to exit the session, fix the bug, and
then reconstruct the whole testing scenario back down to that point again
before you can continue? Sometimes you can save the situation right there
and proceed. Saves a lot of time. Of course it doesn't always work that way,
but every once in a while you gain from its presence. I missed hearing that
the C# team has decided to do it - thanks for correcting me - but I'm
delighted to hear it. Try it some time, when you get it in a version of
VS.Net that supports it. Might change your mind. Myself, I'd make it an IDE
option, that you can turn off if it's causing you performance problems, so
if for some reason you need to load the whole world in your solution you can
avoid whatever difficulties its presence induces. Instead of loading the
whole world, though, why not try thorough testing of the lower-level
assemblies, to the point where you trust them (think NUnit and its
brethren), and then just reference them and use them as binaries from the
part of the code that you're currently working on?

But much more important, perhaps you missed my last paragraph, in which I
presented a hope that the two camps might come somewhat closer together,
rather than holding such deep investment in a single way of doing things. I
often see this in people who have never known anything other than a single
programming language, and therefore believe that the way it does things is
the only right way to do them. These are usually young programmers, in the
early stages of their careers, to whom exposure to other ways of doing
things hasn't yet given a wider perspective. I wouldn't think you could get
to be an MVP without being a rather experienced developer, and unless C++ is
the only language you've ever known before C#, and unless you have had no
experience in any other development environments, I'd expect you to have a
balanced viewpoint as well. Do I misunderstand?

Best regards,
Tom Dacon
Dacon Software Consulting

"Daniel O'Connell [C# MVP]" <onyxkirx@--NOSPAM--comcast.net> wrote in
message news:%23RoUgcxuEHA.452@TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl...
>
> "Tom Dacon" <tdacon@community.nospam> wrote in message
> news:egqZ8QxuEHA.1204@TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl...
>> The teams that built the IDE interfaces for C# and VB are different
>> groups of people. They implemented feature sets that are different in
>> some respects, based on their notions of what their developers would
>> want. The VB group apparently thought that the editor should show errors
>> immediately, while the code was being typed - it's more like VB6, and I
>> must say that that it's pretty handy, to boot. The C# group apparently
>> thought that their developers would be coming from C++, where the VS6 IDE
>> gives them essentially no real-time help. They probably thought that
>> their developers would disdain that kind of hand-holding. You know: "REAL
>> programmers don't need squigglies!"
>
> There are issues in the two. Background Compilation has drawbacks and does
> not really suit for large projects. Search the groups and you'll find
> plenty of VB users complaining about how slow the IDE is when they are
> working in huge projects.
>>
>> I've heard that in the next go-round, VB.Net will get edit-and-continue,
>> while the C# group won't implement that. It's a shame that the C# people
>> won't have that useful capability. In VB6, it sometimes saved me
>> considerable time during development, but my impression is that some
>> fairly vocal people in the C# developer community don't want it for some
>> reason I can't fathom. I suspect that it's because they've never had it,
>> and don't want to admit that something from the so-called 'toy language'
>> would be useful to them. (Could it be that C# programmers are
>> Republicans, and like Republicans have already had all the ideas they
>> ever want to have?) I mostly program in C# these days, myself, and I'd
>> love to have it in that environment.
>>
>
> Apparently you havn't been paying attention, the C# team has announced E&C
> support despite the concerns expressed by a fair portion of the community.
> It seems that the pro-E&C crowd whines well, even though I've yet to hear
> a *single* reason why E&C is worth anything. Everything is just rhetoric,
> "VB6 had it and I want it back", or plain BS.
>
> And the isuse with it isn't so much that its from VB, just that it reduces
> code quality. VB6 may well have been a more reliable and less disdained
> langauge if its users weren't so keen on using E&C for every bug they ran
> across(and don't claim otherwise, I somehow doubt anything beyond a small
> minority actually didn't use it to fix things inappropriatly). It simply
> does not add to the quality of code and is far to expensive for the only
> real use it has(fixing minor typos. Fixing a bug in E&C is downright
> foolish). But thats all been documented many times over.
>
> However, your political opinions are really off topic, and the rest of
> your opinions are rather rude. If you are going to spout opinion off it
> would suit to actually *READ* wahts been said instead of defining peoples
> motivations based entirely on what suits your purposes. E&C is an
> expensive tool that doesn't belong in *any* language, but, again, that is
> well documented if you would take the time to read it.
>
>> What I hope will happen in the next iteration of the tools is that each
>> group will learn something useful from the other. The VB.Net people get
>> some goodies from the C# camp, and the C# people get some from the VB.Net
>> side. If everyone can rise above their ego problems, maybe it'll get
>> better for all of us (and, in particular, for those of us who program
>> regularly in both languages!).
>>
>> Tom Dacon
>> Dacon Software Consulting
>>
>> "Hareth" <abiheiri@hotmail.com> wrote in message
>> news:udsXTpvuEHA.3900@tk2msftngp13.phx.gbl...
>>> C# 2005 express & vb 2005 express:
>>>
>>>
>>> 1. During runtime, I can edit my codes in C#..... How come this cannot
>>> be done in VB? it says ...."read-only" during runtime......
>>>
>>> 2. Why does vb automatically show the errors, but C# i have to build the
>>> app b4 errors are underlined in my code?
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>
>

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