Re: C++ with VS.NET and Twilight of the Microsoft Era


Bruno wrote:
In this they have partly failed, much to their chagrin,
because Java persists and there are major new ways to
make desktop apps Internet aware - for example the remarkable
Ajax,

Wow, I'd better forget everything I have learned so far, learn whatever the
current fad is and ingore an installed base of billions of lines of C/C++
code.


Not at all, just be aware that C/C++ is not the be-all
and end-all of existence.

in addition to the gravest threat of all - Linux,

I have developed for linux. IMO, win32 has an enormous power and
flexibility, while posix caters to the lowest common denominator. posix IPC
and threading suck.
But that is just my experience of course.

My opinion too.

But the "flexibility" of Win32 is being continually restricted
by Microsoft which seeks to give us development environments
which furthur goals and not all with the aim of helping
our productivity our ease of development. I understood
this, finally after looking in amazement that they had
dumped the "Export Makefile" selection in post
Visual Studios after 6. I have never gotten a straight
answer from them as to why they would do this
other than to hear long circumlocutions about
"solutions" and the "solution" builder and so forth.

The fact they would give symbolic second class
status to "Unmanaged" code, to the point where confused
developers were not even sure if the new Visual Studios
would support it (see recent posts this forum to name a few)
tells me that their marketing department has gone completely
amuck and convinced upper managment (or is it vice versa)
that the time has come to "gain control" over the developers
and the development process. That Microsoft is aiming
for complete compatability and conformance with the goals
of the zombie offshore "software factories" is obvious
and is not a goal with which I concur - if the same thing
happened in health care there would be an uproar (don't
think they have'nt thought of it or are planning it if only
they can find a way!!!!!!!)
which, despite all of its shortcommings, has the advantage
of an active and open development community

As far as I can judge, the majority of the aforementioned community is only
interested in doing sexy new things as opposed to really fixing things, and
make them easy to use. That and infighting over whose patches get into the
kernel and which patches are ignored.

Yes, this is true, at least sometimes.
Granted.

which means that each month that goes by Linux is
catching up to, and probably already has surpassed,
anythiing that Vista may offer.

Yeah sure. You don't know much about systems programming do you?
Let's list a couple of things:
- Vista (anything since win98 really) has had decent power management, and
the tools to configure it.
- Vista ships with the new KMDF and UMDF driver frameworks which makes
developing drivers a breeze. You get object orientation, resource management,
power management and PNP for free, working out of the box

No, this I did not know -> impressive!

- every Windows version in the NT line has decent user management tools,
whil most nixes including linux have the 'root or luser' type of user
management.

True.

- you can actually hook up a printer and use it to print documents from
within all apps without days of fudging around with config tools.
- sound works without config tools.
- software developed of earlier platforms is forwards and backwards
compatible. with linux, even point updates break the existing binaries.

Not always but often - this is a weakness of Linux
but this is not a static situation (no pun intended) -
that is to say, everything I see seems to indicate
that the rate of rectifying these kinds of strategic
or systemic design errors is rapidly improving
for Linux while staying exactly the same or getting
worse (despite their enormous resources) for Mircorosft.
That is because every Microsoft operating system
(just like Linux) inherits all the patch work quilt
of patches, marketing errors, vaporware feints
and all the rest of the non-productive baggage
them comes with multi-million line multi developer
software code.

Add on top of that that linux kernel is permanantly semi-stable, and device
driver interfaces change every few months. That's fun if your driver is not
yet in the mainline kernel, in which it will probably never appear because
that is a fierce battle all by itself.
And who needs wireless drivers, printing or 3D graphics anyway...

This is one of Microsoft's greatest strengths and was once
one of Linux major weaknesses. As I mentioned above,
however, the rate of rectifying this shortcomming
is rapidly improving in Linux (no need for improvment
with Microsoft in this area they are very nearly perfect
as they should be for a company of that size
and resource)

Microsoft has made a major strategical error in not updating
the Windows File system to that promised for the new Vista
operating system and this was a critical error which
gives a major strategic opportunity to switch to
alternative systems.

It is still better than ext3 and ext2, which are still the default
filesystems in linux.

I am not sure.
I'm using Reiser under Suse 10.1 - At first there was terrible
disk thrashing so I tried throwing out mono and Beagle
and immediately got real good perfromance.

Many IT managers, understandably tired of their desktop applications'
software developers being unable to create everything they needed,
foolishly took the short term solution of replacing everything in a
giant database - this was the trend at least a few years ago, with the
double failure that their IT budgets are now drowning in red ink to pay
for the Oracle or whatever database, the server, the maintenance
expenses and staff and they have everything locked into this which
means in a few years they will have to expensively upgrade or else
switch to a new system.

And redhat enterprise server software comes cheap? it is still just as
expensive as Microsoft solutions. And you still need staff, vendor support
and hardware.
downloading and installing the various patches of the day manually is not
going to cut it in the enterprise.

They are not needed to be installed everyday.
The key strength of Linux here is their level of security
is better (because the source is available, weaknesses are quickly
spotted announced and fixed). Microsoft has tried to make
a big deal about how the cost of Linux server deployment
is more than Microsoft. I don't believe it for a second - and besides,
with Linux you have far more flexibility in how you set up the server
(who says you have to use Redhat - there is OpenSuse or Fedora for
example)
I'm sure it will be a Yum experience anyway.


Instead, the answer is to take this historic opportunity to break away
from the expensive licensing fees and lock-in typical of Microsoft
envrioronments and seek an alternative solution (yes, Linux!!) before
Vista establishes itself worldwide and an entire generation of
companies is again locked into the same old straightjacket.

If your whole enterprise is running on redhat linux, you are just as locked
in.
You are not going to uproot your whole infrastructure to switch software.
That means staying with your enterprise software vendor.
Actually, Microsoft guarantees enterprise level support for > 5 years.
Redhat only 2.

Nonsense, you are looking at Redhat as Microsoft Jr., its like Ford vs
GM -
I'm saying by doing more of it yourself ( and there are PLENTY of young
Linux gurus eager to be hired and do the job for you) you can bypass
these
kinds of expensive lock ins. In my book, Redhat has been trying for
several years to become the "Microsoft" of the Linux world, by
positioning
themseves as THE server platform for business while discarding their
hacker
roots (note the split off to Fedora). In the world of Open source
software, there is no
need for a Redhat, only for the software which is already there waiting
to be used and configured - yes its easier if you wish to pay Redhat to
configure things for you, but it is hardly a necessity once has broken
their mind free from the zombie client server conceptions and starts
thinking a a large network of distributed clusters - a peer to peer
network, sort of.
Yes, Linux can be tricky to work with - but much has changed and as I
mentioned,
every month a worldwide group of developers is improving and fine
tunning Linux so that it has long since passed the point where it is
appropos for business to use.

Uhuh. There is still lots of work to do.
And as a systems software developer, I'd like to have STABLE driver apis
please, as well as decent userland IPC and threading support.

Agreed.


At the very least, take a spare computer and put in a Suse 10.1 or
Fedora distro and try it out - I believe you and your programmers will
be rewarded.

Been there, done that. Linux has its good points and no question about it.
But for writing consumer applications it is below par.
It is very difficult to distribute binaries that are not expressly build for
a specific version of a specific distro.

Hmmm.

Are there some bugs or problems with LInux - Yes of course there are
but XP and all operating systems have them too (for example, I have on
my XP desktop a folder with some files in it which will not allow
itself to be deleted, even though I am the administrator and even
though I tried to remove the "read only" check mark from this file;
this is on a fully updated windows xp professional desktop and
Microsoft still has not fixed this bug, probably have not even
acknowledged it).

Linux has its own share of bugs that annoy me no less than the bugs in
Windows.

The end result is that YOU will now control your corporate, business,
scientific and personal software

That software is as much out of my control as Windows software.
Unless you actually have experienced programmers lying around (which also
cost you a lot) you are not able to actually do anything with those sources.

Hmmm. OK, agreed, sort of.


- YOU will control the budget, YOU

As I said, enterprise level software from Redhat et al is just as expensive.

will not be forced to pay for "extra" information that should have been
included with the operating system or the developement software in the
first place. I know it is a difficult - even risky choice, but not is
the time.

Hilarious. You are comparing obfuscated and incomplete man pages (compounded
with miscellaneous information from half-forgotten usenet posts) with the n
Gigabytes of information, sample code, bugreports and knowledgebase articles
that are indexed and searchable, and freely available through MSDN?

Ah yes, I know, I have spent MANY HOURS going through that massive
Microsoft stuff and you know what -> IT SUCKS - they have no
intelligent
interface and they have turned their entire help system into one big
Microsoft ad
which waltzes you through all the new components they want you to use
while you keep going nuts trying to get the information that you want
and need. Finally you do a fucking code search on Google or something
and find how someone else did it and
that it. Just one of the most worst aggregations of knowledge of any
major ogranization and its just that way because they want it to be.
You see, they use developer frustration and confusion as a tool in
order to herd you poor bastards into the areas that they want you to
be, not necessarily the same as the areas that you want to be
developing in. Everyone is so busy trying to get their
project done that nobody notices what's really going on.


Those braindead managers who perisist in automatically choosing
Microsoft products
and development systems will earn their just rewards as they gradually
are outdistanced by managers of companies who are more agile, more
creative, more intelligent

Nice spin there: if you use windows you are dumb, if you use linux you are
smart, creative and intelligent.

and better able to adjust to rapid changes in markets and envrionments.

rapid change in linux land? where they are still trying to invent easy
printing, decent power management and stable USB support?

Look at the rate that the changes are occuring today vs. 2002
and you will see.

GET BACK IN CONTROL. AVOID VISTA!!!!!!!!

And what, exactly, has this to do with C++?

Er... nothing, I posted this dumb thing in the worng forum.

Thanks for good objections.

Jimserac
James Pannozzi

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