Re: Venting on .NET

In article news:<744tr1t3ob29v812o6nq0s0l7bt435a0r6@xxxxxxx>, Joseph M.
Newcomer wrote:
> ... I can state that NO design effort was expended on such irrelevant
> concepts as user studies, or we would not have the crap we have

Microsoft have always prided themselves on spending effort on user
studies (though perhaps they only do this for "end user" apps like
Office) but their aim always seems to be to make it easy for a non-expert
user to find *a* way to achieve something, not to make it easy for an
expert user to do that thing efficiently.

I'm not diagreeing with you, just highlighting the irony in the fact that
a company that normally makes a such a big point of usability studies
should have managed to produce something so UNusable in this case.

> It wouldn't be so bad if the tools were adequate, but they are not.
> So what we end up with is a poor set of tooling coupled with something
> critically dependent and intertwined with that poor tooling.

Well put. Ideally the tools should be better, the APIs should be better,
and the APIs should be usable independently of the tools; but if the
tools were at least adequate than the other things wouldn't matter all
that much.

> I missed cultures, probably due to the lack of good examples.
[snip]
> Is there a good reference on how to use these? (The documention I've
> found seems to more sales-oriented that content-containing ...

As I said, I haven't used Cultures (or tried to). I've only seen an
overview (maybe the same salesey thing you refer to) that suggested the
functionality was available. I haven't looked for usable technical docs.

> Hand-editing the generated code is usually risky; I would never have
> considered this an option, based on how badly previous tooling could
> cope with hand edits, I remain suspicious.

I've never had a problem hand-editing wizard code in VC6 ... but then
I've always been careful not to edit to anything that the Wizard couldn't
have generated for me. I've not tried doing this in VS200x ... but as
VS200x lacks the wizard guards (the "//{{" bits marking code one is not
supposed to edit) it must be pretty easy to do so by mistake. I suppose
maybe that doesn't matter as there is no class wizard to speak of to be
confused by code edits.

[The conspiracy-theorist within me suspects that the ClassWiz was removed
because it was easier to remove it than to make it work better.]

Cheers,
Daniel.






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