Re: Venting on .NET

Tech Tip: Click here to run a free scan for Windows Errors and optimize PC performance

See below...
On Sat, 07 Jan 2006 12:34:49 GMT, Daniel James <wastebasket@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>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.
***
If the Office group ever delivered a product as crappy as VS.NET, they'd all be seeking
new employment. It is absolutely CRITICAL that it MUST be easy for an expert to work
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 agree
****
>
>> 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.
****
I'm not talking about MFC ClassWizard generated code. I'm talking about that pile of
massive rubbish generated by C#.
****
>
>[The conspiracy-theorist within me suspects that the ClassWiz was removed
>because it was easier to remove it than to make it work better.]
****
The functionality of ClassWizard is there; it has not been removed. This is a common
misconception. What happened was that the functionality that used to be centralized in
ClassWizard has now been distributed willy-nilly among a collection of dialogs, all of
which can only be invoked in a context-sensitive fashion. The core technology has
actually improved; the user interface was destroyed.
****
>
>Cheers,
> Daniel.
>
>
>
>
>
Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
email: newcomer@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Web: http://www.flounder.com
MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm
.

Quantcast