Re: If Borland had owned Windows for many years now...


"Troy Wolbrink" <troy.wolbrink@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:43f7bdeb$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
That doesn't make sense. If Microsoft wants everybody to adopt .NET why
would they make it difficult to get there, like with the VB team did?

Excellent question, and a lot of people have been asking it. MS has been
stunned by the miserable uptake of VB.Net but it is too late for them to
gracefully do anything useful about it.

Lesson learned for MS. Perhaps they privately wish they made a different
decision, but hopefully they are stronger for it moving forward.

You'd think so. Unfortunately they continue to fumble, even today. I've
found it really amazing to watch. The same folks are making the decisions
and they're definitely not through "cleaning up" the language. VB.Net isn't
a bad language, it's just that you won't be able to count on your own code
working down the road. That makes it unusable for anything but "throw away"
code. That's actually OK if you're just doing quickie miniapps, but for the
(literally) millions of devs that have mission critical, or "mission
serious" applications that's a real problem.

Give it a rest with the gross generalizations and conspiracy theories,
please!

These aren't "gross generalizations and conspiracy theories". They're
facts and experiences, from very close to the core of the problem,
accumulated over the 5/6 years that the decisions have been cast in
stone.

I'm going to have to explore your site a bit more. I find it pretty
interesting how they fumbled so badly!

It has been an amazing ride. As a VB cheerleader, and someone who has made
a really good living with MSBasic code since CP/M versions you can't imagine
the series of shocks folks like myself have been through.

The fact that MS uses developer tools to press their platfom agenda is
not a secret either. It's a corporate strategy that's worked well.

Sure, I would expect nothing less. But for a developer wanting to build
solutions for Windows, Microsoft's motivation should actually help my
situation as well as they improve their tools. It should be a win-win.

Yea, and it had for a long time. They started stumbling when they started
moving folks into key positions who had no background on the community or
product. You may find this hard to believe, but I don't know of a single
key player who has any serious experience with ClassicVB (VB6 and before)
versions. Most sill don't even have much with VB.Net.

Atleast they seem to understand that it's all about "developers,
developers, developers". :^)

LOL. Yea, we've played that card. FWIW, the team *thought* they were
"helping" developers (though a few really just wanted to prove a point by
cleansing the language). Overall the team was surprised and disappointed by
the dismal uptake of VB.Net... even though most of the MVP's warned them in
the most vocal way we could. Yup, a large number of *MVP's* have loudly
protested, to no avail. No doubt you've run across this somewhere:

http://classicvb.org/

If you click on the "petition" link you'll see that 263 Microsoft MVP's have
signed, and the total sigs have now passed 10,000. The sigs have been
validated, and teh MVP sigs have been double checked against rosters. We
wanted to make sure it was a valid process.

Again, the problem with VB.Net (and with the incompatibilities of VB4
previously) were due, simply, to the fact that the team didn't realize
what they were doing to developers.

You make a convincing case the the VB.NET leadership is out of touch with
real developers. But that's not helping MS, and I doubt MS would want to
emulate their bad choices into a newly acquired product. Just because
they made bad decisions with VB.NET regarding compatibility, I don't see
the need to automatically assume they would do the same with Delphi.
Perhaps if MS made similarly bad decisions with C++, their might be a
pattern. I guess time will tell with C# and J#

You would think so, but if that was the case you'd think they would have
done something about this mess. They haven't.

I'm not an author, but stretched my own abilities <g> to try to explain what
the reprocussions were in 2001. This paper was well circulated within MS
and elsewhere: http://vb.mvps.org/tips/stability.asp

The strategy is to hope it "just goes way". You wouldn't belive teh
arrogance of the small core that is in charge of the language itself. Even
though (as I've stated here before) I still prefer Classic MS Basic (again,
apologies to my Delphi friends), I've lost confidence that they can manage
this process well enough for my own code safety. VB is dead for any serious
application. We decided some time back to move somewhere, then decided that
would be Delphi, if we couldn't get some direction change in the VB world.
We failed spectacularly. Making no headway with MS, after 4 years we
decided to pull the trigger on that move.

MS still doesn't "get it".

There be monsters there. Go at your own risk.

If Delphi went that route, you'd better hope that DavidI and team are locked
in *and* that they get to grow their own replacements over objection of any
MS guidance. That condition, of course, will never happen.

Dan


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: A VB6 fan asks... why do YOU stick with VB6???
    ... and developers. ... I also agree that they can do far more with Delphi to ... used years ago as a teaching language and they let that go completely. ... simply because things "fit" better into the whole. ...
    (microsoft.public.vb.general.discussion)
  • Re: Turbo Delphi... Why ? :(
    ... language will they be using - C++, Delphi Win32, C# or Delphi .NET. ... So you will never need to use more than one language at a time? ... The thing is, BDS satisfies some of our customers needs, and Turbos ... In addition - NEW developers and students how ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)
  • Re: The Pascal - isation of MS and C++
    ... It's interesting that MS is encouraging C++ developers to use the plumbing ... This seems easy enough for Delphi developers (even when using C# ... > performance language choice within the .NET stable. ... And what should strike any Delphi programmer right away is ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)
  • Re: Over 100 Microsoft MVPs Have Signed Online Petition - Give Us Back VB!!
    ... Most serious VB apps, by necessity, use a fair ... > understand that Delphi 3rd party components have also all but dried up. ... I assume VB developers could do the same? ... because of the language per se, it's because if I go there I know I'll have ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)
  • Re: How can you drop Winforms support?
    ... Being able to use that shiny VCL Office 2007 Ribbon Bar from ... The support for WinForms in Delphi ... Get 3rd paty developers on board with a partner VCL.NET program with the idea of a coordinated release of the VCL.NET IDE and VCL.NET 3rd party ports to get an initial influx of the biggest 3rd party names. ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)