Do as I say, not as I do: That's the message I took away from Microsoft's latest confessional session at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC). Apparently, several of Microsoft's best and brightest -- the people who help chart the course for the company's tools division -- admitted to eschewing modern visual programming techniques in favor of the "old school" text editor and command-line approach.
This would hardly be news if it weren't for the fact that it flies in the face of everything that Microsoft has said and done in the developer tools space over the past two decades. At PDC after PDC, company executives have touted the wonders of their latest visual goodies. To now learn that company's own gurus don't use these same glitzy, paint-by-numbers toolkits is tantamount to hearing how wonderful Obamacare will be and then finding out that the people passing the relevant legislation are exempt from the program. (I wonder if their "Cadillac" health plans will be taxed?)
[ Follow all the significant developments at PDC 2009 in InfoWorld's coverage. | Read Neil McAllister's Fatal Exception blog for the latest insights on application development issues. ]
Of course, nobody at this panel thought to question why these Microsoft hotshots avoid visual tools like the plague. That's because everyone already knows the answer: performance. Simply put, lazy programming models -- like the ones at the heart of Microsoft's visual tools -- produce bloated, inefficient code.
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Download now »My company continues to develop in ASP.Net, but we are using the MVC pattern with ExtJS.
We get the excellent integrated debugging, the C# language, and the Visual Studio editor, but we deal directly with the browser javascript rather than writing it indirectly using inefficient ASP.net controls.
Our app is at least 5x faster than what we could do with web controls. The code isn't harder to write, once we got over the hump of learning ExtJS metaphors.
The backend code is really clean and easy to read because all it does is send data objects to pages in JSON format.
Microsoft does push a lot of lazy metaphors, and they are fine for simple pages, but for large apps, you have to handle things yourself more efficiently.
Thank you for having the fortitude to mention in this somewhat visible forum that VS is inefficient. So many die hard MS developers refuse to recognize a dog when they see one. I chalk it up to herd mentality.
I've noticed how many developers have been forced to justify their stated beliefs that VS is useful. They can talk all they want about "good" coders and "bad" coders all they want, but they're missing the point.
The problem being discussed ehre is the tool. It doesn't matter if you are a "good" coder or "bad" coder if you are using the wrong tool for the job. However I should mention that using the wrong tool for a job will most likely create a whole bunch of "bad" coders.
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