Wednesday, July 27, 2005
DLLs, IDEs & flowers
Microsoft Ho!
I managed to be sailing along through development of many things quite nicely. My ship had no alternative but to crash directly into the land of Microsoft. I wouldn't mind so much if the natives were friendly, or even if they were unfriendly but made use of common sense.
After a few days of frustrating experiments trying to get a VFP XML webservice COM object to run on a server, we realized a few things. We should have known that DLLs built on one version of an MS Operating System would _not_ work on another platform. It makes sense now that we think about it. It is not obvious in the documentation.
The COM server generation just places the DLL wherever you state. The mapped drives are on different machines, and it turns out that is a bad thing to do. It's not a problem ... we'll just build DLLs for every platform and run an MSI installer to choose which version of the dll to use. Pain in the ass ... and of course there is no documentation to help out the VFP developers.
I then decided to venture further inland and start climbing the VFP 9 development tree. It's very similar to .NET / VB development. If you have done one ... you have done them all. It was very frustrating to build my simple hello world program, and run things until I was shown a few tricks, and realized a very startling fact. VFP does not allow you to build a project while your code is open. That is _so_ inefficient! I only had one form, and one code window open. What happens when you are coding multiple objects, and events at the same time. Did someone at Microsoft really think it would be desired to close 10 windows, and build to find a compile error, and then open 8 windows again to get back into coding? What an enormous waste of time!
It makes me love the *NIX style of development. Just code away, open 20 files if you want. Just hit another terminal and run make. You get some errors, just flip a window with SHIFT+Right and go to you file line number. It just "MAKES SENSE"! Every time I am forced to dabble into the IDE that supposed to be "The Best Programming Tool _Ever_". I find so many glaring deficiencies that just fires me right back into my Konsole code. If windows had efficient programming tools it might not be so bad ... but they don't. Let the cannibals eat themselves on that island my friends.
Flowers. A couple of days ago at the office one of the employees was celebrating an anniversary with his girlfriend. She sent him a lovely bouquet of flowers to the office. Needless to say he was ridiculed for this. Much to his chagrin. Since I am an endless practical joker, this happening set into to motion my next victim. The "boss" had recently experienced a visit from a cross country old acquaintance. It was a surprise visit, that simply could not be avoided. Although avoidance may have been desired. His surprise continued when I set in motion the plan, with the support of many other employees, to send him a bouquet of his very own. "Great to see you after all these years, Love Jim". I think it's time to let him of the hook. Let the retaliation begin.
I gotta be me! ΒΆ 2:56:00 PM
I managed to be sailing along through development of many things quite nicely. My ship had no alternative but to crash directly into the land of Microsoft. I wouldn't mind so much if the natives were friendly, or even if they were unfriendly but made use of common sense.
After a few days of frustrating experiments trying to get a VFP XML webservice COM object to run on a server, we realized a few things. We should have known that DLLs built on one version of an MS Operating System would _not_ work on another platform. It makes sense now that we think about it. It is not obvious in the documentation.
The COM server generation just places the DLL wherever you state. The mapped drives are on different machines, and it turns out that is a bad thing to do. It's not a problem ... we'll just build DLLs for every platform and run an MSI installer to choose which version of the dll to use. Pain in the ass ... and of course there is no documentation to help out the VFP developers.
I then decided to venture further inland and start climbing the VFP 9 development tree. It's very similar to .NET / VB development. If you have done one ... you have done them all. It was very frustrating to build my simple hello world program, and run things until I was shown a few tricks, and realized a very startling fact. VFP does not allow you to build a project while your code is open. That is _so_ inefficient! I only had one form, and one code window open. What happens when you are coding multiple objects, and events at the same time. Did someone at Microsoft really think it would be desired to close 10 windows, and build to find a compile error, and then open 8 windows again to get back into coding? What an enormous waste of time!
It makes me love the *NIX style of development. Just code away, open 20 files if you want. Just hit another terminal and run make. You get some errors, just flip a window with SHIFT+Right and go to you file line number. It just "MAKES SENSE"! Every time I am forced to dabble into the IDE that supposed to be "The Best Programming Tool _Ever_". I find so many glaring deficiencies that just fires me right back into my Konsole code. If windows had efficient programming tools it might not be so bad ... but they don't. Let the cannibals eat themselves on that island my friends.
Flowers. A couple of days ago at the office one of the employees was celebrating an anniversary with his girlfriend. She sent him a lovely bouquet of flowers to the office. Needless to say he was ridiculed for this. Much to his chagrin. Since I am an endless practical joker, this happening set into to motion my next victim. The "boss" had recently experienced a visit from a cross country old acquaintance. It was a surprise visit, that simply could not be avoided. Although avoidance may have been desired. His surprise continued when I set in motion the plan, with the support of many other employees, to send him a bouquet of his very own. "Great to see you after all these years, Love Jim". I think it's time to let him of the hook. Let the retaliation begin.
I gotta be me! ΒΆ 2:56:00 PM
