Archive for October 28th, 2004
Visual Studio users make me sick.
One thing that has always driven me nuts about Visual Studio is the way it hurts developers. Many of you know what I’m talking about. People seem to get used to using the all the little wizards and predefined templates and files that Visual Studio makes for you. Thats fine and I don’t have a problem with that. Its just that some programmers need to understand what the Visual Studio wizards and tools are doing for you (andsometimes hide from you).
One of the first things I tell people when they are learning the basics of .NET now days, is to go grab a copy of the .NET SDK from Microsoft (and possibly a copy binary copy of Mono for Windows from the Mono website) and put Visual Studio on the shelf for a few days. If you feel you still must use Visual Studio, don’t create a project. Instead just use like a fancy code editor with fancy menus and color coding. Learn how to make a makefile, how to create a Windows form from scratch, create a DLL and reference it, and get a good feel for the command line compiler.
Then after you have gotten good at doing the bulk of .NET, then use Visual Studio. However, use it with caution. If you do anything with any tool or interface other then the code editor, get your explorer ready and look at all files that had changed. Some things will shock you, such as creating a reference to a DLL, making a web reference (big one if you use them so you can see the proxy interfaces it generates), dynamicly generate a typed dataset (which ends up generating over 4000 lines of code in most cases), or even creating a form using the form template and the nice little cute form designer that gives Visual Studio, the “Visual” aspect like in their name.
Visual Studio can try and keep you dumb, mostly so are forced into using its features and dish at money for each new version, just so you can maintain your nicely pregenerated code.
Read the .NET books and do the samples as it says. What is very ironic about this, is that very few books talk about .NET from the aspect of Visual Studio, but most programmers do nothing but write code in Visual Studio.
We need to stop the madness.
